What they're saying is that if someone else is oncall, you tend not to deal with the quality issues of the system (it's a negative externality). If the system y

What they're saying is that if someone else is oncall, you tend not to deal with the quality issues of the system (it's a negative externality). If the system you own doesn't require any on-call at all, then great. But for those that do (let's say your a web developer for nytimes.com), the code and system owners should be on-call, not a separate ops team. Ideally being on-call is something you barely notice because nothing happens.