[existencebox]

Your points are valid. Stronger than that, I stand more to your view than the parents. Although I certainly understand the desire of the parent, I've been on both the Ops and Dev side of that fence, and on call REALLY SUCKS (I almost feel dirty in this post agreeing with a statement of "I should be on call" but it is what it is :) ) but it sucks worse if as you say it's entirely on the backs of the ops who are also handling sysadmin style work, and are kept more isolated from dev as is typical in "throw it over the wall" shops. (In writing this I realize I want to clarify that I have other thoughts entirely about having ops specialists instead of suggesting a merge to totally unified devops, but that's an entirely other discussion). Also as you say, ownership/responsibility/etc is also an ancillary benefit.

What I actually wanted to say from all this however, is that despite the truth of your argument, I'd take a third angle. No on call is bad, but similarly, _unpaid_ OT is bad. The common rhetoric from this soapbox is that if employers are accountable for this time, it'll incentivise them to have processes and hold values that don't abuse an expensive resource. If something is on fire; the on call employee still _will be there to handle it_, but the fact that it's become a pro-bono assumed part of many of our jobs in the tech sector is the part I take issue with more than doing the task itself.