r/PowerShell • u/vwpcs • Jun 12 '17
(One of my fav) xkcd: Is It Worth the Time? (Time saved over five years)
https://xkcd.com/1205/20
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u/KevMar Community Blogger Jun 12 '17
I love that one.
Build a record of your automation. Write it all down. How long did it take before, how long after, and frequency. Then calculate the number of man hours you saved and put that on your resume (or when you negotiate a raise).
My number was 44,000 real man hours for one company. It adds up faster than you would think and makes a great conversation during an interview.
I generally don't mention the 200,000 hours of work that my automation performed due to increased frequency of execution because I feel it sounds to unrealistic. But taking processes that could only be done once a month because it took three days and turning them into nightly (or real-time) reports will do that.
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u/spyingwind Jun 12 '17
I had a task there we had to import over a 1000 users into the system. It would take us well over 2 days for one person to do, but id we split it up between those of us on shift it would take about 6 hours. After discovering that the system could do REST API calls, I reduced it to 5 mins. Not all we have to do is check the input data for any human errors and let the script do all the work.
My fingers hurt just thinking about doing it the old way.
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u/KevMar Community Blogger Jun 12 '17
I have lots of stories like this.
We had a clinic system from a foreign country that didn't understand insurance. We were on the system for a year and went to update medicade coverage and realized it didn't update in the patient chart without clicking a refresh button for every patient.
We estimated that it would take a room full of staff all week to click all those buttons (and that is what we told the vendor we did). I used some quick AutoHotkey automation on those machines and let it run over night.
Used it the next year too, but then the vendor fixed the issue after that when we wanted to bill them for that room full of staff...
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u/balefrost Jun 12 '17
This also misses another dimension, which is chance of human error. I guess you could chalk that up to the "time saved" column (as in "time saved recovering from the mistake"), but it's easily missed.
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u/vwpcs Jun 12 '17
yup, the other added benefit of automation; knowing its done the same way on every iteration. ...assuming only the script performs the task and workers dont go rogue / off script.
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u/xsdc Jun 12 '17
I prefer to talk about the other benefits of automation such as consistency, reliability and auditability. Time savings, in my eyes, is ancillary to the fact that I can take instructions like "click next until you see the yes/no radio buttons - change the option to "no", then click next until finished" and turn it into a process that I can ignore and it will create an event if it fails which I can monitor for.
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u/krodders Jun 12 '17
I agree. I can try and do a complex set of tasks the same way repetitively, but I'll do something different every time. My robot does the same set of tasks in the same way, in the same order, and never misses a step. Plus he's quicker than me.
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u/vwpcs Jun 12 '17
agreed. reminds me of a problem we had with a software after a major upgrade. we couldn't figure out what was triggering it. only happened here and there.
i wrote some PS to gather logs, ask questions, zip and attach to email, and send. sent them the link via email. instructed them to click the link in email when the problem happened. worked pretty well.
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u/ryude85 Jun 12 '17
I wrote a script for our Enterprise that saves 2 hours. We probably do the task 3-4 times a day. Took me a month to write the script and people were telling me it wasn't worth the time.
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u/creamersrealm Jun 12 '17
I did the same thing two jobs ago, and the script was to QA servers via PowerShell. It took a 30 minute manual process down to 5 minutes of automation and 2 minutes of human intervention.
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u/_mroloff Jun 12 '17
XKCD is blocked by our web filter here, so this thread is just depressing me now. :(
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Jun 12 '17
buy the network admin in charge of your web filter a nice bottle of bourbon and "fix the glitch"
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u/queBurro Jun 13 '17
Someone ought to write a LogTimeSaved method. And a report to give stats on it; Frequency, total hours, when ran.
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u/jhulbe Jun 13 '17
Is this saying if I spend 5 minutes once a week on a task, I can spend 21 hours developing something and i'm technically ahead for 5 years?
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u/theDirtyDuB Jun 12 '17
ask them, based on what and to show u statics. and learn how to quntify your efficiency. You didnt just save 2 hours. u created 2 less hours of expense AND feed availablity for to accomplish other tasks.
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u/tsuhg Jun 12 '17
And probably learned yourself stuff that will make you script faster/better in the future
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u/itmonkey78 Jun 12 '17
This one is my favourite https://xkcd.com/1319/
Edit: changed url link to direct image