Do Not Automate Is Costlier That It Seems
Recently, I came across a story based on a meme talking against automation, but it is missing a crucial point.
Okay, I have to confess, I am writing this because I have to vent the frustration I had reading an article against automation. Currently, in our society, we have been taught to look at problems in isolation, it is often a good strategy, but sometimes we lose the big picture. And that was the problem of that article.
The meme compares the time it takes to complete a task manually, ten minutes, against the time it takes to automate the task, ten hours. It makes you think that spending ten hours to automate a task that only takes ten minutes is a waste of time. I have seen people using this meme to discredit programmers for attempting to automate such tasks, and for feeling good about it. Although we cannot take this meme as fact, I have seen managers dealing with such tasks with the same opinion. They do not let developers automatize simple tasks because it only takes a few minutes. But, is that right?
Well, here is where I want to point out that we are looking at the situation in a very isolated way. We need to take a step back to understand what is happening. The meme compares a task that takes ten minutes to complete manually against the…
