People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
Not since I was a teenager.
Leave my mom out of this.
That area of the chart is for people with really repetitive jobs/hobbies. There are MANY jobs where you do the same 5-10 minute thing 50x a day.
How many things does anyone do 50x a day, period? Apart from autonomic body functions I can’t think of anything. I probably don’t even stand up 50 times a day.
Sending emails, opening files, checking the database. Those are quite mundane everyday tasks of every office clerk.
I’m going to click the [-] thread collapse button on Lemmy 50 times in the next ten minutes.
Type
;in JS or C.
I feel it, fellow automation-human.
To me the automation calls harder than the gains, but when I do fix stuff for my org of 500 or so people, it is so good.
Thanks for this!
Also, automation is not merely a time saver but very importantly also an error preventer! That is a major reason for much of my automation.
Question, can anyone please tell me what job titles cover this skill set? I’ve seen and performed a tremendous amount of this automation work by data analysts and data scientists, but it doesn’t seem to fit the titles. I’ve seen ‘process automation X’ as an example but more often than not that title seems to be used for an actual engineer in some assembly line manufacturing job rather than what is essentially a programmer/GUI automator
DevOps for me in hardware (chip design/verification)
You would thing a bunch of engineers would know how to use conputers, but no, they are good at chip deign. Automating stuff for them gives insane benefits and scale.
I used to write tons of automation in my previous data role. While time saved matters, the other important takeaway is reproducibility. Other people on the team were writing giant SQL scripts and highlight running each one and then manual checking to see if it worked… I’m talking about tables anywhere from 1-100 millions records. You aren’t checking shit by skimming a top 1000. And what a ridiculously error prone process that is. Take the human out of that equation!
If the data came out wrong, it would be because the data came in different/corrupted, not because I missed a query. Speaking of different causing problems… one time a company sent us data that was fixed width by character instead of fixed width by byte. Smh…
This! The point of automation is rarely saving time. The point of automation is increasing quality.
It can be a data quality, it can be mitigating a production risk, can be avoiding regression.
Heck even unit tests are automation (you may just manually test your code once and call the day).
I am not saying that automation is always good, but the evaluation should be
- what is the cost of production/data quality/regression gone wild? (Possibly in€/$/¥)
- what is the cost of the person/team performing the task over 1 Year (Again, £€$¥)
- what is the expected cost of the person/team implementing automation?
Then you do (3)*3 - (1) *3 - (2). Is it positive? You do, is it negative you? You don’t. The more it’s positive the higher the priority of doing.
Why the *3? The first because the expected cost of automation is always massively underestimated The second because it takes multiple times something goes wrong till the decision is reconsidered 🙂
Why 1 year? Because generally the task to automatize changes or disappear
I contribute to open source because i use the tool and the problem exists for me as well, and I know how to solve it. I don’t care if others use it or not.
Would you spend an hour fixing a problem that will only save you ten minutes total in the rest of your lifetime using the software?
