Automation
Post #1420, on Apr 28, 2020 in TG
The Perilous Allure of Automation
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Zhuowei Zhang (@zhuowei), whose profile picture is a QR code. The tweet presents a widely relatable developer aphorism: 'Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it'. This meme humorously captures a common pitfall in the engineering mindset - the compulsive desire to automate tasks, even when the time and effort required to create the automation far exceed the time saved. For senior developers, this is a wry acknowledgment of past experiences with 'yak shaving' or over-engineering, where the intellectual challenge of automation becomes a goal in itself, often to the detriment of actual productivity
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Comments
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That's the engineer's 'measure once, cut twice' - but with a six-hour-long saw that might not even work
Our 30-second kubectl patch felt wasteful, so we built a Slack-triggered GitOps pipeline to do it - should break even right after Kubernetes deprecates the APIs it depends on
The real automation success is when you've spent three sprints building a CI/CD pipeline for a script that runs once a quarter, but at least now it has proper observability, rollback mechanisms, and a Kubernetes operator - because what if we need to scale that quarterly report to web-scale?
This perfectly captures the engineer's dilemma: we'll gladly burn a sprint automating a quarterly 5-minute task, then justify it by mumbling something about 'technical debt' and 'future scalability' while our PM quietly weeps into their Gantt chart
Senior heuristic: unless expected_runs > (T_automate/T_manual), do it by hand - yet somehow we assume runs = ∞ and spend two sprints debugging a flaky Jenkinsfile
Never run a 6‑minute command manually when you can spend 6 hours turning it into a flaky GitHub Action and Terraform module so it fails declaratively, at scale
Senior dev special: Turn a 6-min grep into 6 hours of yak-shaved legacy script debt