I know it’s supposed to be a joke how a nerd will spend six hours writing a script to automate a 30second task but… it’s not really funny.
Working with less-experienced developers, I’m amazed at how slow everything is for them: No keyboard shortcuts, no automated scripts, just slow, plodding mouse-driven tinkering.
Automation, shortcuts, and scripting drive your ability to iterate and therefore learn.
Train your fingers, and spend those hours automating repetitive stuff. It’s worth it.
Experience doesn’t even have much to do with it. I’ve seen developers working much longer than me do the same.
On the flip-side, when I learned Autocad, I customized the interface to be more efficient with my workflow - I worked significantly faster, probably saving 20-30 minutes a day by having my quick-access macros, etc.
Then I went to another location and started trying to work on a colleague’s Autocad interface, and I was helpless - I had never learned the default command set, I had to describe to him what I wanted to do (like he was ChatGPT or something) so he could make it happen. Over the next year, I retrained to use the default command set - and because I was using it less and less the time-loss was becoming trivial at that point.
I mean yeah but if the automated way is a quick command under a minute and its going to be used for years then great.
Sometimes the manual steps grow like weeds. Where I’m at now, they haven’t invested in automation much at all. Now deploys take all day. Making a code change is a sweaty manual regression search process. It’s bad.
it’s worse when everything is manual because they don’t “trust scripts” due to them not fully understanding what automation means.
This is kinda why programmer was not a good for for me. By the time I script something its because doing it again and again has just gotten so annoying I finally get off my but and do it.
Bad news buddy, that’s exactly how you become a programmer. /irony
deleted by creator
I swear we must have started posting at the same time, but adding an alt text to the image cost me 2 minutes apparently. xD
You should write a script to automate it
Having alt-text makes yours superior; I will, therefore, cede the content to you. :)
…and now my popcorn has gone stale. Fuck you guys and your civil discourse!
hey, the 24 hours i invested were totally worth it to save 30 minutes of work over a year!
Great! Now you just have to ensure you stay at your job for at least 48 years so that this automation really starts to pay off!
So then you break even after using the automation to do the task 144 times.
Seems like a decent trade-off
Why spend 10 minutes doing a task when you can automate it in 6 hours?
