Why automation matters to me
The release engineer working on our Drupal project is happy. He manages the deployment of four Drupal projects (each with three multisites), and the project I’m on takes the least time to deploy.
In the beginning, it took two hours to deploy one set of Drupal multisite because of many manual configuration steps. The team had gotten it down to fifteen minutes thanks to node imports and other time-savers, but it still required someone to click on buttons, type in text, and upload files from the source code tree.
Shortly after I joined the team, I started automating as much as I could. This helped me because I could quickly test my configuration from a clean install. I also wrote a web-based deployment script based on the script I’d written for my previous Drupal project. This script made it easy for any team member to deploy a selected revision to the site and reinstall all the microsites. Any time a manual step entered into the installation process, I ruthlessly automated it. Now deployments take a single click (or three, if you want to select a revision other than the latest one), and the build process has shrunk from fifteen minutes to five minutes, with no manual interaction required.
So the release engineer is happy, the team’s happy, I’m happy, and we can quickly deploy and test new code.
I like automating repetitive tasks. It’s not just about showing off a clever shell script or Makefile (although my scripts are clever) or about saving myself time (although I do). It’s about freeing people up to do better work.
One of my best friends was on an internship at a large computer company. A large part of her work involved copying and pasting data between spreadsheets, a task she detested. However, the cost of getting interns to do the work had been lower than the cost of automating the process, so she was assigned to copy and paste the information. If she were more comfortable with programming, she might have automated it herself, but she wasn’t familiar enough with Microsoft Excel to do so. So she did the mind-numbing work. When she left her role, no progress had been made on automating the work, and she knew that the next intern would probably also need to copy and paste information manually.
I remember hearing her frustration with the kind of work she was doing. I wished I could do something about it. I couldn’t, but at least I can automate whatever routine tasks I come across so that people can work more effectively.
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This’ll drive you nuts: I’m self-taught. No schooling to speak of. As such it was tremendously difficult to get a job programming back in the late 80s, early 90s. So I ended up with an awful lot of temp data-entry type jobs.
Having some nontrivial skills under my belt I frequently set out to automate them. Most of the time (at least 6 of 10-11 instances) when I was able to actually automate the task I was immediately made redundant.
Now, that’s the right solution for my employers (who included your current one actually) but it used to burn me something terrible.
The happy ending is that someone eventually said “hey wait… you’d probably be good over here, since you’ve made yourself useless at this job.” But it was a rough few years.
To non-IT staff, people who automate menial office tasks are truly terrifying entities. They represent disturbance to the established order.
I suppose it’s what comes of believing in magic.
An autodidact! Awesome. =)
If you’re working for an employer who sees you as cheap, unqualified labor, and you automate your trivial work, your employer (who may not have a lot of respect for you) may say, “Great! I can save some money by getting rid of that position.”
If you work for an employer who sees you as skilled talent, and you automate your trivial work, your employer (who’s already starting with some respect for you) may say, “Great! What else can I have you do?”
Kinda funny that way. Probably depends on the quality of employer. If I were your employer, I would immediately have assigned you to do something else that was costing me more money than it should, so that you could make it better. =)
There’s also working for yourself, which means you reap even more benefits from automating things. =)
I accept that by automating things and by learning as much as I can, I’ll probably make some people nervous. Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to do these things themselves. Maybe it’s because they’re worried that I’ll be a flash in the pan, that I’ll burn myself out. =) But I don’t want to do mediocre work just to fit in, not if I can save people time and effort and not if I can open opportunities for growth. And if I ever run into short-sighted people who’ll take the immediate savings of not needing to pay for my skills over the the long-term growth of applying my talents and energy to different opportunities, well, life is too short to work in that kind of situation when there are many better ones.
Thanks for sharing, and don’t ever stop making magic.