Sometimes I’ve gone the other way. My manager complained once that I didn’t automate a task to get business metrics, and I responded to say that it currently takes me 1 minute to pull the metrics and paste them into a spreadsheet and print a PDF. Automating this would take at least several days, for a slide that changes constantly, and where the data often requires a deep dive into why the data is how it is. What’s the point in automating something that I already need to manually look at?
They raised it with our PM, and their response was “fair, I wish I hadn’t bothered to automate things last year”.
If the cost would give a higher benefit, sure, automate it so that it spits out a spreadsheet every week and do the manual stuff separately - but automating something “because you can” is junior level shit. My time is valuable, let me work on stuff that actually matters.
Sometimes I’ve gone the other way. My manager complained once that I didn’t automate a task to get business metrics, and I responded to say that it currently takes me 1 minute to pull the metrics and paste them into a spreadsheet and print a PDF. Automating this would take at least several days, for a slide that changes constantly, and where the data often requires a deep dive into why the data is how it is. What’s the point in automating something that I already need to manually look at?
They raised it with our PM, and their response was “fair, I wish I hadn’t bothered to automate things last year”.
If the cost would give a higher benefit, sure, automate it so that it spits out a spreadsheet every week and do the manual stuff separately - but automating something “because you can” is junior level shit. My time is valuable, let me work on stuff that actually matters.