5 ms·
Another point of anecdata: Once upon a time, early in my career, I spent half a day automating and error-proofing a 15 minute task. My boss, at the time, was
by fotbr 13y ago
Another point of anecdata:
Once upon a time, early in my career, I spent half a day automating and error-proofing a 15 minute task. My boss, at the time, was slightly annoyed, and slightly amused. Fast forward two months from that point, and that same task needs to be done not once, but several thousand times. My boss wanted to go get coffee before we got started, so while he was grabbing his wallet, I fired up my automated process. By the time we got back, the task was done, and the boss was annoyed at himself for being annoyed earlier, and never again questioned why I built the systems I did. I, unfortunately, was too young and too inexperienced to realize that he was an excellent boss, and left a couple years later for "greener pastures", where I encountered many "productivity is measured entirely by the time you sit at your desk" bosses.
TL;DR: I work hard to look this lazy, had a boss that recognized it, and was too dumb to realize how good I had it.
- avalaunch 13y agoIt could be that you prematurely optimized the task and then got lucky that the optimization turned out to be necessary later on. Your story reads as if you are saying that you were correct to automate the task because later you happened to need the automation, despite not having any reason to believe that automation would be needed. ie. Buying a lottery ticket was perfectly reasonable because I happened to win. That being said, based on the numbers given, the optimization would make sense as long as you knew the task would be needed to be done at least 16 more times, which I imagine was the case. That also assumes there wasn't anything more pressing that needed to be worked on.
- GFischer 13y agoThere's a cool chart on xkcd estimating the max time you should spend automating something based on its frequency: http://xkcd.com/1205/ http://xkcd.com/1205/
- dhimes 13y agoOptimizing optimization. Terrific! Complete with extra-verbose mouseover text just to make the point. Of course, it leaves off a benefits of the particular type of optimizing that is automation, such as (1) reducing errors in task performance, and, admittedly a little more abstractly, (2) the ability to produce new efficiencies you may not have anticipated until you started automating. Kind of like writing a function only to discover that it's re-usable.
- ams6110 13y agoNice chart, but "across five years" is a little unrealistic IMO. You're much more likely to change projects, jobs, etc. before you realize a five-year payoff.
- jackgavigan 13y agoThat chart is misleading. Instead of saying "X days", it should actually say "X*24 hours" because there's a big difference between working on something for a day (e.g. 8-10 hours) and working on something for 24 hours.
- fotbr 13y agoTo be completely honest, it was a bit of getting lucky, and a lot of realizing that if I needed to modify one object in that particular library to satisfy a legal requirement, it was only a matter of time before a decree would come down that the rest need to be changed as well.
- interpol_p 13y agoMy coworker has a rule in our office: if you have to do something for a second time, automate it. He's been getting us all to follow this, and it has paid off many times. It's not just about whether it pays off for an individual task — it's a mentality you develop as you go into future tasks.
- chris_mahan 13y agowhat's his name, where does he work, and is he hiring?
- kaib 13y agoI would actually like to know if we could hire him.. :-)
- kamaal 13y ago>>"productivity is measured entirely by the time you sit at your desk" bosses. Productivity is measured by both building such systems, and how many such systems you build everyday.