Ask HN: How much human time have you saved?
2 _DeadFred_ 2 6/5/2025, 11:25:05 PM
I wrote software that made a real difference and I felt proud of it. Then I switched jobs where my work didn’t feel as impactful, but I did manage to speed up a process used by hundreds of thousands of people every week.
When a win is a win we should celebrate. How many human hours have you saved and did you do it through an approved change or some stealth skunkworks fix?
I used it several years ago to justify the need to prioritize a certain project at work, saying it took 3 FTEs working around the clock for this one thing that could be fully automated. Based on my math this was true, but it’s not like anyone was only doing this one thing, it was mixed in throughout their day of doing other stuff as well.
My intent was to get this mind numbing work automated so these people could do more useful and interesting work; there was plenty to do. Fast forward to when the work was rolled out… they laid off 3 people. I had no idea that was coming, and yelled at management over it when I found out. I felt responsible. A lot of trust was broken all around with that move.
What I’ve done more recently has saved hundreds of thousands of hours of human time. Management isn’t bringing up that stat (at least to me) and I’m not going to put it in their head. They’re likely to lay off whole departments.