1. Physical maintenance is usually done by a separate team. There is always more low-immediate-value stuff like skill development, but actual process or procedu

1. Physical maintenance is usually done by a separate team. There is always more low-immediate-value stuff like skill development, but actual process or procedural improvements almost always require support from multiple stakeholders. Those folks may already be prioritizing other projects, and if the process is already mature, they are likely to tell you to go away if you aren't solving a major pain point. It's honestly a lot like grad school in solid state physics. A lot of hurry up and wait. 2. Mostly I mean higher effectiveness in that one person knowing all the random details of a tool or process can, at least in the short term, be more effective than multiple people spread out over time just because it eliminates the issue of knowledge transfer. The follow-up to that can reasonably be "write better documentation," but some amount of unstructured talking is usually required to convey the full nuance of a situation. Doing that with multiple people spread across four or more shifts that don't overlap is fairly difficult. To a limited extent, I also mean that PhDs have higher effectiveness because a PhD has a much higher chance of having delivered on process development on relevant tools while in grad school.