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I would be satisfied if people were simply able to identify tasks that can and should be automated. There are many, many, many people / organizations that have

I would be satisfied if people were simply able to identify tasks that can and should be automated. There are many, many, many people / organizations that have weekly or monthly manual tasks that could be automated if the individual or organization could recognize it - and hire someone to address the automation. Stupid alert: I briefly worked at a startup that did push to production by remote desktop to the server and manually restarting the IIS server after copying things into place. They didn't automate it - because "it's the way we always did it." (Yes, they're out of business now.)

empthought 12y ago
You've probably seen http://www.xkcd.com/1205/ http://www.xkcd.com/1205/ -- if you're doing it monthly and it takes less time than an hour, you can't spend more than three work days trying to automate it, or you're wasting more time than you're saving.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  Meh. Automation in the software industry isn't just about saving a certain amount of wall-clock time: that's the perspective of a bean-counter without broader perspective. Having highly skilled people frequently spend time on boring drudgery has other costs. The cost of the interruption, for instance, or the annoyance factor alone... Automation also has the potential to make a task less error-prone and its output more consistent. A botched or forgotten manual task can be difficult to clean up after, so there's risk management too. For instance: in one incident, a coworker at a former employer accidentally ran the "send thousands of people email about how much we're about to pay them in a few days" script on input from the wrong year because January had just ended and he had to input a value containing the last day of the month (e.g. 2013-01-31) by hand.
  - taeric 12y ago
    Way to completely miss the point. The point isn't to try and avoid automating things. But to realize that you can't just dream up benefits in complete isolation to the costs. That is, if the benefit is worth the costs.... do so. Otherwise, reconsider. And few things make as glorious as a mistake as an automated job going out of control. There is a reason one of the most important questions you should ask on any automated task is "how do I make it stop?"

empthought 12y ago

You've probably seen http://www.xkcd.com/1205/ http://www.xkcd.com/1205/ -- if you're doing it monthly and it takes less time than an hour, you can't spend more than three work days trying to automate it, or you're wasting more time than you're saving.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
Meh. Automation in the software industry isn't just about saving a certain amount of wall-clock time: that's the perspective of a bean-counter without broader perspective. Having highly skilled people frequently spend time on boring drudgery has other costs. The cost of the interruption, for instance, or the annoyance factor alone... Automation also has the potential to make a task less error-prone and its output more consistent. A botched or forgotten manual task can be difficult to clean up after, so there's risk management too. For instance: in one incident, a coworker at a former employer accidentally ran the "send thousands of people email about how much we're about to pay them in a few days" script on input from the wrong year because January had just ended and he had to input a value containing the last day of the month (e.g. 2013-01-31) by hand.
- taeric 12y ago
  Way to completely miss the point. The point isn't to try and avoid automating things. But to realize that you can't just dream up benefits in complete isolation to the costs. That is, if the benefit is worth the costs.... do so. Otherwise, reconsider. And few things make as glorious as a mistake as an automated job going out of control. There is a reason one of the most important questions you should ask on any automated task is "how do I make it stop?"