How embracing automation can secure your tech career, not threaten it.
Many DBAs and Platform Engineers still hesitate when the topic of automation comes up. Some find it daunting. Others quietly fear it, as if automating their work might make them replaceable.
But the truth is simple: if you’re not automating yourself out of a job, someone else eventually will. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t you rather be the one driving the automation rather than the one being replaced by it?
The reality is that the people who build automation rarely lose their jobs, they just redefine them.
The Fear of Automation Is Understandable, but Misplaced
For decades, manual work defined what it meant to be a DBA or Platform Engineer. Backups, patching, deployments, service restarts—those were our bread and butter.
But those same tasks are now the easiest to automate, and that is a good thing.
Automation doesn’t erase expertise; it amplifies it. Every repetitive task you automate buys you back time to focus on what actually requires your judgment: architecture, optimization, and strategy. Automation doesn’t make you less valuable. It makes your expertise scalable.
The Shift from Doing to Designing
The modern engineer’s job is no longer about “keeping the lights on.” It’s about designing systems that keep themselves on. Automation changes your focus from doing to designing:
- How do we enforce database standards across hundreds of servers?
- How do we detect configuration drift automatically?
- How can we deliver new environments faster without compromising security?
If you’re the one architecting those solutions, you’re not eliminating your role, you’re future-proofing it.
The Human Element that Automation Can’t Replace
Automation can execute consistently, many times, but it can’t reason. It doesn’t know why a maintenance window matters to a financial system. That is where human experience still leads.
Automation replaces repetition, not reasoning. The best engineers teach systems how to operate, while maintaining ownership of why they operate the way they do.
Automation Is the Gateway to AI
There’s a lot of talk about AI taking over. But the truth is you cannot adopt AI responsibly without first building automation. And as I’ve said before, you can’t scale automation successfully until you’ve first mastered your standards.
AI thrives on structure, consistency, and feedback loops. If your environment is chaotic and manual, AI will only amplify that chaos.
Automation lays the foundation for AI success by ensuring:
- Reliable data pipelines
- Repeatable deployment patterns
- Auditable, policy-driven workflows
In short: you can’t just throw AI in, and hope that it’ll do your automating for you.
Lead the Change, Don’t Resist It
The best leaders and engineers don’t just adapt to automation, they drive it. They show their teams that automation isn’t about working less; it’s about working smarter. It’s how you multiply your impact. Not by doing more yourself, but by enabling your systems and your peers to do more without you.
Automation doesn’t make you obsolete, it makes you irreplaceable.
Final Thoughts
Automation isn’t a threat, it’s just another evolution.
The engineers who embrace it early become architects of efficiency, reliability, and scale.
Those who avoid it end up maintaining what others have already improved.
So ask yourself: do you want to lead the next wave in tech, or take a back seat to those that are?
The next time you hesitate to automate a task, remember: you’re not replacing your job, you’re rewriting it into something better. And if you don’t, someone else will.
In a future post, I’ll walk through some of the most effective tools for automating common DBA tasks , from PowerShell and dbatools to Terraform and Azure Automation, and show how to get started building your own foundation.
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Brendan McCaffrey 