Interface ergonomics: automation isn't just about time saved

Interface ergonomics: automation isn't just about time saved
macoy.me

This assumes that you actually own the product, if you don't own the product and just have a job to do then why bother about saving time, so in this case you should still automate it because automation is more fun.

This bears repeating. When you automate a task, you often push it over a "breakpoint" where it suddenly makes certain things profitable in terms of effort. For example, say you fill up a water bottle and place it within arm's reach, instead of running to the tap every time you're thirsty. You save maybe 10 seconds per sip, but the real win is that you can now consider behaviors like "drink water every 5 minutes" that previously you would have considered too much effort.

To take an example from operations: To me (admittedly speaking from the developer side of things), the overwhelming benefit of containerization has nothing to do with elasticity or scaling or really any of the marketing buzzwords. The real benefit is that Docker and friends encourage presenting a much more consistent management surface to the operations team. In the short run, this is just the price of automation. In the long run, this greatly reduces the mental burden of understanding how all the individual pieces are configured and deployed.

Most of that was never anything but incidental complexity. I doubt that ops's job has actually become any easier over the past 20 years. But, even so, if they're spending less time just shaving yaks, that suggests that a greater proportion of what they're doing is genuinely valuable.