don’t try making changes as individual. do it when you have leverage, after organizing your coworkers collectively into a formally recognized union or an informal grouping of workers that take action together and are willing to take some risks. and I’m not just talking about technical changes to projects or ops, im talking about workplace processes, such as how much unpaid time you work, getting guarantees about not getting laid off, keeping or improving current pay and benefits, getting on the job training, getting to work certain types of skills without getting deskilled, etc.

Otherwise, for technical challenges, a lot of it boils down to how popular you are and internal politics and whether management will or will not get in your way. as a worker, i’m less concerned with how well the business performs and much more concerned with how my coworkers and I are treated. I do also dislike toil but realize that too much automation can also remove the need for myself to be employed. If you are working in the west it can also mean getting yourself replaced with outsourced workers, who will either also be de-skilled and only taught to use the automation you wrote and paid less or very skilled and without access permissions and still payed way less than you. Its a fucked system in every type of way.

I often wish my coworkers would care way more about working conditions and the way they are being exploited and used and less on technical aspects of how the work gets done. Not that a well organized work process and sane technology choices wont make things easier for workers sometimes, but this is traditionally the job of senior engineers colluding with management to figure out and not much of my concern, even if I do have good ideas on how to improve things, which will get ignored by the needs of the business and executive’s silly decisions that they make that day