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Comment by avalaunch | Hacker News Reader

It could be that you prematurely optimized the task and then got lucky that the optimization turned out to be necessary later on. Your story reads as if you are saying that you were correct to automate the task because later you happened to need the automation, despite not having any reason to believe that automation would be needed. ie. Buying a lottery ticket was perfectly reasonable because I happened to win.

That being said, based on the numbers given, the optimization would make sense as long as you knew the task would be needed to be done at least 16 more times, which I imagine was the case. That also assumes there wasn't anything more pressing that needed to be worked on.

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There's a cool chart on xkcd estimating the max time you should spend automating something based on its frequency:

http://xkcd.com/1205/

Optimizing optimization. Terrific! Complete with extra-verbose mouseover text just to make the point.

Of course, it leaves off a benefits of the particular type of optimizing that is automation, such as (1) reducing errors in task performance, and, admittedly a little more abstractly, (2) the ability to produce new efficiencies you may not have anticipated until you started automating. Kind of like writing a function only to discover that it's re-usable.

Nice chart, but "across five years" is a little unrealistic IMO. You're much more likely to change projects, jobs, etc. before you realize a five-year payoff.

That chart is misleading. Instead of saying "X days", it should actually say "X*24 hours" because there's a big difference between working on something for a day (e.g. 8-10 hours) and working on something for 24 hours.

My coworker has a rule in our office: if you have to do something for a second time, automate it.

He's been getting us all to follow this, and it has paid off many times. It's not just about whether it pays off for an individual task — it's a mentality you develop as you go into future tasks.

To be completely honest, it was a bit of getting lucky, and a lot of realizing that if I needed to modify one object in that particular library to satisfy a legal requirement, it was only a matter of time before a decree would come down that the rest need to be changed as well.

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