Lack of development in Ops - Anonymous employee Instacart Employee Review

I agree with the other sentiments shared by other reviewers working in operational teams. Generally, the engineering/product/design orgs seem MUCH happier and fulfilled than operations. Many ops roles are sold as strategic and analytical during the recruiting and interviewing process. However, the reality is that overqualified folks are performing extremely manual and repetitive operational tasks because of a lack of automation. Think thankless work like checking the weather daily to predict traffic delays, cleaning up data by merging duplicate products one by one, clicking the same buttons each day, etc. As with any technology company, internal tools break, bugs arise, or there simply may be too much growth and scale to continue operating using a historical process. There is an unspoken feeling that Ops must still work around those challenges by performing even more manual tasks to the point where the work is beyond ridiculous and time-consuming, instead of "bothering" engineering about automation or optimizing tools. This dynamic seems to be a result of a lack of communication, empathy, and understanding in the entire company (including ops management) of what each teams' day-to-day work is comprised of and how roles can get better so that we improve as a company and operate more efficiently. Automating these tasks could free up Ops time and allow us to work on strategic, high-impact projects that require brain cells rather than mind-numbing work that has become the status quo. Unfortunately don't see this changing any time soon.