Julia Kirby, for Harvard Business Review, interviewed Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering, Jay Parikh. I added the bold emphasis.
So this notion of augmenting your people and enabling them up to take on more interesting work – that is really what drives the automation agenda?
The reason why the automation is so important is that it does free up these teams to go think about and do things for the future. If you think about it, most tech companies in the world today are spending an incredible amount of time competing for the best of the best in the world. For a smart person in tech, there are just a lot of fun companies with fun problems to go work on. So once you’ve worked so hard to get people into the company and to ramp them up and to understand your environment, you want to keep them. You want to have them be engaged. You want them to grow and develop their careers and stay with you for this ride that is scale over a really long period of time.
Hat tip to Marginal Revolution, where I first ran across this.