There are some tasks that aren’t exactly fun, but need to get done. Doing those jobs can also help give you more skills and deep information on certain issues other may lack or let atrophy.
We had a new guy who liked doing the same thing 1,000 times, so I asked him to fix agents on severs that were always broken and would cause deployment failures. Doing it proactively instead of reactively. Our failure rates dropped dramatically, which is a nice feather in his cap. That was low hanging fruit that anyone could have picked up and started doing for 10 years, but no one did. It was a slog at the start, but once he got caught up and everything was clean, it would take him maybe 20 minutes each day to maintain, and he knew more about fixing those issues than anyone. He became the expert in the room.
As issues were discovered, fixing them probably could have been largely automated, by putting the various fixes into code and having it run on broken agents each day to see what it would fix. The gaps could be addressed and added to the fix-it script if possible. This would have been even better. No one actually writing code knew enough about fixing the agent to do this, or cared enough, they’d just deal with things failing periodically.
Look for these gaps in your organization and come up with ways to address them and do it.
