In the good old days as a system administrator, roughly 15% of your time was spent on deliverables, maybe 35% spent on troubleshooting/outages, and the rest of

In the good old days as a system administrator, roughly 15% of your time was spent on deliverables, maybe 35% spent on troubleshooting/outages, and the rest of the time doing whatever you wanted. We had time to investigate weird things, work on performance improvements, build new tools to automate things, you name it. There was excess capacity built into the system because there needed to be, every once in a while you needed many people at once to handle a rush of problems. Slowly, the field has progressed to 100% deliverables 100% of the time. The interrupts are constant because the business hasn't staffed enough engineers. The reason is always the same: despite all the planning and sizing meetings we have, somebody promised someone a feature by X date before asking engineering thinks (or you have yes-people answering for engineering that doesn't represent the actual engineers).