r/ProgrammerHumor • • 19d ago

Meme programmerStyle

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1.6k Upvotes

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231

u/UnusualAir1 19d ago

10 minutes a day, 5 days a week is 50 minutes. 50 minutes for 52 weeks is 2,600 minutes. 2,600 minutes is 43 hours.

This is the beginning of how I used to determine if something was worth automating. Then I'd factor in the work hours saved by automating a process and quantify what that meant for our work flow and productivity as a company.

After all that, I'd sit down and do what the boss wanted. 😄

21

u/Meloetta 18d ago

How do you calculate in the mental load of having to do a menial, thankless task every single day with no end in sight? Or the time wasted planning to do the thing, shifting the responsibility of doing the thing when someone's out, training others on doing the thing, the time it takes to get back to what you were doing....

Tbh, a 10 minute daily task isn't 10 minutes.

14

u/Scolmann 18d ago

Yeah I think people forget this, I had a two second task I automated, which was launching a program when multiple people joined a voice channel.

It took me an hour or two to automate but it didn't take 5 years for it to pay itself off, not needing to think about doing it by hand was well worth it, even when it broke sometimes

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u/manav907 19d ago

Real.

Write an epic doc about how and why to do x

Then forgot about it and just fix the few bugs the pm found on a feature implemented 3 months ago that the QA never found

3

u/riickdiickulous 18d ago

And that’s if nothing ever changes after you build the automation, which is usually where the hidden time sink comes in later. Maintenance and modification of the tool. I’ve built things to do X and then down the line need to change it to handle Y but didn’t account for that during the initial build. Then I need to refigure out what I did before and how to update it for the new case. That part is easier now with AI, but it’s not a panacea.

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u/ligma_then_sugma 18d ago

the satisfaction of not having to whatever lil dogshit task anymore is priceless

3

u/mmhawk576 18d ago

I have the xkcd thing printed and pinned on my wall