When it comes down to brass tacks, developers don't want to be on call. They want to work on the things that they want to work on, when they want to work on the

When it comes down to brass tacks, developers don't want to be on call. They want to work on the things that they want to work on, when they want to work on them. Look at the proliferation of 20% projects ("keep them happy and let them do what they want 1 day a week rather than what they get paid to do"), and the outright refusal to fix their own bugs. How many developers do you know who would turn their noses up at being placed on a sustained engineering team rather than creating new features? There's a stigma there. You think that stigma won't be there at 3AM Pacific when Europe starts hitting their new feature to the breaking point? I've been an ops engineer in a "lean startup" where developers were on-call for their services. It didn't work super well because people ignored their phones or put phones on silent at night. As a backstop, they put me (ops engineer) as the fallback secondary notification because they knew I would wake up. Ergo, everyone ignored everything and it all rolled to me. They'd wake up at 7AM, find everything ablaze (because they ignored all my phone calls), then would fix it and go about the rest of their day. Let's face it though. They probably don't want to be on call. Why force them to do this? There's the concept of ownership and closing the pain loop, but most people really don't understand what it truly means to be on call. "Sorry honey, can't go to the movies tonight I'm on call." "Sorry bro, can't get wasted tonight I'm on call." Only huge organizations with huge dev teams can go through a developer on-call rotation. Most leaner (smaller) companies have 1-2 devs per project, and it's unreasonable to expect that developer to be on-call 24x7. This stuff works at Uber, Facebook, and Google. But the vast majority of the world isn't Uber, Facebook, and Google. Also, I'd expect more pay as a developer if the job required on-call shifts. I don't think companies are willing to pay even more than they already are.