your company probably isn't doing SRE Google SRE - embracing risk - 50% time is for free thought and development if your "devops" are so busy doing ticket work they're asking for you to hire, you're not doing SRE https://sre.google/sre-book/introduction/ Don't forget the chapter that says 50% time for development Don't forget the one that says no new deployments when ops are at capacity. "But the business needs this" well then the business needs to hire more people.