On-Call in a World Full of Toil
summary
Ten years on call leads to a simple claim: most wakeups are manual, repetitive, automatable work that drains teams. Definition borrows Google SRE: toil is predictable operational work. Root causes listed are legacy systems and technical debt, poor post-incident communication and human error. Concrete fixes are recommended: run postmortems with visibility, prioritize remediations, create error budgets and implement automation so pages fall and teams ship features instead of firefighting.
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