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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

It naturally applies not only to SRE. Toil is a great equalizer - if 80% of say development work is basically toil then a 10x developer is not really that distinguishable from nor useful more than an 1x (Amdahl's law so to speak :) Amount of toil (and not say failed projects/etc.) seems to be a one of the main factors separating the companies with revenues $2M/year/head like Google from the ones with mere $300K/year/head, and one of the best things a mid/low performing company can do is to reduce toil - though usually on practice any such attempt means something like MBA-style "efficiency improvement" measures and processes which add even more toil.

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I am somewhat skeptical of the claim that "one of the best things a mid/low performing company can do is to reduce toil". It feels that this principle is dependent on the context to the extent of not being useful guidance anymore.

For instance, if the company is pre-product-market fit reducing toil seems like the wrong investment; doing stuff manually can be the way to go until you find what works (unless the effort investment in toil reduction is trivial).

If the company has reached something approximating product-market fit, reducing toil still ought to be weighed against the other priorities. That (as all technical debt reduction) can do wonders to productivity, but alternatives (e.g. pushing for a new feature) may as well be the better call.

I think it is market dominance/monopoly that gives the big revenue per head rather than lack of toil.

The difference between $300k/head revenue companies and $2M/head revenue companies is far larger than amount of toil and efficiency measures/overhead. Most notably, there tends to be a fundamental difference in who they hire, how they hire them and how they compensate them. It might even make sense for $100k/year engineers to do more toil than $400k/year engineers.

That's interesting, I'd say that's one of the least likely fundamental differences, especially with these large 10k+ employee companies. Those differences in hiring should average out when compared to things like timing entering their markets, monopolistic advantages, regulatory capture that are external to the company.

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