🔗 Automating what shouldn't require effort: the resume as an engineering exercise

Updating a resume was never hard. It was just tedious. For a long time, this was one of those processes I accepted as a natural part of professional life: open a document, update experiences, adjust dates, export a PDF, and move on. It required no intellectual effort, brought no new learning, yet it needed to be done repeatedly. Only after a few years did I realize this had a name: toil.

What is Toil? Toil is repetitive, manual, automatable operational work with no lasting value. It’s the kind of task that doesn’t scale, teaches nothing new, and tends to grow linearly with the system. The term is widely used in SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) to identify work that should be eliminated through automation.

The problem was never the resume itself. It wasn’t the format, the editor, or the layout. The problem was repeating the same process, always the same way, with no cognitive gain. This kind of work is treacherous because it seems small, almost irrelevant, but it accumulates. It takes time, mental energy, and most importantly, normalizes the idea that certain things “are just like that.” Toil doesn’t live only in production environments or operational tasks; it silently infiltrates our daily lives.