Comparison
Hero culturevsToil
Hero culture
the same engineer saves every launch weekend and gets praised for it, and nothing about the launches changes.
An organisation that rewards dramatic rescues more than the boring work that prevents them. It is self-sustaining, because the rescues are visible and the prevention is not, and it quietly selects for people willing to sacrifice their weekends. Naming it is uncomfortable and necessary, since the same failure repeating with a different hero each time is a systems problem being paid for with individuals.
Full entry →Toil
you did the same twenty-minute manual runbook every Tuesday for a year.
Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with the size of the system and produces no lasting value. It is worth naming because it hides: each instance is small and doing it feels like being helpful. The SRE convention of capping it — measuring what fraction of a team's time it consumes and treating a breach as a signal to invest — turns a slow drain into a visible, arguable number.
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