Toil doesn’t make everyone unhappy all the time, especially in small amounts. Predictable and repetitive tasks can be quite calming. They produce a sense of accomplishment and quick wins. They can be low-risk and low-stress activities. Some people gravitate toward tasks involving toil and may even enjoy that type of work.
劳作并不总是让每个人都不快乐，尤其是少量的劳动。可预测的和重复的任务可以让人很平静。它们会产生成就感和快速胜利。它们可以是低风险和低压力的活动。有些人倾向于涉及劳作的任务，甚至可能喜欢这种类型的工作。
Toil isn’t always and invariably bad, and everyone needs to be absolutely clear that some amount of toil is unavoidable in the SRE role, and indeed in almost any engineering role. It’s fine in small doses, and if you’re happy with those small doses, toil is not a problem. Toil becomes toxic when experienced in large quantities. If you’re burdened with too much toil, you should be very concerned and complain loudly. Among the many reasons why too much toil is bad, consider the following:
- Career stagnation. Your career progress will slow down or grind to a halt if you spend too little time on projects. Google rewards grungy work when it’s inevitable and has a big positive impact, but you can’t make a career out of grunge.
- Low morale. People have different limits for how much toil they can tolerate, but everyone has a limit. Too much toil leads to burnout, boredom, and discontent.
劳作并不总是坏的，每个人都需要绝对清楚，在SRE的角色中，甚至在几乎所有的工程角色中，一定量的劳作是不可避免的。小范围的劳作是可以的，如果你对这些小范围的劳作感到满意，劳作就不是问题。如果大量的劳作，就会变得有毒。如果你承受了太多的劳作，你应该非常关注并大声抱怨。在太多劳作是坏事的众多原因中，请考虑以下几点。
- 事业停滞不前。如果你在项目上花的时间太少，你的事业进展会放缓或停滞不前。谷歌奖励无趣的工作，当它是不可避免的并且有很大的积极影响时，但你不能用无趣的工作来成就事业。
- 士气低落。人们对自己能忍受多少劳作有不同的限度，但每个人都有一个限度。太多的劳作会导致倦怠、无聊和不满。
Additionally, spending too much time on toil at the expense of time spent engineering hurts an SRE organization in the following ways:
- Creates confusion. We work hard to ensure that everyone who works in or with the SRE organization understands that we are an engineering organization. Individuals or teams within SRE that engage in too much toil undermine the clarity of that communication and confuse people about our role.
- Slows progress. Excessive toil makes a team less productive. A product’s feature velocity will slow if the SRE team is too busy with manual work and firefighting to roll out new features promptly.
- Sets precedent. If you’re too willing to take on toil, your Dev counterparts will have incentives to load you down with even more toil, sometimes shifting operational tasks that should rightfully be performed by Devs to SRE. Other teams may also start expecting SREs to take on such work, which is bad for obvious reasons.
- Promotes attrition. Even if you’re not personally unhappy with toil, your current or future teammates might like it much less. If you build too much toil into your team’s procedures, you motivate the team’s best engineers to start looking elsewhere for a more rewarding job.
- Causes breach of faith. New hires or transfers who joined SRE with the promise of project work will feel cheated, which is bad for morale.
此外，花太多时间在劳作上而牺牲了工程时间，在以下方面伤害了一个SRE组织：
- 造成混乱。我们努力工作以确保每个在SRE组织工作的人都明白我们是一个工程组织。SRE中的个人或团队，如果从事过多的劳作，就会破坏沟通的清晰度，使人们对我们的角色感到困惑。
- 放慢进度。过度的劳作使一个团队的生产力降低。如果SRE团队忙于手工工作和救火工作而不能及时推出新的功能，产品的功能速度就会减慢。
- 设定先例。如果你太愿意承担劳作，你的开发同事就会有动机让你承担更多的劳作，有时会把本应由开发人员执行的操作任务转移给SRE。其他团队也可能开始期待SRE来承担这些工作，这显然是不好的。
- 促进减员。即使你个人对劳作没有不满，你现在或未来的队友可能会更不喜欢它。如果你在团队的程序中加入了太多的劳作，你会促使团队中最好的工程师开始在其他地方寻找更有价值的工作。
- 导致失信。加入SRE的新员工或调职人员，如果承诺有项目工作，就会感到被欺骗，这对士气是不利的。
Back to contents of the chapter（返回章节目录）
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