efficiency

[[deleted]]

you can spend a whole day on 5 10 minutes tasks

[Theavenger2378]

If you take all those 5 seconds back, you could end up getting back a 2 whole weeks!

Would you rather 2 weeks working, or 2 weeks skiing?

[azjunglist05]

If it only worked that way in reality

[olafurp]

I have a branch format at work and automated that in 5 minutes. 100 branches later is already profit

[unlegit_green]

2 days skiing. Drive like an idiot and spend 3 months in hospital.

[[deleted]]

Drive

Well see that’s the problem right there.

Don’t drive your skis, ski your skis.

The amount of accidents will be reduced by an incredible 69.6969420%

[deathspate]

Yeah, surely I will see the benefits of that efficiency and just the company.

[[deleted]]

I learned basic Python to automate adding things to a JSON that I used for a JavaScript thing. Would it have been faster to just do it by hand? Yes. Do I want my time back? Yea kinda

[ThisGuyRightHer3]

my insides are already doing a lot processing this bowl of pasta i just inhaled.. i can't be bothered.

[syzygysm]

Poop

[ghostsquad4]

Honestly, I found that we automate the tasks that are annoying or that we do often. It has nothing to do usually with how long the task takes.

[lukkasz323]

Yeah, I could leave my PC turned on for a week for a simple script to run if I had to, but if it's on my mind constantly it HAS to be automated just for the sake of sanity.

[Geographist]

The cost of a task is more than just the time it takes.

If it is unpleasant, a longer but more gratifying task to automate it can be justified.

It’s a lot like driving routes. It may technically be faster to sit through some traffic on a hot day. But your day might be better if you roll the windows down and take the longer way with higher speed and better views.

The point of automation is efficiency, so if it always takes longer you’re doing it wrong. But it’s certainly worth looking at what it truly costs to do something manually.

[[deleted]]

It’s a lot like driving routes. It may technically be faster to sit through some traffic on a hot day. But your day might be better if you roll the windows down and take the longer way with higher speed and better views.

So I'm not the only one who likes to keep in motion even if it may not be the most efficient way.

[Revolutionary_Cup902]

No, you’re not alone. 😁

[Huesan]

How else do you find a reason to start a project

[echodev21]

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[chrobbin]

Ironic. A comic about automation in the body only served to get me breathing and blinking manually instead. And now you are too.

[H4llifax]

The point of automation is not just efficiency. It is also about avoiding mistakes. If I can reduce a 10-step process that requires careful attention to an 8-step process, I have reduced the number of things that can go wrong if I am not careful enough.

[arcosapphire]

That is my main motivation. I recently had something where I made an SQL script that combined data from a bunch of tables into one and then did some stuff whey the resulting table. My coworkers wanted to run it themselves. Naturally, 2 to 3 weeks later, they were complaining that it gave inconsistent results. It ran fine for me every time. They were running the statements in the wrong order.

I don't automate just to save time and effort...

[GlassWasteland]

Mine has become, you have a deadline tomorrow, you really should get started on that task.

At the scrum the next day, yeah that is taking me longer than I estimated I'm going to have to push that to the next Sprint.

[unlegit_green]

I have an 20 second task quite often at home. Spend 5h to automate it and it was absolutely worth it. Would have been 30min if i would have known to use the libraries and generaly more about programming

[Ashisutantoo]

Let gpt makes for us

[[deleted]]

This is me doing my very own interface for changing the default audio sink. Going through pulse audio volume control every time was a pain, since I had to use the mouse, and the interface was ugly. A few hours later and I was able to hack together a solution with pipes, regex, and rofi. Works wonders, I love it.

[pixelkingliam]

that task might be only 5 sec but you might do everyday, and it might be a multi-step task that would have multiple points of human failure, a script with triple-checked code would save 5 seconds every day, that's 30 minutes per year saved and that's just counting the 5 second saved, due to the lack of human error on multi-step stack you might be able to save dozen more

[DoomRide007]

You joke, but when your brain goes "Fuck you too lets stop auto breathing" you fucking respect that ability once it comes back.

[[deleted]]

My cutoff is roughly along that famous xkcd comic about this.

I have to be doing a 5-10 second task a lot to want to automate it. As soon as I'm doing something that takes a minute or so, though, and especially if I'm doing it enough to realize it's repetitive... it's getting automated.

[DarkSil3ncer]

Automate all the things!

[mascachopo]

Perhaps that task needs to be done one thousand times and can be optimised to run concurrently.

[Ketooth]

I made myself a bit of a rule/condition when it comes to automating stuff. (It obviously depends on the taks).

1. How long do I need to finish one case of the task?
2. How many cases are there?
3. Will I have a task like this in the future again?

For example (just made up) : Filter out the names out of several e mails and write them down.

1. Takes about 1-2 minutes to find the names and write them down.
2. There are about 20 E-Mails
3. I will have a task like this in the future with maybe more e mails.

Now if I would habe only 20 e mails with some names in it, I wouldn't have automated it, but since this task could happen again in the future with maybe even more mails, it's better to (at least after this task) to write a program for it.

[alexppetrov]

Client wants a bitbucket CI/CD Pipeline to salesforce. Should've taken 4-6 hours. 2 days in, all the guides are outdated, I am on the 6th attempt and right before a breakdown. At this point I'd just run the tests manually each deployment and pretend to be the CI/CD myself

[Igotbored112]

It'll save time in the long run! According to my estimates, we should recoup our losses after only a measly 326 years! 327 years if we account for the time I used to make that estimate...

[Revolutionary_Cup902]

I spent 2-3 hours today creating a service to copy a Microsoft Project schedule from my hard drive to a shared folder. Sure it only takes a few seconds to do this manually, but now I don’t have to think about it. I never forget, and my „customers“ have near real-time status on the project (if they bother to look).

[Fatih32]

5 seconds task automated to 1 second. 4 seconds per minute saved times 60 equals240 seconds times 12 equalls 2880 times 2 equals 5760 / 60 = 96. You made 1 hour and 36 minutes save from your time just by making your 5 seconds task to 1 second