3 ms·

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

• 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?"