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 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.
Also, automation is not merely a time saver but very importantly also an error preventer! That is a major reason for much of my automation.
Question, can anyone please tell me what job titles cover this skill set? I’ve seen and performed a tremendous amount of this automation work by data analysts and data scientists, but it doesn’t seem to fit the titles. I’ve seen ‘process automation X’ as an example but more often than not that title seems to be used for an actual engineer in some assembly line manufacturing job rather than what is essentially a programmer/GUI automator
I work on business intelligence, and part of my job is automatize processes, like comercial team updates excel files and those updates needs to be updated on the database so the dashboards show the latest version. I could do the update manually, but I don’t like do that and wrote a python script that do that for me.
DevOps for me in hardware (chip design/verification)
You would thing a bunch of engineers would know how to use conputers, but no, they are good at chip deign. Automating stuff for them gives insane benefits and scale.