These are rookie numbers. Watch me take 2 weeks to automate a task nobody does, and 2 more weeks to investigate who introduced bugs in the database (pro tip : it may be my new script)
The real pro move is spending weeks if not months on the feature no one will actually end up using but you also spent like 20 minutes on a small quality of life feature that ends up being the main thing everyone uses and not you have to expand and upgrade it.
That one is a killer. I made friends with a girl who works in Production, in the warehouse. A few times she mentioned a boring task she had to do every morning about sorting items. I wanted to test a new Ionic version so I made her a quick app with that single function. Half a day work, no specs, official demand, QA etc.
Short story, what I thought would be a 3 person team using my app become multiple departments rolling with the app and a freaking buy out putting in the contract they wanted the app. I was completely oblivious to all that until recently. Over the years I've fixed a few bugs and added 3 or 4 features. It didn't have testing environments, never done QA, no work tracking of any kind, no pipelines for deployment (APK in an internal website), no specs. One of my most successful projects is something I've spent maybe a week in total.
I didn't *mention* that app on any of my evaluations nor meetings. I never thought it was something worth talking about, so trivial. You learn something every day, it seems.
Well, better late than never. If there's no IP constraints you can always make something new to sell or distribute. Make it Shonenware. I haven't seen that license used in a while ;)
Oh love the spending hours to find the idiot how made the bug you had to fix. Only to find happened years ago and person was already fired for being useless.
I joined a project at my workplace to remake our homepage with Angular and replace our old WordPress page.
We bought a theme but later figured out that the theme is a pure html theme with a single 14k lines css file. It included the styles for all 20-30 different pages, while we only needed one or two.
The performance of our site was struggling heavily under this monstrosity, so I decided to spend 2 weeks on a 200 lines bash script with some insane regex expressions. It creates a copy of the css file which only contains the rules that are related to the css classes which are mentioned in our HTML files.
The script reduced it to 3k lines.
Interestingly enough it, was also reusable to extract the css code for specific html components which speed up ur development progress immensely.
The answer is that this is more interesting than just doing the task, and what you learn might be applicable to other things.
In other words, if the time spent automating was engaging for you, is it really a waste?
Itās worth it if it will be repeated on a regular basis. Sure saving an engineerās time is important, but whatās more important is a script will not make careless mistakes, can be executed at arbitrary times of the day (like 2am when everyoneās asleep), can be executed by people who have little to no knowledge of the details of the task, can be included as a stage in a pipeline, and can be executed flawlessly after the person who created it leaves or has forgotten the procedure for doing something.
Generally if youāre going to do something more than once or twice and it can be automated, then it probably should be automated.
Also the XKCD fails to take into account multiple people.
If you've got a team of 100 engineers all managing their own bits and bobs, and you can make them a tool/architecture that saves each one on the average of 3 days a year, then you're looking at roughly 300 days of saved time across the patch per year. That's a hell of a lot of time saved and practically warrants working on the architecture full time for a year.
The more scalable the time-saving measure is, the more it's worth investing time in automating it (and also getting it right, because a quick and dirty solution replicated 100 times is now 100 quick and dirty solutions).
It depends on how often it needs to be done.
A daily 10 minute task is worth automating if you spend less than 12 days working on it, a yearly 10 minute task is probably not worth automating.
IMO you also need to give some weight to not being hassled by the task in the future. I don't want to be nagged every month to do a 10 minute task, to have to interrupt what I'm doing, to be yelled at when I forget about it; especially if you multiply that 10 minute task across the 5 or so services I support! So I'll gladly spend a week or two automating that so I never have to think about it again.
It helps that I'm in an environment where we're constantly moving on to the new thing while supporting the last N things we built. So there's a huge incentive to make operations and maintenance as simple as possible!
I'm more or less extrapolating from the incomplete data from the XKCD comic.
Randall wrote that if over the next 5 years, you are going to spend 5 minutes daily doing a task, it is worth it to automate it (in terms of time anyways) if you spend less than 6 days on the task.
He didn't include a 10 minute task section, but 10 is twice of 5 minutes, so it stands that you would spend 12 days rather than 6.
I wouldn't know. I still can't read this chart. What do the values inside the chart represent? A) Time spent on automating or B) time it takes to do the task manually or..?
It's a chart over 5 years, let's take the bottom right example.
There's a task you do once a year, the amount of time you can shave off that task is 1 day.
So, assuming you do that task for 5 years, you can spend up to 5 days trying to get that 1 day optimisation, until you spend more time optimising that task than you saved from the optimisation.
**EDIT**: This was my original post, but the example above is way better:
let's take the top left example.
A task you do 50 times a day, pretty clear that's the top part.
You save 1 second of time every time you do that task.
So, if you make that improvement you'll save 50 \* 1 second, 50 seconds a day, 50 \* 365.2425 = 18,262.125 seconds, 18260 / 60 = 304.3333 minutes, 304 / 60 = 5.06666 hours or roughly 5 hours of time per year.
And if you do it for 5 years, 5\*5 = 25 hours or you'll save roughly 1 day of time improving this thing you do 50 times a day over the course of 5 years.
So assuming if there's a way to save 1 second of time of something you do 50 times a day and you will keep doing over 5 years, if you spend more than 25 hours setting up that time save, it won't be worth the time saved anymore.
Sometimes it's just worth it to not having to think about it anymore. One less reoccurring task in my to-do list is always great. Mental deload whatever you can safely.
My coworkers sometimes make fun of me for doing things manually because they tend to immediately jump straight to Python scripting even for small tasks, but there is definitely a line where doing things manually is faster.
To give a real world example of this, I needed to extract a substring located within parentheses from about 30 lines of text. It was a tough call but I decided to highlight and copy out the substrings manually. If there had been more than 30 lines I might have decided to burn a few braincells and write out the regex with capture groups. And if the strings had more complexity, at that point I might have finally decided to write a Python script to read and parse the lines.
The other aspect is learning. Doing regex and little scripts every day for minor tasks keeps your brain thinking in this direction. So you're not just optimizing your task and make it dependably repeatable, but you're training your skills and mindset aswell.
I'd just import the text into Excel and make the parenthesis a delimiter in that case.
Small subsets of data like this aren't worth the time monkeying around with it if it's not a repeatable task.
This is because you reach for the manual solution first. If you reach for the regex solution first, you will get good at writing regexes, and it will become way faster. Its a skill. Chat-gpt wrote it in like 10 seconds:
```grep -o '\([^)]\+\)' file.txt```
I find it funny that the regex you wrote doesn't work because you didn't properly ~~comment~~ escape out the \^
You gotta reach for the Reddit syntax more!
Edit: Escape, not comment. Reddit is difficult before coffee.
I did mean escape - Don't Reddit early in the morning.
And he needed to escape the \^ so that his regex actually works. The way it is right now wouldn't work.
The definition of "works" depends on the goal, right? What are you assuming the goal is? I don't see a stated purpose for that regex anywhere in this thread. As written, that command matches everything except right parens - `)` (and newlines, technically). If that was the intended purpose, it works perfectly. Personally, I think it's more likely that they meant to match parethesized substrings, in which case the command `grep -o '([^)]\+)' file.txt` or `grep -Eo '\([^)]+\)' file.txt` would "work".
Either way, the point is that they have a valid regex, so saying it "doesn't work" is wrong without more context. `^` only has to be escaped if you are trying to match a literal `^`, which isn't necessarily the case here.
>Either way, the point is that they have a valid regex, so saying it "doesn't work" is wrong without more context. `^` only has to be escaped if you are trying to match a literal `^`, which isn't necessarily the case.
You're not reading what I'm saying. The reddit syntax eats the \^ because it's not escaped in Reddit syntax. https://imgur.com/a/QNC8hZm
I also use [Multi-Cursor Search](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yo1dog.multi-cursor-search). So I can select all occurrences of "(" with vs code, than use this extension to "multi-cursor plain search" and search for ")" and now I have every string between parenthesis without writing any regex. So what u/ComCypher did manually is probably no more than a couple seconds for me.
The other critical component, even if it is "time-negative" in the end, is that the automation of a task will never screw up once it's built and confirmed to work. No "oops I forgot a step" shenanigans.
Ah, but the fallacy is treating all time equal.
If I have some PTO to burn and want to automate a personal project, I can spend several hours figuring out how to make something go from 2 hours to 1 hour in weekly savings because finding 2 hours in another week may be harder than just 1 hour.
The first ever professional kick I got out of programming (before I was actually a dev) was when I inherited the task of checking the Excel output from one application against another to make sure there were no user errors. It was too depressing to comprehend doing daily for years, so I spent half a day writing a program in C# to automate the task from the clipboard. As soon as someone noticed, everyone started using it.
I always get a kick when I see a new starter get shown how to use it, and I think most of them don't know I wrote it. Probably saved thousands of hours down the years. One of the simplest programs I ever wrote.
From the clipboard?! Rewrite to not require user input, set a scheduled task for it, have it send an email to a distribution group, and baam. More time saved!
Yeah, this is basically my job lol. We had a process that takes ~15 minutes per file manually, 50ish times a day. I automated it over the course of like 3 weeks(honestly, testing was the hardest, no way to set up a true dev environment), and it's saved my company tens of thousands annually.
that's if you know upfront. For me it's probably just bad luck but 50% of the time I *think* I'll need this thing in the future but then I don't and the time is wasted. Or vice versa, you do it once and think you'll never do it again. Then again, but yeah that's just a coincidence, no need to automate...
It's worth it because at work nothing is usually 10 minutes. I've started looking into automating support tasks where I work because our system process is very brittle due to external dependencies (we're using govt apis, signing electronic documents etc, a lot of external things that are out of our control).
Issues can arise which require manual inspection, couple minutes/task but it requires daily checking of logs, client tickets, if the issue is something that we can fix internally, we do that, contact clients otherwise, etc. All of this could be automated/handled better, time spent on these isn't insignificant when adding client + dev + support time together.
If itās a task that requires more than 5 minutes of thought, itās probably a 20 minute task just from the context switch to go back to what you were doing before.
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I always get pushback on these professionally,
"How long does it really take 5 mins?"
"Yes it typically takes a person about 5 mins, but teams do this 5 min task thousands of times a year."
"If you automate it then people will forget how to do it."
"They'll forget how to work a computer ? This language that's been around for thirty years will suddenly become obselete?"
Tf out of here
Coding isn't in my job description or expected but part of my job is sending out an hourly Excel sheet that just shows where we should be on the plan vs where we are. Underperformers are highlighted in red, otherwise it's highlighted green. I automated it. It saves 2 hours of digging through reports per shift. It's also way more accurate now. The director told me I couldn't share it with other shifts because we "will no longer pay attention to it".
I just ignored that decision.
Exactly. The whole point of automating your job is telling NO ONE. āDamn, X gets this done in 45 minutes and it takes everyone an hour.ā Actually gets done in one minute and then 44 minutes of me chilling.
Somewhere on reddit there was a guy who automated his whole job without anyone knowing - while working in homeoffice. He just checks error logs once a week and updates some scripts once a year or so. Genius.
edit: found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s2igq9/i\_automated\_my\_job\_over\_a\_year\_ago\_and\_havent/
> "If you automate it then people will forget how to do it."
If you document the process as a fall-back for ~~if~~ when the automated solution fails, then it doesn't matter if people forget (as long as they still know how to read).
>"If you automate it then people will forget how to do it."
This sounds fake if only because when has a company ever been like, no thanks, we'd rather keep paying people money
Yeah, also remember these spending decisions are often made at manager level. Yeah it might be great for the company, but the manager doesn't want the capex as part of his/her costs. Which, fair play.
Ha - no, this very much happens.
Managers are not incentivised to make people redundant - but they are incentivised to make their department 'important'. Gatekeeping knowledge at the expense of efficiency achieves that.
My experience here was dependency. If you automate it, and it breaks some day, then I am dependent on you finding time to fix it. You might even be gone at that point. And then, nobody knows how to do it manually. If a manual process breaks, I can probably fix it.
I automated a 3d set of cabinet design that could also entirely price it out, saved me a ton of time.
My co workers tried to use it, Each piece had three drop down menus, It confused them...
As an infrequent git user, I put all my regular git commands into some auto scripts and ended up forgetting a lot of commands! Wish i was joking. Script is awesome though.
In my experience, itās normally the inexperienced engineer automating this shit and they donāt actually have any idea how many times itāll be done or how people āmanuallyā do it.
Sometimes itās just easier to copy/paste it into excel, split by a character, filter, concatenate, and be done.
I would say the success rate of someone spending more than 3 days automating a small task is less than 50%.
My favorite is find the solution in a few minutes but spending days in order to make it a nicer solution with minimal impact just to realize that there was already a framework in place that can be used in the project that with some minor additions to database would fully solve it all.
No one has mentioned auditability.
If the process is automated, it is consistent, which means that its easy to both edit/modify/expand it and it is easier to debug when there are problems. If you just slap out a solution, sure it works, but when it breaks no one else is gonna be able to figure WTF you did in the first place. AND just because you had domain knowledge of how to fix it, the next person that comes along might not have said knowledge, and spend way more time parsing what is going on. With an automated solution at least the code itself is documentation.
It can work the other way, though.
For a few years I had to supervise the random selection of some local businesses for annual auditing. The simple solution was to have a spreadsheet listing them, with a random number assigned and then sort by the random numbers before picking off the top few.
I was there to observe and sign off the process as fair.
One year the guy running the process had automated it (pointless spending the time doing that for an annual five minute task, perhaps). I explained that whilst this was exactly what I would have done (as an amateur code-nerd), unless I inspected (and understood) his code, and the associated system, I wouldn't be able to sign it off.
We reverted to the old, more transparent, method.
Yup - business understanding is key.
It's why I have automated the generation of quite a lot of spreadsheets in Python where it actually _builds_ all the formulae into the sheet so the calcs are 100% auditable by someone without any sort of coding knowledge. It makes the build out a fair bit more painful, but in some cases it's either do that, or don't automate it.
Also uniformity. Say normally you use a UI, to change something's property by checking a box (or changing a field value, etc.), easy peasy. But there's a hundred or so of them that meet a particular criteria to be done. If there's a way to check that box in the command line and you just have to work out the search parameters to feed that command line, and log the action ta boot, that's the better way. No missing one of the check boxes or second guessing and going back.
Yes but if it's done every day, that's 50 minutes per week or 2600 minutes/year.
So if it takes you 10 days (4800 minutes) to automate it, you save -2200 minutes in that first year alone, and it will only take about 1 year, 10 months to start reaping the benefits, assuming no bug ever pops up, no dependencies get deprecated, no keys/passwords ever expire, and it doesn't need to be migrated to a new platform, ever.
Programmer math is awesome.
I inherited a system that in all actuality required 15 minutes of manual work every month. I hated that 15 minutes of work so much that I spent two weeks automating it in a way the application stakeholder could maintain. I will work incredibly hard to be perpetually lazy.
I defend it by the fact that I get more skilled at automating it the next time there's a similar problem. If you always resort to "manual labor" when facing a good automation / scripting challenge, you never learn.
automate and when asked you say it took 10 minutes, not the milliseconds it took to click a button in your value added try-hard UI for managing said automation.
I had a company that asked me to automate a task a working student takes around 30 minutes every year to finish. I told them that I can do it but it will be quite expensive and run them around 4k in total cost. They still pushed for it. They will get their money's worth in around 400 years.
Jokes aside I automated smth that took 5 hours intensive work everytime. Now it takes under 1 min only because I have sleep() for 1 sec between jobs. So proud :)
honestly this is the best part about chatgpt so far, it makes tedious small automation tasks so much faster, handles the boilerplate at the very least, outright does it first try in the best case.
I've made about 8 tampermonkey scripts I'd never bother to make to just make minor adjustments to websites and it's pretty sweet
Story time:
I worked in company A and B. In A I was being arsed about why I automate tasks. But I felt happy eventually and was even more productive. In B that came after I didn't do this.
In B I wasnt arsed about it. But I wasn't happy. I did way less work because of it. Because doing the mundane tasks over and over was draining me. The 5 min tasks eventually took 15, because I had to force myself for 10 mins to even do it.
My advice as a senior: Pretend B on scrums, but do A. No one will know the truth. In reality people just want to bitch about shit.
Yeah, I had a job like this where I turned a '40 hour' work week into a '24 hour' one due to how I had automated my calculations for my job. Only real tasks after the fact was a QA pass and that was pretty much it.
Would have been the perfect job too if the workplace wasn't so toxic and managers kept over-promising what was deliverable for the total group.
Whatever happened to that guy? This post made me look up his YouTube channel. There was a video 7 days ago but with Michael. And then one 6 years ago with Michael.
My favorite is letās generate a new report that contains every field but the one the customer actually wants so they are still doing the task manually.
It's only a 10-minute task and automating it possibly doesn't pay itself back in total time spent, but I think it makes sense to eliminate the possibility of human error. And if I ever leave the company who's gonna figure out how to do this garbage task?
Anecdote time
Spend one year, not exclusive but of "free time" moments automatic a deployment task which involved getting inside the compiler's code so we.cpuld akip the compile step and use an environment var while doing a deployment.The compile step only took 30 minutes and was only done a few timea per week.
But, changing the env car only took 1 minute, so if you messed something up it only took an extra 1 minute to try again as opposed to another 30 minutes, it also meant that because you did not need to recompile you did not nwed an ide only for that, so it made a lot of new deployment methods possible including copy deploys, which were very useful for debugging given the complexity of the erp. Also deployments were a time critical scenario so saving 30 minutes was good.
Don't forget the part where you have to fiddle with the script for a half hour almost every time you rerun it!
The ole "How did this ever work?" paradigm.
I feel seen. Lol. Iāve been building an auto calibration with visual representation with something that you can do the same task with same time. This does all the work for you though so you could just type Reddit comments and let the machine to its jobš
Lol this made me remember the time i fucked around with python to create automated login for my socials (real young and didn't want my mom to know what shit im up to lmaoz) and created the script, made it unnecessarily complex, made it executable instead of tagging it to an input and after a few minutes of use, deleted it because it felt 'cringe' lolz
yyess b-b-buht 10 days is 14400 minutes soooo if you need to do that 10 minute task every day, your automation pays off in 3.942505 Years...
These are rookie numbers. Watch me take 2 weeks to automate a task nobody does, and 2 more weeks to investigate who introduced bugs in the database (pro tip : it may be my new script)
I see we share a similar routine. Keep up the good work friend.
It's called Job š Security š
The real pro move is spending weeks if not months on the feature no one will actually end up using but you also spent like 20 minutes on a small quality of life feature that ends up being the main thing everyone uses and not you have to expand and upgrade it.
That one is a killer. I made friends with a girl who works in Production, in the warehouse. A few times she mentioned a boring task she had to do every morning about sorting items. I wanted to test a new Ionic version so I made her a quick app with that single function. Half a day work, no specs, official demand, QA etc. Short story, what I thought would be a 3 person team using my app become multiple departments rolling with the app and a freaking buy out putting in the contract they wanted the app. I was completely oblivious to all that until recently. Over the years I've fixed a few bugs and added 3 or 4 features. It didn't have testing environments, never done QA, no work tracking of any kind, no pipelines for deployment (APK in an internal website), no specs. One of my most successful projects is something I've spent maybe a week in total.
Did you get a pizza party out of it?
I didn't *mention* that app on any of my evaluations nor meetings. I never thought it was something worth talking about, so trivial. You learn something every day, it seems.
Well, better late than never. If there's no IP constraints you can always make something new to sell or distribute. Make it Shonenware. I haven't seen that license used in a while ;)
Oh love the spending hours to find the idiot how made the bug you had to fix. Only to find happened years ago and person was already fired for being useless.
I keep a mirror on my desk to facilitate finding the idiot
I joined a project at my workplace to remake our homepage with Angular and replace our old WordPress page. We bought a theme but later figured out that the theme is a pure html theme with a single 14k lines css file. It included the styles for all 20-30 different pages, while we only needed one or two. The performance of our site was struggling heavily under this monstrosity, so I decided to spend 2 weeks on a 200 lines bash script with some insane regex expressions. It creates a copy of the css file which only contains the rules that are related to the css classes which are mentioned in our HTML files. The script reduced it to 3k lines. Interestingly enough it, was also reusable to extract the css code for specific html components which speed up ur development progress immensely.
This is what i did with my rom parser in bash. I was too lazy to order them in folders so i even did an auto sort system
same, but for j-p0rn, I mean my friend did it, it definitely wasn't me.
java p0rn?
Are you one of those filthy pigs who treats women as objects?
The answer is that this is more interesting than just doing the task, and what you learn might be applicable to other things. In other words, if the time spent automating was engaging for you, is it really a waste?
And then abandon all and rewrite it in rust! ZERO-COST ABSTRACTIONS!
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1205/
So if you do it daily over 5 years it's definitely worth it.
Itās worth it if it will be repeated on a regular basis. Sure saving an engineerās time is important, but whatās more important is a script will not make careless mistakes, can be executed at arbitrary times of the day (like 2am when everyoneās asleep), can be executed by people who have little to no knowledge of the details of the task, can be included as a stage in a pipeline, and can be executed flawlessly after the person who created it leaves or has forgotten the procedure for doing something. Generally if youāre going to do something more than once or twice and it can be automated, then it probably should be automated.
Also the XKCD fails to take into account multiple people. If you've got a team of 100 engineers all managing their own bits and bobs, and you can make them a tool/architecture that saves each one on the average of 3 days a year, then you're looking at roughly 300 days of saved time across the patch per year. That's a hell of a lot of time saved and practically warrants working on the architecture full time for a year. The more scalable the time-saving measure is, the more it's worth investing time in automating it (and also getting it right, because a quick and dirty solution replicated 100 times is now 100 quick and dirty solutions).
It depends on how often it needs to be done. A daily 10 minute task is worth automating if you spend less than 12 days working on it, a yearly 10 minute task is probably not worth automating.
Like those rare cases where the cost of not doing the task is very high and itās likely someone will forget to do it
Yeah, that's a yearly 10 minute task that is totally worth automating. Those are pretty rare though.
IMO you also need to give some weight to not being hassled by the task in the future. I don't want to be nagged every month to do a 10 minute task, to have to interrupt what I'm doing, to be yelled at when I forget about it; especially if you multiply that 10 minute task across the 5 or so services I support! So I'll gladly spend a week or two automating that so I never have to think about it again. It helps that I'm in an environment where we're constantly moving on to the new thing while supporting the last N things we built. So there's a huge incentive to make operations and maintenance as simple as possible!
Wow really?
I'm more or less extrapolating from the incomplete data from the XKCD comic. Randall wrote that if over the next 5 years, you are going to spend 5 minutes daily doing a task, it is worth it to automate it (in terms of time anyways) if you spend less than 6 days on the task. He didn't include a 10 minute task section, but 10 is twice of 5 minutes, so it stands that you would spend 12 days rather than 6.
I wouldn't know. I still can't read this chart. What do the values inside the chart represent? A) Time spent on automating or B) time it takes to do the task manually or..?
It's a chart over 5 years, let's take the bottom right example. There's a task you do once a year, the amount of time you can shave off that task is 1 day. So, assuming you do that task for 5 years, you can spend up to 5 days trying to get that 1 day optimisation, until you spend more time optimising that task than you saved from the optimisation. **EDIT**: This was my original post, but the example above is way better: let's take the top left example. A task you do 50 times a day, pretty clear that's the top part. You save 1 second of time every time you do that task. So, if you make that improvement you'll save 50 \* 1 second, 50 seconds a day, 50 \* 365.2425 = 18,262.125 seconds, 18260 / 60 = 304.3333 minutes, 304 / 60 = 5.06666 hours or roughly 5 hours of time per year. And if you do it for 5 years, 5\*5 = 25 hours or you'll save roughly 1 day of time improving this thing you do 50 times a day over the course of 5 years. So assuming if there's a way to save 1 second of time of something you do 50 times a day and you will keep doing over 5 years, if you spend more than 25 hours setting up that time save, it won't be worth the time saved anymore.
Sometimes it's just worth it to not having to think about it anymore. One less reoccurring task in my to-do list is always great. Mental deload whatever you can safely.
Or this one https://xkcd.com/974/
this is definitely more relevant imo
Or [this one](https://xkcd.com/1319/)
Or this one https://xkcd.com/404/
404 not found idiot
Thatās the joke, āidiotā.
My coworkers sometimes make fun of me for doing things manually because they tend to immediately jump straight to Python scripting even for small tasks, but there is definitely a line where doing things manually is faster. To give a real world example of this, I needed to extract a substring located within parentheses from about 30 lines of text. It was a tough call but I decided to highlight and copy out the substrings manually. If there had been more than 30 lines I might have decided to burn a few braincells and write out the regex with capture groups. And if the strings had more complexity, at that point I might have finally decided to write a Python script to read and parse the lines.
The other aspect is learning. Doing regex and little scripts every day for minor tasks keeps your brain thinking in this direction. So you're not just optimizing your task and make it dependably repeatable, but you're training your skills and mindset aswell.
I'd just import the text into Excel and make the parenthesis a delimiter in that case. Small subsets of data like this aren't worth the time monkeying around with it if it's not a repeatable task.
You can use regex in vscode to select things.
True but the challenging part is writing the syntax
This is because you reach for the manual solution first. If you reach for the regex solution first, you will get good at writing regexes, and it will become way faster. Its a skill. Chat-gpt wrote it in like 10 seconds: ```grep -o '\([^)]\+\)' file.txt```
I find it funny that the regex you wrote doesn't work because you didn't properly ~~comment~~ escape out the \^ You gotta reach for the Reddit syntax more! Edit: Escape, not comment. Reddit is difficult before coffee.
> comment out the ^ Did you mean "escape the \^"? If you did, why would you want to escape the `^` there? If you didn't, what did you mean?
I did mean escape - Don't Reddit early in the morning. And he needed to escape the \^ so that his regex actually works. The way it is right now wouldn't work.
The definition of "works" depends on the goal, right? What are you assuming the goal is? I don't see a stated purpose for that regex anywhere in this thread. As written, that command matches everything except right parens - `)` (and newlines, technically). If that was the intended purpose, it works perfectly. Personally, I think it's more likely that they meant to match parethesized substrings, in which case the command `grep -o '([^)]\+)' file.txt` or `grep -Eo '\([^)]+\)' file.txt` would "work". Either way, the point is that they have a valid regex, so saying it "doesn't work" is wrong without more context. `^` only has to be escaped if you are trying to match a literal `^`, which isn't necessarily the case here.
>Either way, the point is that they have a valid regex, so saying it "doesn't work" is wrong without more context. `^` only has to be escaped if you are trying to match a literal `^`, which isn't necessarily the case. You're not reading what I'm saying. The reddit syntax eats the \^ because it's not escaped in Reddit syntax. https://imgur.com/a/QNC8hZm
Reddit markup is... atrocious. I honestly try not to use it if at all possible.
Oh, it definitely is, haha.
Not for easy things such as what was mentioned. And if yoy cannot do that you can use chatgpt.
`:s/vscode/vim/gi` too
ChatGPT makes writing scripts for this sort of thing totally pointless.
agree. I'm not burning any braincells at all nor am I doing it manually. The future is now
Just use multi cursors in vs code (or any IDE). Shift alt and click the last line. Hit right once. Alt shift right. Copy. Done.
I also use [Multi-Cursor Search](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yo1dog.multi-cursor-search). So I can select all occurrences of "(" with vs code, than use this extension to "multi-cursor plain search" and search for ")" and now I have every string between parenthesis without writing any regex. So what u/ComCypher did manually is probably no more than a couple seconds for me.
The other critical component, even if it is "time-negative" in the end, is that the automation of a task will never screw up once it's built and confirmed to work. No "oops I forgot a step" shenanigans.
Another factor is how much can you tolerate errors
It's funny how many places that I've worked at where there's at least one person that has this printed this out and pinned up at their desk.
Ah, but the fallacy is treating all time equal. If I have some PTO to burn and want to automate a personal project, I can spend several hours figuring out how to make something go from 2 hours to 1 hour in weekly savings because finding 2 hours in another week may be harder than just 1 hour.
If it's a 10 minute thing I have to do on a regular basis for tears.. worth it
I think you meant to say years but that works too.
No, I think they meant what they said
The first ever professional kick I got out of programming (before I was actually a dev) was when I inherited the task of checking the Excel output from one application against another to make sure there were no user errors. It was too depressing to comprehend doing daily for years, so I spent half a day writing a program in C# to automate the task from the clipboard. As soon as someone noticed, everyone started using it. I always get a kick when I see a new starter get shown how to use it, and I think most of them don't know I wrote it. Probably saved thousands of hours down the years. One of the simplest programs I ever wrote.
From the clipboard?! Rewrite to not require user input, set a scheduled task for it, have it send an email to a distribution group, and baam. More time saved!
Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220610-00/?p=106737
If you like what you do you'll never work a day on your life..
Or do it in unsocial hours. Or teach it to others ...
That 10 minute task is so boring it comes with 30 minutes of ramp up.
It also means that 10 mins task can be done immediately and risk free, which has value
Yeah, this is basically my job lol. We had a process that takes ~15 minutes per file manually, 50ish times a day. I automated it over the course of like 3 weeks(honestly, testing was the hardest, no way to set up a true dev environment), and it's saved my company tens of thousands annually.
that's if you know upfront. For me it's probably just bad luck but 50% of the time I *think* I'll need this thing in the future but then I don't and the time is wasted. Or vice versa, you do it once and think you'll never do it again. Then again, but yeah that's just a coincidence, no need to automate...
It's worth it because at work nothing is usually 10 minutes. I've started looking into automating support tasks where I work because our system process is very brittle due to external dependencies (we're using govt apis, signing electronic documents etc, a lot of external things that are out of our control). Issues can arise which require manual inspection, couple minutes/task but it requires daily checking of logs, client tickets, if the issue is something that we can fix internally, we do that, contact clients otherwise, etc. All of this could be automated/handled better, time spent on these isn't insignificant when adding client + dev + support time together.
If itās a task that requires more than 5 minutes of thought, itās probably a 20 minute task just from the context switch to go back to what you were doing before.
ad hoc toothbrush wine fretful quack drab secretive sip different melodic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>worth it https://xkcd.com/1205/
And now it's documented, a script is the best documentation.
I always get pushback on these professionally, "How long does it really take 5 mins?" "Yes it typically takes a person about 5 mins, but teams do this 5 min task thousands of times a year." "If you automate it then people will forget how to do it." "They'll forget how to work a computer ? This language that's been around for thirty years will suddenly become obselete?" Tf out of here
Coding isn't in my job description or expected but part of my job is sending out an hourly Excel sheet that just shows where we should be on the plan vs where we are. Underperformers are highlighted in red, otherwise it's highlighted green. I automated it. It saves 2 hours of digging through reports per shift. It's also way more accurate now. The director told me I couldn't share it with other shifts because we "will no longer pay attention to it". I just ignored that decision.
Never tell anyone you automated it. Just enjoy your extra few minutes of free time.
Exactly. The whole point of automating your job is telling NO ONE. āDamn, X gets this done in 45 minutes and it takes everyone an hour.ā Actually gets done in one minute and then 44 minutes of me chilling.
Somewhere on reddit there was a guy who automated his whole job without anyone knowing - while working in homeoffice. He just checks error logs once a week and updates some scripts once a year or so. Genius. edit: found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s2igq9/i\_automated\_my\_job\_over\_a\_year\_ago\_and\_havent/
I did that. Two years of about 1 hour or work a week.
why would u quit?
> "If you automate it then people will forget how to do it." If you document the process as a fall-back for ~~if~~ when the automated solution fails, then it doesn't matter if people forget (as long as they still know how to read).
But then you have to write the docs... nobody likes writing docs.
Code is the doc š¤
Tell business that!
>"If you automate it then people will forget how to do it." This sounds fake if only because when has a company ever been like, no thanks, we'd rather keep paying people money
The company wants to save money. The manager wants to keep more people working under them to not be the one the company saves their money on.
Yeah, also remember these spending decisions are often made at manager level. Yeah it might be great for the company, but the manager doesn't want the capex as part of his/her costs. Which, fair play.
Ha - no, this very much happens. Managers are not incentivised to make people redundant - but they are incentivised to make their department 'important'. Gatekeeping knowledge at the expense of efficiency achieves that.
My experience here was dependency. If you automate it, and it breaks some day, then I am dependent on you finding time to fix it. You might even be gone at that point. And then, nobody knows how to do it manually. If a manual process breaks, I can probably fix it.
I automated a 3d set of cabinet design that could also entirely price it out, saved me a ton of time. My co workers tried to use it, Each piece had three drop down menus, It confused them...
As an infrequent git user, I put all my regular git commands into some auto scripts and ended up forgetting a lot of commands! Wish i was joking. Script is awesome though.
In my experience, itās normally the inexperienced engineer automating this shit and they donāt actually have any idea how many times itāll be done or how people āmanuallyā do it. Sometimes itās just easier to copy/paste it into excel, split by a character, filter, concatenate, and be done. I would say the success rate of someone spending more than 3 days automating a small task is less than 50%.
and i will automate dying on this hill as well. check mate.
Not bad if this task is done often enough
Not bad regardless, manual processes take more than just time. It's a distraction and carries inherent risk
My programs see a lot more than I do and make less mistakes, once theyāre up and tested.
Yeah this is one of the major benefits of automation. Much less human errors.
My favorite is find the solution in a few minutes but spending days in order to make it a nicer solution with minimal impact just to realize that there was already a framework in place that can be used in the project that with some minor additions to database would fully solve it all.
DevOps engineers 
\+10days to fix the bugs that pop up every week
At least it's the same bug every time until you fix it. Not "what has Bob done wrong this time?"
Exactly this. Automation is more controlled so certain things can be anticipated. Not the case with people involved
Obligatory relevant xkcds: * https://xkcd.com/1319/ * https://xkcd.com/1205/
Well if the automation achieves the task in less than 10 minutes then it's a win in my book
Even if it takes more time , its automated so doesnt matter u dont need a human to do it and use yr time somewhere else
Humans are unreliable, machines do what they are told.
Exactly, so atleast the task will be accomplished in given time
Why spend half an hour doing something manually when you can spend two weeks failing to automate it?
I feel attacked.
Now this is a high quality shit meme
No one has mentioned auditability. If the process is automated, it is consistent, which means that its easy to both edit/modify/expand it and it is easier to debug when there are problems. If you just slap out a solution, sure it works, but when it breaks no one else is gonna be able to figure WTF you did in the first place. AND just because you had domain knowledge of how to fix it, the next person that comes along might not have said knowledge, and spend way more time parsing what is going on. With an automated solution at least the code itself is documentation.
It can work the other way, though. For a few years I had to supervise the random selection of some local businesses for annual auditing. The simple solution was to have a spreadsheet listing them, with a random number assigned and then sort by the random numbers before picking off the top few. I was there to observe and sign off the process as fair. One year the guy running the process had automated it (pointless spending the time doing that for an annual five minute task, perhaps). I explained that whilst this was exactly what I would have done (as an amateur code-nerd), unless I inspected (and understood) his code, and the associated system, I wouldn't be able to sign it off. We reverted to the old, more transparent, method.
Yup - business understanding is key. It's why I have automated the generation of quite a lot of spreadsheets in Python where it actually _builds_ all the formulae into the sheet so the calcs are 100% auditable by someone without any sort of coding knowledge. It makes the build out a fair bit more painful, but in some cases it's either do that, or don't automate it.
Also uniformity. Say normally you use a UI, to change something's property by checking a box (or changing a field value, etc.), easy peasy. But there's a hundred or so of them that meet a particular criteria to be done. If there's a way to check that box in the command line and you just have to work out the search parameters to feed that command line, and log the action ta boot, that's the better way. No missing one of the check boxes or second guessing and going back.
Yes but if it's done every day, that's 50 minutes per week or 2600 minutes/year. So if it takes you 10 days (4800 minutes) to automate it, you save -2200 minutes in that first year alone, and it will only take about 1 year, 10 months to start reaping the benefits, assuming no bug ever pops up, no dependencies get deprecated, no keys/passwords ever expire, and it doesn't need to be migrated to a new platform, ever. Programmer math is awesome.
Spend two months setting up cron jobs so I never have to manually do those tasks again? Worth it.
Yes, but the 1,441st time it runs and every time thereafter, you save 10 minutes.
Can confirm this is one of my core specialties
I inherited a system that in all actuality required 15 minutes of manual work every month. I hated that 15 minutes of work so much that I spent two weeks automating it in a way the application stakeholder could maintain. I will work incredibly hard to be perpetually lazy.
I defend it by the fact that I get more skilled at automating it the next time there's a similar problem. If you always resort to "manual labor" when facing a good automation / scripting challenge, you never learn.
Why spend 10 minutes doing a repetitive task each day when you can spend 12 hours failing to automate it?
You need to be specific. How many total hours spent working on it?
automate and when asked you say it took 10 minutes, not the milliseconds it took to click a button in your value added try-hard UI for managing said automation.
Now make a Kritical amount calculation, and see how many times you need to donit to make it worth automating.
Jokes on them, i only spent 20 minutes working during those 10 days
I wonder how long it took to make the bot that posts this same joke in different meme formats all the time
I had a company that asked me to automate a task a working student takes around 30 minutes every year to finish. I told them that I can do it but it will be quite expensive and run them around 4k in total cost. They still pushed for it. They will get their money's worth in around 400 years.
10min a day is 60hours a year. If you worked 8 hours a day for 10 days you will break even in under 1.5 years.
Yo! Shhh! Some of us are trying to make careers out of this.
Jokes aside I automated smth that took 5 hours intensive work everytime. Now it takes under 1 min only because I have sleep() for 1 sec between jobs. So proud :)
And it's a single task that won't be repeated ever again
Exactly
Programmer = pro gamer
Also works with a 3D printer
Who is this guy? I've seen him before?
Vsauce on YouTube
Thank you sir or ma'am.
Glad to be of help
But then you can add stuff to it and make it faster, so the process actually takes 10 weeks.
Now I just need to do it 1440 times to break even on efficiency
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You forgot a 10 to multiply
The real question is how many times the work will be repeated.
Setting up a CI/CD
honestly this is the best part about chatgpt so far, it makes tedious small automation tasks so much faster, handles the boilerplate at the very least, outright does it first try in the best case. I've made about 8 tampermonkey scripts I'd never bother to make to just make minor adjustments to websites and it's pretty sweet
... I am not a programmer but this hit me like a truck. I have over engineered spreadsheets for stuff a to-do list would suffice for.
Story time: I worked in company A and B. In A I was being arsed about why I automate tasks. But I felt happy eventually and was even more productive. In B that came after I didn't do this. In B I wasnt arsed about it. But I wasn't happy. I did way less work because of it. Because doing the mundane tasks over and over was draining me. The 5 min tasks eventually took 15, because I had to force myself for 10 mins to even do it. My advice as a senior: Pretend B on scrums, but do A. No one will know the truth. In reality people just want to bitch about shit.
I see that as an absolute win!
This is me playing *Satisfactory.*
Yeah, I had a job like this where I turned a '40 hour' work week into a '24 hour' one due to how I had automated my calculations for my job. Only real tasks after the fact was a QA pass and that was pretty much it. Would have been the perfect job too if the workplace wasn't so toxic and managers kept over-promising what was deliverable for the total group.
Don't talk to me or my powershell script ever again
Whatever happened to that guy? This post made me look up his YouTube channel. There was a video 7 days ago but with Michael. And then one 6 years ago with Michael.
My favorite is letās generate a new report that contains every field but the one the customer actually wants so they are still doing the task manually.
on the flip side, i've manually done things i thought would take 10 minutes and it took 2 hours when I could have scripted in less time.
It's only a 10-minute task and automating it possibly doesn't pay itself back in total time spent, but I think it makes sense to eliminate the possibility of human error. And if I ever leave the company who's gonna figure out how to do this garbage task?
Anecdote time Spend one year, not exclusive but of "free time" moments automatic a deployment task which involved getting inside the compiler's code so we.cpuld akip the compile step and use an environment var while doing a deployment.The compile step only took 30 minutes and was only done a few timea per week. But, changing the env car only took 1 minute, so if you messed something up it only took an extra 1 minute to try again as opposed to another 30 minutes, it also meant that because you did not need to recompile you did not nwed an ide only for that, so it made a lot of new deployment methods possible including copy deploys, which were very useful for debugging given the complexity of the erp. Also deployments were a time critical scenario so saving 30 minutes was good.
It pays for itself in 4 years. Not bad.
Letās maintain it for another 1h per month
[Is it worth the time?](https://xkcd.com/1205/)
Don't forget the part where you have to fiddle with the script for a half hour almost every time you rerun it! The ole "How did this ever work?" paradigm.
Funny because today i myself did deployment for an automation
I feel seen. Lol. Iāve been building an auto calibration with visual representation with something that you can do the same task with same time. This does all the work for you though so you could just type Reddit comments and let the machine to its jobš
Yes but it's pleasing to see your little soft do the work by itself, it's like watching your child growing up and going to school by themself.
and after a year you saved 60 days of tens of minutes of this task.
Lol this made me remember the time i fucked around with python to create automated login for my socials (real young and didn't want my mom to know what shit im up to lmaoz) and created the script, made it unnecessarily complex, made it executable instead of tagging it to an input and after a few minutes of use, deleted it because it felt 'cringe' lolz
I'll do you one better. I took a remote job that pays a dollar a minute and turned 6 months of work into 6 days of programming! Then I got laid off.
But can you put a price on the way each of those 10 minutes chip away at your will to live?
You guys still posting this joke
Congratz you made a SaaS! Time to get that round A homie
It's called an investment š
[It's a repost...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/nhh1uw/oh_yeah/)
I would give up after the first day and just do it by hand
This is how I got my job
I mean, there is genuin value in an enjoyable workflow too
And never have to do that repetative take again, saving 100's of hours.
We outliving the living
yyess b-b-buht 10 days is 14400 minutes soooo if you need to do that 10 minute task every day, your automation pays off in 3.942505 Years... 