Automate Yourself Out of a Job.

• ↳Not all work is toil.
• ↳Writing a Terraform module is engineering.
• ↳Attending meetings is overhead.

• ↳Toil is very specifically defined work that is: 1.
• ↳Manual: Typing commands by hand.
• ↳2. Repetitive: Doing the same thing multiple times.
• ↳3. Automatable: A script could do it.
• ↳4. Tactical: It's reactive, interrupt-driven (e.g., clearing a full disk).
• ↳5. O(n) Scaling: If the company doubles in size, the volume of this work doubles (e.g., onboarding new users).

↳If you spend your day manually granting database access to developers, you are not an SRE, you are a traditional sysadmin.