Hire people who'll automate themselves out of the job: from manual ops to agents
alex_verem · x · 2026-10-16
An argument about team staffing: most teams staff operations for today's workflow, which turns manual processes into permanent ones. Every product has an unbudgeted layer—per-client configuration, integrations, tier-two support—done by hand forever.
The author suggests putting engineers on that work: the third identical config request becomes a script, the script becomes an agent, and the agent gets monitoring that flags broken integrations before clients call. Those people move on to the next unautomated thing rather than running out of work.
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