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0 pointsjoshuamorton8y ago0 comments

Grunt work isn't everything though, it's more often than not highly manual, highly repetitive, low skill work. That sounds like a great candidate for automation.

I think the bigger issue is that you appear to be using the truth that you can't automate everything, to support the statement that you can't automate gruntwork, which I think depending on how you define gruntwork is false by definition.

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AFNobody8y ago· 2 in thread

By grunt work, I mean "low skill" for a software developer / white collar professional with a similar income. I don't mean like, minimum wage data entry type work.

joshuamortonOP8y ago

I understand that. It sounds like you're describing something similar to what the Google sre book calls "Toil", and I would say that the goal should be to eliminate that kind of work.

While that definition focuses tightly on ops, you can extend it to general swe-ing. A manual, mechanical refactor is probably toil. The eng-time it takes scales linearly with code size. It can and should be automated.

To respond to the specific example in your linked post, you automate the f out of the process and then have the same person do it, but now it takes them minutes instead of hours, or hours instead of weeks.

[1]: https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/eliminating-toi...

AFNobody8y ago

The first thing that came to mind with that link was:

wget -r -nc -p --html-extension -k -np https://landing.google.com/sre/book/ -D google.com; mv ./landing.google.com/sre/* ./; rm -rf ./landing.google.com

> I understand that. It sounds like you're describing something similar to what the Google SRE book calls "Toil", and I would say that the goal should be to eliminate that kind of work.

Yes, to some degree.

You'll notice almost everything I point out is powerful automation handed to a user that doesn't really understand it is something to be avoided.

And when I say refactor, I don't really mean "code cleanup" so much as "removing technical debt that doesn't change the current buisness logic".

Keep in mind, my original definition of "Top Performer" was someone who resented even 10% Toil and basically would rather automate it shoddily than deal with it.

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