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.
…
Did you seriously see an xkcd from 3 or so years ago and get so angry that you felt the need to run and post in a forum about how they are wrong and you are actually the savior of humanity?
Ummm … are you ok?
It’s a good point to make and interesting to see how the numbers shake out … both of which come together to make the broader point that many people probably have bad intuitions for what these numbers look like.
No?
This graph needs to be put on a poster with the caption “This is what you pay IT for”
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!
I’ll do it for things that don’t seem like it will save much, but because it was such an infrequent task I would forget how all the cogs worked when it needed to be done again, and what pitfalls to avoid. So it’s not just direct time saved, but also increasing reliability.
Fixed your link: xkcd.com/1205
I hadn’t ever seen this XKCD, but as someone who’s constantly worrying about spending too long solving silly problems, this is really encouraging. Even more so when you solve someone else’s problems and save them time. Thanks for the share!
FYI: there is actually an XKCD font if you want to match the original more closely. https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
#nixos
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
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.
I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
How can we shave a second of the time it takes for you to click the left mouse button?
Automate it.
When you press a button on this revolutionary machine, it will automatically left click for you!
Something we talk about at my job is being able to do stuff in our UI with less clicks, less is better.
Not since I was a teenager.
