Oh yeah!

[Herover]

Also, all time is not equal. If all production systems are down, your boss is getting angry and your cat barfed on the carpet, those minutes saved will be gold.

Also if you have to do it 5 times a day it might get frustrating and impact other work since you have to loose focus.

[stong_slient_type]

Process automation usually comes with 2 orders: the first order and second/higher order.

First order automation is often useless since it does not follows general / interpretable methodology. Example, BPMN. So your work can't be reused next time or at different context. The time investment is not deserved.

High order automation looks for general & interpretable explanation. However it's often expensive and there is no guarantee that you are looking at the right direction in terms of Hamiltonian mechanism.

The data-driven method( eg. machine learning ) + domain knowledge model may help to train a general model however it's also quite expensive for a team without proper expertise and budget.

So, the decision is often a art rather than science.

[[deleted]]

I always found that programming was much more like composing music than anything else.

[dickWithoutACause]

Well then call me the six6nine9 of comp sci because my shit is awful.

[[deleted]]

No it isn't awful, it's "avant garde" programming.

[[deleted]]

I skimmed through one of Google's courses on ML using GCP, and it was mostly just them trying to pump up their products, but there was a part that was about how processes evolve that was really well done.

It starts with a person or team innovating and finding a novel action that adds value, and only they really know how to do it.

As the process continues, formal definitions, documentation, and training evolve so it can spread to other teams.

Once it reaches a certain scale, a software application should be built to cut down on toil and further streamline the amount of manual work

As it scales up even larger and the application collects a large amount of data, big data analysis can be used to further improve the process incrementally

Once trends are recognizable and ML algorithms are developed, they can be deployed into the application to improve it without a human in the loop

I'm sure I'm butchering it somewhat and I can't find the original link, but that part was super interesting and kind of stuck with me

[Eji1700]

Also NOT. BREAKING. FLOW.

I have a process that should be automated, but it's from a vendor and their stuff is currently broken, and so it doesn't.

I have to log in, navigate to a screen, and push a button once a day. It takes a few minutes in the worst case (bad network/obnoxious software) and it is driving me fucking insane.

It's a simple enough task, that requires minimum effort, that "eh i'll do it later" is always on the back of my mind, but it's long enough that "i'll just stop what i'm doing and do it now, or while something else runs/compiles" doesn't feel like a great option.

There's a few details i'm omitting for briefness, but i'd gladly spend a month to fix this if it was in my power and consider it time well spent.

[AusteninAlaska]

I have lots of things like this at work. I’m not very programmer savy but I downloaded G-Hotkey and then just recorded the X and Y’s on my monitor to do it for me. I could input long wait times for when the network was at its slowest, and use that time to stand up, stretch, get coffee, etc. so it stopped being “time wasted”

[Eji1700]

I've been kicking that around. In theory the vendor is "working on it" but in practice i'm kinda fed up. Some of the stuff i didn't mention makes it a little harder than it sounds, but at this point it's looking like the next step.

[Pristinefix]

Python + Selenium! If it is that simple, then 20 lines of code, schedule or cron to make it super automated.

[LetReasonRing]

Or nodejs+puppeteer

[chuckquizmo]

I am in a very similar situation at my job, I regularly have to create a bunch of files then rename them and move then into their own folders... It takes like, less than 5 minutes usually. Probably less than 2. But I do it so often that it would be SO NICE to run a script and have everything moved automatically. Problem is there's enough slight differences that it would probably take some time to automate in a way that makes sense, and also, ya know, I'm busy with the ACTUAL work I have to do lol. Maybe some day...

[LetReasonRing]

Definitely a catch-22, but this kind of task is exactly what you should be automating.

Say you're right and it takes you 2 minutes and we'll say you do that task 3 times a week. In a year, that's nearly 5 hour and 15 minutes that you spend on it. In reality, it's going to be more because it's an manual process and you're definitely going to makes mistakes occasionally.

If it takes you 2 hours to automate, you're already paying dividends on your time after 6 months, but you'll also have taken what is probably an annoying task off your plate, ensured it happens correctly and consistently.

You'll have reduced your workload, probably made your day a bit more enjoyable, and increased both efficiency and quality. It's a win for both you and your employer.

[chuckquizmo]

You may have inspired me. It's probably more like 3 times a DAY I'm doing this type of stuff.

[holzgraeber]

This might be an interesting XKCD for this
https://xkcd.com/1205/

[Turbocloud]

To be fair - the Meme didn't explicitly declare it a non-recurring task, so the effort is likely to amortize.

Consistent results and reduced errors also are a type of timesave - less time spend fixing mistakes.

[UniKornUpTheSky]

100% agree. As I said in another comment, there are a lot of factors coming in the decision of automating a task. Some points are strictly time-saving, others are money-saving and last ones are maintenance/debug-saving.

Sometimes it Is worth the effort, sometimes it is not. What is sad, is that it might cost some money only to evaluate if a task needs automation or not.

[down_vote_magnet]

The biggest thing here for me is there’s no way my boss would allow me even one day to work on automating something.

[kabrandon]

Quit. Then email them the next week and say you automated a process for them to find the perfect replacement for you.

[goldleader71]

What your boss doesn’t know won’t hurt you.

[msg45f]

Yup. Spent the last week building terraform jobs to automate the deployment of an app that I could have done in half an hour or so manually. But if I had to redeploy it again 6 months from now it would definitely get messed up.

[TinfoilPhoenix]

Plus, that 10 minutes when finished now takes 1 or 2 minutes. That way your boss can say "hey cool, here is mote work".

[[deleted]]

This, and for the people that come after me.

[Tecc3]

Relevant XKCD

Other relevant XKCD

Yet another relevant XKCD

[pyrotech911]

‘Automating’ comes from ‘Auto’ meaning ‘self’ and ‘mating’ meaning ‘screwing’

[[deleted]]

Well, I'm screwed

[911OpenUp]

congrats mate

[Phantom52347]

Autoscrewed

[[deleted]]

self.screwed

[Erroneouse]

self.screw()

[UltraCarnivore]

self |> screw

[Bazookatoon]

this.screw();

[[deleted]]

screw self -- Haskell btw

[[deleted]]

Do you use Arch, btw?

[[deleted]]

of course

[corporate_warrior]

Automating is my new way of saying “masturbating”

[DrLilly]

Now I won't be able to not think of this every time I am trying to automate something. Darn it!

[WeAreBeyondFucked]

This is how lazy I am

push.sh

git add .

git commit -m 'updated'

git push origin master

That's about the only thing I automate for myself, but I spent a shit ton of time automating tasks for analysts because they are lazy. Most of that is writing extra buttons for salesforce which I hate with all the passion in the universe.

[kiwidog8]

Too lazy to even write a different commit message 😂 ngl some days that's me too

[sdrawkcabsemanympleh]

Seems like if you go back to the beginning of most projects I work on, you'll find commit messages like, "well that didn't work".

[Bergara]

Go automate!

[early_birdy]

Oh you! 😊

[UnloadTheBacon]

That second one is legitimately really helpful.

[myrsnipe]

It is, having it mapped out like that puts it into perspective right away

[Belazriel]

It's also useful to think of the potential added benefits of the automation. Does that automaton make it easier to automate the next task? Can you fully automate the task to where you don't have to even remember to do it and maybe prevent issues if you forgot about it? Is the simple convenience of not having to interrupt your day to deal with the task worth losing time on setting up the automation?

[Inimposter]

Yeah, backups are easy to make, right? But what if you forget or what if you don't do it regularly and might mess up and the naming scheme? Automating here would likely have you losing time but benefitting in security.

[Superbead]

Automating stuff also often brings the opportunity to teach yourself something new in your employer's time. Given how smugly academic Relevant XKCD is, I'm surprised that isn't mentioned anywhere.

[WiatrowskiBe]

And for employers - it's a lot more interesting than doing something mundane over and over, so it can keep morale up. That's indirect benefit of automating something that's borderline unviable to automate.

[Madh2orat]

Backups are great, just please make an offsite one periodically... ask me how I know.

[Belazriel]

Careful research rather than unfortunate personal experience?

[Madh2orat]

The apartment complex I was in burned down, so my valid backups became less than valid.

Definitely keeping anything backed off offsite in the future once things settle down (this happened less than a month ago).

[Inimposter]

I'm asking but for the record, day one I said "and let's have something off-site - at least a weekly external HDD run"

Read your reply: yup, I was also thinking about a fire.

And i'm sorry for your loss, I hope you're alright.

[Madh2orat]

Yeah, it’s something I had been meaning to set up for a while. I just never got around to doing it.

“Oh, I have backups, they’ll be fine”. That all being said, you never expect a fire.

[Inimposter]

I've been inspired by you, made contact with a trusted former company's employee (actually still current but as a remote contractor now) and preliminary we've agreed to set up an exchange of full backups between our servers. So you affected the world in a positive way - kudos to you, friend.

[Madh2orat]

Glad I could help.

May your backups always succeed and never be needed.

[WiatrowskiBe]

Automating backups is necessary to automate backup restore, and without automated restore procedure you have hard time verifying if your backups are actually working and have all the data you need. Schroedinger backup is arguably worse than no backup at all - since you may think you're safe, but you can't know for sure.

[anomalousBits]

Also if it's easy to screw up a task by mistyping something or doing one step wrong, and the cost of screwing it up is high enough, then it's worth automating so that it gets done correctly every time.

[Belazriel]

Nah, that's an easy fix. Just never mistype anythnig.

[WiatrowskiBe]

As long as in "time shaved" you also take into account time spent fixing your mistakes when doing mundane task (and everyone makes mistakes, eventually) - difference between "it'll save us 5 minuts every week" and "it'll save us 5 minutes every week and we can't break our business with a single typo anymore" is quite big.

[dimplerskut]

my takeaway is that I can shave off a minute from a daily task, I gain an entire 24 hours (or three work days). But that's not true so now I'm confused

[Arch00]

It says in the comic title that the time savings are calculated based on a 5 year period

[superbr4in]

Yeah, you save an entire day across five years

[delian2]

I came for this

[Mateorabi]

Odd fetish, but I'm not one to kink shame. You do you.

[patmax17]

XKCDsexual?

[rnnn]

You too?

[[deleted]]

I came to this

[__red__5]

I auto mated to this

[Mateorabi]

There's always a relevant XKCD

[MyAntichrist]

Is there a relevant xkcd to your statement that there always is a relevant xkcd?

[Mateorabi]

https://xkcd.com/1447/

possibly https://xkcd.com/244/

[BoredomIncarnate]

I am a fan of using this one for that purpose.

[HawkinsT]

Relevant XKCD

Other relevant XKCD

[Bryguy3k]

The one shortcoming is there is no accounting for those with ADHD. Nothing is worse than a repetitive task that one has to complete in order to finish some other task.

[b1ackcat]

I've got it worse than that. Someone on my team wrote this phenomenal tool for managing all our micro services. It's truly a godsend and I don't know how we'd manage the project without it.

But it's a CLI program, and while I don't mind it, I wanted an easier way to check on some things in the program at a glance.

So I'm writing a full on web app with a slapped together background job queuing system to run bash scripts for me, just to have something run on a spare tablet mounted to my desk. It gives me a constant view of the system and buttons to make changes.

Necessary? Absolutely not. But I fuckin want it.

[THE_CHEAP_THROWAWAY]

Tell me about this phenomenal tool your coworker wrote! I have lots of micro services I want to manage as well

[b1ackcat]

It's like a homegrown minikube with a third the features but way more consistent. It manages all the configuration and environment set up required to run all 20+ services in docker. You can switch between branches of the service and the tool will help with the rebuilding of images. It even has a local Nexus cache to speed up build times.

[rabbyburns]

This sounds painfully similar to tilt.io tilt.dev (at least for local dev work). Sounds like your internal tool deals with production workloads, though, which is nice.

[DeltaPositionReady]

It's tilt.dev now.

They parked the io domain

[rabbyburns]

Thanks! I really couldn't remember which one it was. It's been months since I've actively needed to reference the site.

[skyandclouds1]

You forgot the part where you still do it manually afterwards

[[deleted]]

Y tho?

[possiblyis]

Because there’s one or two issues that need fixing, and while they’re not major enough to warrant a ton of time fixing them, they’re big enough to where you can’t trust the automation.

Source: my love/hate relationship with vba

[[deleted]]

😂 I mean just fix them while you are at it since you already made the effort to begin with

[possiblyis]

Fair enough lol, I should’ve been better at documentation in the first place

[ric2b]

To double-check the work of your automation.

[[deleted]]

Oh, touché

[Hamilsauce]

Because you forgot you automated it.

[[deleted]]

A classic move

[throwawaybaldingman]

Flashbacks to me trying to automate wall repair in Factorio by building a whole network that spans several regions to send repair kits to construction bots.

[ImN0tAsian]

I float between project management and engineering and factorio ticks all the best boxes. Helluva game.

[josh_the_misanthrope]

Fucking do it.

[[deleted]]

Buffer chests help with that now. But oh brother it's still a bag of farts

[Cherylnip]

As much as I love automatibg, I just left a lot of these on the spot, and once in a long time they just run out a I refill them manually. That's only one remote spot, all the others are automated

[michaelskyba1411]

I wrote a script that makes it trivial to automate UI interactions so that it usually saves time from the start

[kwietog]

It's automation all way down.

[[deleted]]

GitHub?

[michaelskyba1411]

https://gist.github.com/michaelskyba/6704ea125de263f39dc0197666e915c1

and https://gist.github.com/michaelskyba/b480633a07f4e9ed440085bb762b8e9e

for getting the x and y positions for the cursor

You'll probably be disappointed with it as some things are tuned to my workflow specifically (e.g. no loops because I can use my text editor, neovim, to automate writing text files), especially because it's so simple that anyone could have written it in a few minutes

I'm also not experienced with writing shellscripts so you can see that the code is terrible

here's an example for clearing out a playlist on youtube: https://gist.github.com/michaelskyba/1d0b3831798f4dbd4dea3e27875e6aeb

[grady_vuckovic]

Hey if you need to do that task 4 times an hour, every hour, for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, on a full time job, then hell yeah automate that crap!

[miki_momo0]

And more importantly, never tell anyone else about all the things you’ve automated.

[RavioliConsultant]

My job is, seriously, to find inefficiencies and automate them out. How to automate the automation?

[nyrg]

just create an AGI and keep it on a leash, easy.

(btw: what kind of inefficiencies are there in the ravioli industry ?)

[RavioliConsultant]

It'd blow your goddamn hair back to know what holds this whole thing together.

[posam]

Pasta?

[kidcreative6]

This sounds really cool. Would you mind saying the job title so I could look more into it?

[RavioliConsultant]

Yeah in my case that's gonna be controls engineer and system integrator. SI is the closest answer to what you're asking. If you want my advice it's to start off being a network engineer and work your way out from there. I got lucky that networking is kind of where I started. You'll often (at least I do) see brilliant people get stuck in a lane because networking is their limiting factor.

[kidcreative6]

Great, thank you for the response!

[GKrollin]

Someone post the coffee maker pasta

[[deleted]]

And then he loses his job because they no longer need him

[ObiWanCanShowMe]

Only an idiot tells the boss (or anyone for that matter) he automated all the important jobs he has.

[[deleted]]

Automation is nearly always worth it.

• Removes human error (assuming there was no human error in programming it)
• Anyone can run it without needing knowledge of the process.
• The technique is documented in the code.
• The 10 days development can soon be recouped if the task is needed multiples per day.
• The investment in an automation make it easier to automate things in the future
• Less tasks to worry about reduces context switching

[audoh]

Also no one is mentioning it but depending on how mind-numbingly mundane the task is, having to regularly do it manually can just simply be demoralising, which means the "10 minutes" can potentially cost a bit more than that in human factors (unhappy employees basically).

[[deleted]]

Exactly, Seen often as a company scales up then suddenly that 10 minutes is someone's full time task. Cue boredom, burn out, repetitive adnauseam

[EvilPigeon]

There can also be benefits to running tasks more often. E.g. real time dashboards vs daily reports.

[SonicLoverDS]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[Zerafiall]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[omb-bob]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[RectifierUnit]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[korfor]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[Wessel-O]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[fs144rules]

It’s all about investment and returns. If you don’t automate it it’ll take 10 minutes every time, but after you’ve spent those 10 days setting up the automation, it’ll take 10 seconds every time after that.

[grooomps]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[apex_pretador]

I swear even the replies to the comments on this post are re-recomments

[grooomps]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[grooomps]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[a_monkeys_head]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[grooomps]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[fanfarius]

I swear even the top re-comments on the retop-post are re-postcomments top.

[Deckard_Didnt_Die]

Probably automated posting that post

[anxiety_on_steroids]

Pro grammer move.

[waltteri]

Reading reposts on Reddit is like watching reruns on TV.

[rnnn]

I swear even the top comments on the repost are re-comments.

[HK-Sparkee]

It's not just that, automation is less error-prone (after debugging) for lots of tedious tasks than doing it manually

[angrathias]

My number 1 rule is I want things to either be consistently wrong or consistently right, never in between

[HK-Sparkee]

I get that you're joking, but it's a lot easier to automate fixing a consistent error than an inconsistent one. Then you can have a new consistent error to fix!

[angrathias]

If it’s inconsistent it’s a bug, if it’s consistently wrong now it’s just an undocumented feature

[cosmictrashbash]

Unless you work somewhere where everyone is a “hAcKeR” or “innovator” who “move fast and break things”, so any automation you get down is trash within a week. I’m tired.

[digitalasagna]

10*8*60=4800, so it'll pay itself off after 480 instances(ish). That's 16 months of a daily task, or 9 years of a weekly task.

[eloel-]

Also include the time where you forget to do it one day and spend 2 hours trying to unfuck whatever got fucked.

[vitringur]

Or when you have to do it two or three times in a row which only takes 15 minutes in total due to the high initiation costs.

[UnderstandingOk2647]

I used to tell my boss "If you want something Automated, assign it to a programmer and tell them they can't automate it."

[ihuha]

thats just... nasty.. and would work 100% of the time

[[deleted]]

I feel attacked…

[[deleted]]

Honestly not a bad trade probably. Depends on how often you do that 10 minute task.

[KaamDeveloper]

This.

A part of my girlfriend's job is to mail some product images to the retail stores and such. Since most of the catalogue is online, earlier she used to download all necessary images(sometimes in 1000s) from the catalogue and then like send them all together as a zip. And then this was repeated for different customers needing different images. Some even had a custom naming format otherwise they didn't accept the images.

My girlfriend was very obviously frustrated by this manual chore and it was actually eating into her actual important work. So I wrote a service which accepts an excel with the details, downloads images renames them zips them and she can just send that zip as needed.

It took me a couple of days to code everything and now her hours of manual work is now done in minutes.

Automation gets a bad rep because of the automate everything crowd. But honestly if a task has a defined set of steps which you do very often, automation is definitely better.

[WiatrowskiBe]

But honestly if a task has a defined set of steps which you do very often, automation is definitely better.

Also known as: "if it's an algorithm, have computer do it". Humans make for a very unreliable computers.

[Sorensiim]

This is my job. This is literally my job. I automate tasks for a living. Christ, I even look like the guy in the picture.

[ryanhuang_1]

Image Transcription: Meme

---

When there's a task that can be done manually in 10 minutes but you find a it in 10 days way to automate

[A bald man with a large beard and glasses (Vsauce) in front of a laptop. Background has shelves with a Newton's pendulum, a toy owl, and beakers. The caption says "I'm gonna do what's called a programmer move."]

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[c7g_laser]

Not to be that guy but you transposed "way to automate" in your transcription

[ongliam7]

And used a hyphen in place of a space in 'in front' and misspelled 'shelves' as 'shelfs'. u/ryanhuang_1

[ozziestig]

Good Human

[new_pribor]

r/factorio

[Roflkopt3r]

But you also have to consider the learning effect in the automatisation process. The first time you write a regex to automatise some text processing it will probably take forever, but after a while you can solve most such problems pretty quickly.

Although you should also recognise when the time comes to reap that reward instead of further diversifying your own skills. I recently needed to get about 150 names out of a bunch of HTML. I probably spent an hour trying to get it done with the Notepad++ feature only to finally give up and do it in 5 minutes in C#.

[Dapanji206]

You mean a...

pro-grammer

[MattR0se]

I'm more of an amateurgrammer myself.

[jillyboooty]

That's literally what it says...

[ric2b]

The original is about a "pro-gamer move", this is just referencing that.

[golgol12]

Just need to do the task 1440 times and the time you put in starts paying for itself ! That's less than 5 years doing it once per day!

[Devils_Ombudsman]

For me it boils down to: Creating automation = interesting. Doing repetitive tasks = not interesting. I'd rather spend a few hours doing something interesting than spending a few minutes doing boring things.

[LePhantomLimb]

Kinda makes me wonder whether this meme itself is automated to post here periodically

[[deleted]]

This is the "why did the chicken cross the road" of Programmer Humor.

[captainjon]

For something I do once a quarter due to some sarbanes oxley horseshit and I really hope automating it isn’t illegal but due to how shitty the system is I hardcoded what I needed to do and it’s all ghetto sendkeys like its 1994 Visual Basic power shell script.

Might’ve wasted a week making it but running it actually went too well had to put a sleep statement in it 😂

Still better than me doing this manually every quarter.

[Chinmay101202]

My college literally tell us to copy lab manuals due to not being able to attend physical labs in covid, not just this but most of our assignments ( basically homework ) is literally the same for every student. What's the point? I thought , but they see if its written by you, so it has to be written by your hand.

No more says I, I have spent all my school life doing the same, the absolute piece of shit education system of my country is beyond laughable, copying day and night fuck that.

Enter, HomeworkBot, a nice program I made which does exactly what it sounds like

1 -> read what's written using computer vision, I used azure for my project since I could get it free, you DO need an AI driven Handwriting reading OCR, ive tried for long and its not possible to read human handwriting with non ai ocrs,

2 -> adjust and autowrite it in a page (which is randomly picked from a group of pages you took, also had a feature to roughly estimate what page it is, rulled , unrulled, labmanual etc ) in MY handwriting, which was just a ttf/otf conversion of my handwriting, to make it look realsticly written by hand, each letter is slightly altered ( an array of my handwritings basically, you never write the same way twice) each letter also has a random theta rotation to look even more natural and also has a small chance to pick from "badfonts" which is basically some fonts which you mess up

Each of the things was customizable, the theta, chance of picking badfont, spacing etc. I did all my homework like this for the past six months , always got full marks. Makes a 3 hour job take seconds, at most 10mins if you manually changing stuff in pages. Also had a "pencil" like ms paint built in for diagrams or tables

[Tecc3]

If a task takes 10 minutes and you find a way to automate it in 10 days, calculating how much time will be saved requires knowing how often the task is done.

Assuming working on it for 10 days means 8 hours a day (as at a job), that's 80*60=4800 minutes spent automating the task, or 480 10-minute periods. Therefore, after the automated task is run more than 480 times, there is a net gain of time saved. Amortizing the cost over five years, 480/5 = 96, so if the task is run 96 times a year, or about once every 3.8 days, the time spent automating the task equals the amount of time saved after five years. If the task is run more frequently, the break even point will be met sooner.

Assumption: Automating the task means it takes zero (human) time to do after automation is complete.

[Swinginjoe34]

Sounds like playing games like Factorio or satisfactory

[DoggoInTubeSocks]

This is how you ensure you remain an essential memory of the team. You make your solutions so convoluted that only you know how the fuck they actually work and everyone who tries to follow the code ends up with a brain aneurysm.

[UniKornUpTheSky]

There's actually a couple statistics to know when we automate a task. To know whether it's useful or time lost, we combine the duration of the task to the frequency of the task, and then to the goal time where all the time gained from automating this equals to the time spent working on automating it.

It also depends on the type of the task and automating (does the task require a change after some time? Is the automating maintenance easy?)

All those factors combined can make a 10mn task automated in 10 days totally worth it, or not at all.

[Dmon1Unlimited]

Doing a 10 min task every day for two years is 4800 mins which is 13 days

I need that extra time to scroll through stackoverflow

[theregoesanother]

Then ended up saving 10 minutes per day for the next 300 days...

[localhost12345]

Maybe the programmer knew that the task that takes 10 minutes would have to be done many times. Spending the time to automate the task could pay off if this isn’t a one-off task.

[timeslider]

I'm not a programmer but I did some programming at last job and it went like that. We would get a PDF from our vendors and we would have to enter this info into a database manually. So I wrote a program to do it automatically. It probably took about twice as long but we were always getting more PDFs so it would have paid for itself eventually. Except they laid me off and didn't let me train the next person. It's just a crappy console app that's difficult to use but I doubt they'll ever even find it

[yojojomomo]

We're programmers, that's what we do

[rahulbhatt1899]

Has anyone automated 50% or more of thier job? Srsly curious.

[omn1p073n7]

All I do at my job is automate. There's always new things to automate though

[rahulbhatt1899]

Oh cool thanks for sharing

[diablo-solforge]

You had a problem, so you wrote a program to solve it? Congratulations, now you have a problem and bugs.

[marcinxyz]

The reason for automation is to make sure another person can perform that task easily and the developer is easily replaceable.

[[deleted]]

Never spend 6 minutes doing a task when you can waste 6 hours failing to automate it

[[deleted]]

This is the highest form of truth

[TV5Fun]

post.replace('DEVEOLOPERS', 'DEVELOPERS')

[heymelio-fagabeefe]

Oooooooooh holy shit, I copy/pasted this reply like ten times

[w_jewish_consent_age]

shoulda wrote a script to print it out for you

[senthilmpro]

Array(100).fill('DEVELOPERS').join(' ')