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.
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
Not since I was a teenager.
Leave my mom out of this.
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.
Sending emails, opening files, checking the database. Those are quite mundane everyday tasks of every office clerk.
Copy, cut, paste, undo. Use those keyboard shortcuts and if you work with documents for a notable part of the day you will save a half day a year or so.
Type
;in JS or C.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.
I’m going to click the [-] thread collapse button on Lemmy 50 times in the next ten minutes.
Lining up my indent levels.
Write emails? At 250min, or 4 hours it’s either a major repetitive work task or a hobby.
Or if you’re into wargaming or model making, assembly tasks or painting.
Write emails? At 250min, or 4 hours it’s either a major repetitive work task or a hobby.
Remember though, this is the amount of time savings something has to represent.
So you still have to accomplish the task.
So doubling it: your entire repetitive job. Would have efficiency increased to halve the time. Pretty rare.
I mean, there are some lower hanging fruit.
For example, if it takes 10 minutes to poop, but you can get that down to say, 5, with a decent centerfuge, across an entire company (1000 people, assuming every one is pooping five times a day).
… holy shit. Brilliant.
That area of the chart is for people with really repetitive jobs/hobbies. There are MANY jobs where you do the same 5-10 minute thing 50x a day.
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.
FYI: there is actually an XKCD font if you want to match the original more closely. https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
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!
I contribute to open source because i use the tool and the problem exists for me as well, and I know how to solve it. I don’t care if others use it or not.
#nixos
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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?
Heh, I can’t wait until the person who insists that detecting a desired action based upon CPU temperature is actually a very important workflow and an example of why developers need to be wary of fixing bugs
You appear to have completely misunderstood OP. There is no anger or correction of the original comic here.
As Randall Munroe would put it, duty calls
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.
Most of my motivation here was recurring conversations with friends and colleagues and strangers about how much time I put into making small contributions to open source projects.
@NuXCOM_90Percent @sparr I don’t think anyone got angry here?
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