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FTA: "But the result — being able to automate what used to be a monotonous task — is totally worth it." Some of the best hackers and coders I've met were the l

by ajays 16y ago

FTA: "But the result — being able to automate what used to be a monotonous task — is totally worth it." Some of the best hackers and coders I've met were the laziest folks around; but they'd spend hours working to automate a 1-minute monotonous task.

bmelton 16y ago
I remember interviewing for a position at a company I was already at, moving from one department to another. I'd gotten a new manager in the old department, and I don't think I'd had enough time to get over an initial bad impression. I was the night shift guy, on a help desk, and the call volume was generally low. To help better justify the use of my time, I was tasked with some additional duties, like processing account delete requests and other tedium. My manager at the time found fault with the fact that I had written a series of scripts to completely automate the additional tasks I'd been assigned, and considered me lazy. In the interview, I was asked the question "How do you respond to the accusation that you sometimes cut corners?" My answer was something like "I think cutting corners is a good thing. If there's not a requirement for square corners, and the rounded corners don't impact the quality or integrity of the work being performed, and if the corners aren't irreparably damaged in the process, I think that taking the more direct path of least resistance is not a bad thing." I got the job, and I was later told that the manager was very impressed with the answer. Uhhh, that was a roundabout way of saying "I agree."
torme 16y ago
I believe the saying goes "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning" Certainly holds true here, but I think the real value from things like these is beating the task.
patio11 16y ago
You can get staggering productivity wins by automating enough of the right 1, 5, 15 minute tasks, especially when you consider how terrible people's schedulers are. If your computer lost an hour of productive work every time it context switched, you'd figure out ways to eliminate it's list of small recurring chores, too. Happily, your computer has very, very efficient context switching relative to you. I've been keeping a running count of time spent on various activities this month, for giggles. Total support time for BCC in the last two weeks: eight minutes. The machine has been humming so efficiently I burned some time yesterday just to check that the whole thing hadn't been hit with a meteor or something.
- varaon 16y ago
  A second point would be that the time you spend automating tasks has other payoffs, in the form of learning and inspiration. For instance, I suspect that part of the inspiration for Appointment Reminder came from Patrick's own realization of how valuable the automation of small tasks can be (chasing down missed appointments, in this case). --- To go off on another tangent, this is akin to eliminating technical debt from your workflow. By taking time to "refactor" certain tasks by doing them in a more efficient way, you get a net savings going forward. You can increase your ability to take on new tasks by increasing the efficiency of existing ones. In keeping with the refactoring theme, if you have tasks that don't scale well, you may need to spend more time on them in a crisis. For example, in the event of a site outage you might suddenly have a deluge of support emails. Having support tickets be automatically created would save you n*60 seconds of copy/pasting.
steveklabnik 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_programmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...
sliverstorm 16y ago
"If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man- he will find an easier way to do it"
- eru 16y ago
  Procrastination!

by ajays 16y ago

bmelton 16y ago

I remember interviewing for a position at a company I was already at, moving from one department to another. I'd gotten a new manager in the old department, and I don't think I'd had enough time to get over an initial bad impression. I was the night shift guy, on a help desk, and the call volume was generally low. To help better justify the use of my time, I was tasked with some additional duties, like processing account delete requests and other tedium. My manager at the time found fault with the fact that I had written a series of scripts to completely automate the additional tasks I'd been assigned, and considered me lazy. In the interview, I was asked the question "How do you respond to the accusation that you sometimes cut corners?" My answer was something like "I think cutting corners is a good thing. If there's not a requirement for square corners, and the rounded corners don't impact the quality or integrity of the work being performed, and if the corners aren't irreparably damaged in the process, I think that taking the more direct path of least resistance is not a bad thing." I got the job, and I was later told that the manager was very impressed with the answer. Uhhh, that was a roundabout way of saying "I agree."

torme 16y ago

I believe the saying goes "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning" Certainly holds true here, but I think the real value from things like these is beating the task.

patio11 16y ago

You can get staggering productivity wins by automating enough of the right 1, 5, 15 minute tasks, especially when you consider how terrible people's schedulers are. If your computer lost an hour of productive work every time it context switched, you'd figure out ways to eliminate it's list of small recurring chores, too. Happily, your computer has very, very efficient context switching relative to you. I've been keeping a running count of time spent on various activities this month, for giggles. Total support time for BCC in the last two weeks: eight minutes. The machine has been humming so efficiently I burned some time yesterday just to check that the whole thing hadn't been hit with a meteor or something.

varaon 16y ago
A second point would be that the time you spend automating tasks has other payoffs, in the form of learning and inspiration. For instance, I suspect that part of the inspiration for Appointment Reminder came from Patrick's own realization of how valuable the automation of small tasks can be (chasing down missed appointments, in this case). --- To go off on another tangent, this is akin to eliminating technical debt from your workflow. By taking time to "refactor" certain tasks by doing them in a more efficient way, you get a net savings going forward. You can increase your ability to take on new tasks by increasing the efficiency of existing ones. In keeping with the refactoring theme, if you have tasks that don't scale well, you may need to spend more time on them in a crisis. For example, in the event of a site outage you might suddenly have a deluge of support emails. Having support tickets be automatically created would save you n*60 seconds of copy/pasting.

steveklabnik 16y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_programmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...

sliverstorm 16y ago

"If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man- he will find an easier way to do it"

eru 16y ago
Procrastination!