Day to day, developers struggle with a frustrating problem: developer toil. In a 2017 book on site reliability engineering published online, Google“toil” as “the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”
Developer toil bogs down developers’ workflows. They have to constantly stop and deal with tedious tasks. The more time developers spend on manual, repetitive tasks, the less time they have to innovate and iterate, meaning they won’t be able to work on product updates and enhancements that will generate new leads and retain existing customers.
When developers join companies, they want to work on projects that advance the bottom line. Such projects make them more likely to feel fulfilled professionally. Unhappy developers are at a higher risk of burnout, which could result in lower productivity and role effectiveness, likely culminating in them leaving for new opportunities. When developers leave, companies are left in a lurch.
• Decreasing dependencies on other teams by implementing self-service portals such as internal developer platforms that give developers more autonomy in provisioning resources such as machines and databases, using existing blueprints created by platform teams.