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Xkcd's "Is It Worth the Time?" Considered Harmful
27 gcmeplz 18 5/10/2025, 5:12:21 PM will-keleher.com ↗
For example, spending the time to label a few examples yourself instead of just blindly sending it out to labeling.
(Not always the case, but another thing to keep in mind besides total time saved and value of learning)
If your goal is not to reduce time spent, why would you be looking at a chart to determine how much time you're reducing?
Learning is a very good use of time. Choosing to spend extra time to automate something for the sake of learning is a perfectly rational decision. But it's never harmful to know what your choice is costing you. If you wouldn't be willing to automate something in the full knowledge that it's going to take longer than just doing it manually, then the comic is succeeding in stopping you from making a choice you wouldn't want to make.
All the same, you are choosing to learn something new, not to automate something to save time. Learning something new by automating a task which doesn't justify automation is no different from say reading a book or doing coding exercises in the same time - it's potentially a good use of your time, it just doesn't relate to the xkcd chart at all.
> Automating the easy things is how you build the skills, mindset, and muscle-memory to automate the hard things.
There is also an aspect of repeatability without mistakes. Assuming the code is good, it removes the human error from the equation, which has value.
Spending an hour to learn and use sed/xargs is good use of time. Bringing in the xkcd formula has nothing to do with that. It could/should have been done as a one-off whether manually or scripted. Automation doesn't make sense unless you plan to keep putting me function arguments in an undesired order.
I would have put in time sooner to use a static typed language the can reliably reactor in the IDE with a click.
A big one for me is to ensure consistency of data, intervals, etc.
I agree with the statement, yet I think it misses the point. Hyperbole: Pressing play on a mp3 robs you of the experience of learning to play all instruments yourself. They key question is whether automating is a task one wants to improve in at all.