Comment by TheLudd
8 hours ago
One interesting factor that I rarely see discussed is this: Let's say a DevOps person does some improvement to internal tooling and a task that devs had to oversee manually now is automated. Every dev spent about 2 hours per week doing this task and now they don't have to anymore. Now, have we saved 2 hours of salary per dev per week?
Not sure. Because it totally depends on what they do instead. Are they utilizing two hours more every week now doing meaningful work? Or are they just taking things a bit more easy? Very hard to determine and it just makes it harder to reason about the costs and wins in these cases.
The freed-up time question is answerable when the work has clear metrics. A model test suite dropping from 6 minutes to 66 seconds saves developer time on every single run. Ten developers running tests five times a day, the math is straightforward.
The problem is that most engineering work lacks that kind of before/after measurement. Not because it is unmeasurable, but because nobody set up the baseline. Profile before you optimize and the return on investment calculates itself.
If a test suite runs for either 6 minutes or 66 seconds I am not staring at it while it runs. I am doing something else. So that is not holding up my time
If you have no feedback for 6 minutes, it will hold up your time.
They have saved _more_ than two hours per dev and week. There's a compound factor and now code can be more reliable (less outages or emergencies fixing bugs) etc. Also having a sane working environment helps engineers not quitting, which is very expensive if they are replaced.
In such a clear-cut example, I think we have saved the two hours.
Yes. You work 2 hours less, but what do you produce in those two extra hours? Can you say that your company now spends X dollars less or earns X dollars more? I don't think it can be that clear.
And what is your theory? That it’s better to not save those 2 hours since they will just go to waste anyway? Or that there is diminishing returns to saving work as people will tend to just spend longer on other things they were already doing? How can you be sure those 2 hours will not actually be used by most to do very productive things that in the end look like +4 hours in return??
1 reply →