Take a preventative approach to escape the engineering toil trap

Engineering teams hate the ‘same old song’ situation: being woken up at 3am to fix a toilsome, comparatively minor task, such as remedying a disk space issue. Dissatisfaction rises when skilled professionals are asked to do basic activities that — in a more digitally mature operational environment — could be managed preventatively with automation.

A recent survey into the cost of downtime revealed that more than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilizing responders, collaboration between teams, and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated. Other examples of relatively thankless, yet vital, activities that could be automated include managing manual releases, handling recurrent password resets, dealing with repeated identical alerts or creating users on systems. Any task that an engineer can do easily but is low value and uncreative can be considered toil.