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In some organizations, including mine, toil is sometimes "reduced" by saying "not my problem" and push it to other teams. It sucks to be on the receiving end of it.



It depends in which direction it's being pushed. Backpressure is a useful signal that propagates the economic cost of a decision closer to the entity that judges its benefits, resulting in more coherent action.

Tossing the hot potato over to just about anyone else is bad.


I've certainly been on teams that are on the other side of this - we're staffed fairly low, and sensitive to toil work because of it, and thus end up pushing things to some other teams to try to help them reduce our toil. Those teams are often much larger, and have just been doing things manually for years for various reasons, and are fine with it. The only thing we can do is try to make it enough of a problem for them that they'll decide to help us out so we're not drowning in work that is normal for them.


There's nothing worse than this. I had to chase a bug fix (that required a two character string change in the code) for about 6 months as i got a mix of 'not my problem' and 'not a priority'. I could have made the change but, no, the team that owned the product had to do it. Try explaining that to the customer affected.


And in some organizations, the toil just never gets done at all




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