Comment by janalsncm
1 year ago
Not all time is created equally though, so I disagree with that xkcd.
If something is time sensitive it is worth spending a disproportionate amount of time to speed things up at some later time. For example if you’re debugging something live, in a live presentation, working on something with a tight deadline etc.
Also you don’t necessarily know how often you’ll do something anyways.
> I disagree with that xkcd
The xkcd doesn't seem to be pushing an agenda, just providing a lookup table. Time spent vs time saved is factual.
The title of the comic is “ Is It Worth the Time?”.
To take a concrete example, if I spend 30 minutes on a task every six months, over 5 years that’s 5 hours of “work” hours. So the implication is that it’s not worth automating if it takes more than 5 hours to automate.
But if those are 5 hours of application downtime, it’s pretty clearly worth it even if I have to spend way more than 5 hours to reduce downtime.
Time saved also ain't the only factor here. I'll often automate something not because it actually saves a lot of time, but rather because it codifies an error-prone process and having it scripted out reduces the risk of human error by enough of a degree to be worth spending more time on it than I'd save.