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I agree with the statement, yet I think it misses the point. Hyperbole: Pressing play on a mp3 robs you of the experience of learning to play all instruments yourself. They key question is whether automating is a task one wants to improve in at all.
There is also an aspect of repeatability without mistakes. Assuming the code is good, it removes the human error from the equation, which has value.
Key sentence from the article: > Automating the easy things is how you build the skills, mindset, and muscle-memory to automate the hard things.
A big one for me is to ensure consistency of data, intervals, etc.
XKCD's comic is a very simple graphic that tells you whether your automation efforts will reduce the total amount of time for a task. If your goal is not to reduce time spent, why would you be looking at a chart to determine how much time you're reducing? Learning is a very good use of time. Choosing to spend extra time to automate something for the sake of learning is a perfectly rational decision. But it's never ha…
My boss would probably prefer—thinking short-term—that I work by that chart. I would prefer to learn something new, and it usually pays off in the long-term, possibly years from now in unexpected and unforeseeable ways.
The goal to automate is to reduce suffering. Full stop. It’s not to “save time”. STEM types like to pretend they’re stoic cold calculating robots and everything is objective and they don’t mind doing some repetitive 5 minute task every day, because they saw some xkcd comic about efficiency. Maybe they pretend they don’t mind simply so they can smugly post the xkcd comic every time someone new asks why they’re sufferi…
XKCD's comic is a very simple graphic that tells you whether your automation efforts will reduce the total amount of time for a task. If your goal is not to reduce time spent, why would you be looking at a chart to determine how much time you're reducing? Learning is a very good use of time. Choosing to spend extra time to automate something for the sake of learning is a perfectly rational decision. But it's never ha…
My boss would probably prefer—thinking short-term—that I work by that chart. I would prefer to learn something new, and it usually pays off in the long-term, possibly years from now in unexpected and unforeseeable ways.
All the same, you are choosing to learn something new, not to automate something to save time. Learning something new by automating a task which doesn't justify automation is no different from say reading a book or doing coding exercises in the same time - it's potentially a good use of your time, it just doesn't relate to the xkcd chart at all.