The Google Rule That Breaks at Startups

Google's SRE book says: SRE time should be no more than 50% toil . The other 50% must go to engineering work that reduces toil.

At a 10-person startup, your "SRE team" is one overworked engineer. They're already at 95% toil. There is no slack to reduce it.

So you have to be ruthless about what work is worth automating and what work is worth eliminating entirely.

Defining Toil Precisely

Google's definition:

Manual

Repetitive

Automatable

Tactical (not strategic)

Lacks enduring value

Scales linearly with service growth

If a task checks all six boxes, it's toil. If it checks some but not all, it might be legitimate engineering work.

Example: responding to an alert is tactical and lacks enduring value, but if it's not repetitive, it's not toil.

Example: writing a new runbook is manual, but it's strategic and has enduring value, so it's not toil.

The Startup-Sized Toil Audit

Track for 2 weeks.…