We were hired to do the grunt work

Most engineers, analysts, marketers and managers in technology companies spend their days fixing bugs, answering repetitive questions, rewriting content, or shuffling decks. They feel hired for higher-impact work but are trapped in a white-collar salt mine of routine tasks. The frustration is universal: product managers want to dream up features, engineers want to build them, yet they end up handling migrations, dashboards and endless status updates.

The root cause isn't a lack of ambition but organizational dysfunction: brittle tools, unfinished self-serve platforms, unpaid technical debt, and misaligned expectations force teams into grunt work. Two theories emerge: either we're only using twenty percent of our capacity and a better structure could unlock the rest, or the mundane tasks are actually the valuable work that keeps the business running. Real examples-from migration from version 7.1.12 to 9.3.1, to dashboards that never get used-show how process inefficiencies swallow talent.

AI is sold as the savior that will automate the boring, but history repeats itself. The Jevons paradox shows that making work easier often creates more work elsewhere: AI-generated answers still need review, automated ticket fixes still need triage, and AI-driven marketing creates new email lists to reconcile. Leaders must recognize that without fixing underlying processes and technical debt, AI will simply add another layer of grunt work rather than freeing teams for strategic impact.