[spectre256]

The Google SRE book has an excellent description of toil and, unexpectedly, discusses that some amount of toil is beneficial.

In short, the authors of that section claim that it's not really possible for the SREs at Google to spend all their time solving novel problems through automation.

This makes sense: constantly solving new problems is hard. It takes lots of time, mental energy, and the outcome is inherently uncertain.

Google found that some amount of toil (roughly defined as repetitive tasks that are not particularly challenging and do not solve long term problems) is essential for the health of their engineers. Toil is boring yes, but can be relaxing, and as work that is inherently easier to accomplish, can help keep confidence that working on solving unknown problems can deplete.

I would have expected that Google would have absolutely minimal toil, given that they are leaders in the automation space, but if they've found that some amount of easier work is necessary, then it's probably true for anyone.

[gav]

> Toil is boring yes, but can be relaxing, and as work that is inherently easier to accomplish, can help keep confidence that working on solving unknown problems can deplete.

I think it is important for all roles to have a cadence that mixes easy tasks in with the challenging ones so that every day doesn't seem like a drag.

For example, I prefer to start my day by knocking out a couple of easy bug fixes before diving into some challenging development.

[spectre256]

I'm exactly the same way. If I can get a few things checked off my todo list early, I'm nearly guaranteed to at least feel like I had a good day.

[nubbins]

That seems like a good strategy but maybe we should also work towards a mindset of enjoying the process of working on hard problems even if apparently fruitlessly. Whenever I feel I’m spinning my wheels I remind myself thats how I learned what I know and my best breakthroughs usually come when I think its a dead end.

[pm90]

As a user of Google Cloud Platform and having suffered through many, many issues (nothing that takes down our systems mind you, just things that you would expect would be handled better, especially considering all the reverence for the Company) I can say with some confidence that they do not handle automation to that extent. Still love GCP so far though, especially compared with my limited experience with AWS.

[amelius]

> toil (roughly defined as repetitive tasks that are not particularly challenging ...)

I guess an example of this could be annotating deep learning datasets ...

[spectre256]

Maybe, but that actually provides at least a little lasting value.

The ultimate example of toil, which I'm sure Google has automated away at this point, is truncating old log files that would eventually take up all remaining disk space. Simply truncating the file does not solve the inherent problem, but buys you more time before you'll face the exact same situation again.