[pipingdog]

First of all, on-call without the latitude to prioritize operational improvements (making the cause of the pages go away) over feature work is a non-starter.

To address the question in the post title, a team I was on was able to re-negotiate the on-call terms. Our team didn't have any operations to speak of (we just wrote software, and didn't build services) so we were lumped into a rotation for the org we were in. When the pager went off, not only did we not have any familiarity with the system, we didn't have permissions to do anything anyway. We just ended up having to page someone else for every little thing.

We ganged up on management, told them that we simply were not empowered to take any actions during shift to address issues or off shift to improve things, and got taken off that rotation.

Where I'm at now, if someone has a rough night or a couple of rough days, we'll trade part of the shift to give the person a break.