Because network outages never happen, disks never fail or fill up, memory is never an issue, programs always deal with only the data they were expected to, products never do more traffic than expected, and all infrastructure software ships completely bug-free.

If you aren't occasionally up at 3 AM fixing unexpected outages, then either you haven't deployed a project that requires uptime or you're paying someone else to do it for you.

several of these things are exactly the type of things wehre the whole idea of devops just falls apart. If a disk fails what use is a dev vs a good ops person?

I have never gotten up at 3am to fix an outage because outages do not impact systems that widely. If it is a network problem, let the network team do their job. All of your other problems are solved with multiple HA/ load balanced servers, monitoring, and proper testing.

We partnered with companies such a PagerDuty, Wavefront so that they have tools to help them keeping their uptime, we are guiding them to put everything in place so that their website/servers never go down. We never call them at 3AM and we actually never call them at all. However we do have challenges where we simulate hardware failure, traffic spike...

Just to make things clear: the goal is not to wake up students are 3 AM but to get them ready for production and this involve being on call and possibly getting paged at 3AM.

While there is always someone else's mess you have to support, that does not seem like a great teaching moment to me.