There's a big difference having someone who is responsible for the operation of the infrastructure being on pager duty and the developers being on pager duty. I

There's a big difference having someone who is responsible for the operation of the infrastructure being on pager duty and the developers being on pager duty. In most development shops there would be no point in having one random developer being on pager duty. What if something breaks that he's never touched? Usually devops is first made aware of the issue, determines the cause, and, if it's a software issue, should then reach out to the developers who are responsible for that part of the code. A pager rotation among developers means there's something fundamentally wrong. If devops is constantly being paged because of shitty software, they should be the first to recommend that the QA -> release process be evaluated because it's clearly broken.