I bumped into this XKCD again today. I love this cartoon, but I have a whole prez on the possibly invalid assumptions behind this cartoon. Let's do that, but as a tweet thread, because it's Friday! inspired by @bneelon

https://xkcd.com/1205/ 

Assumption 1: All time is of the same value. In my work I am happy to trade 4 hours in August for 4 minutes during our end of the qtr rush. So automating a quarter end process pays for itself even if I do not recoup as many minutes as it took me to build it. ...

Assumption 2: Automated work is of the same quality and accuracy as manual work. LOLWTFBBQ? Sorry, I'm on the dyslexic spectrum and my automated work has a MUCH lower error rate than my manual junk. So automation has quality benefits.

Assumption 3: The freq you do a process will remain the same once automated. In my experience once metrics became automated we suddenly start using them more frequently. So we get new value simply from the higher frequency automated product. More frequent might be more valuable

to reiterate, I think the XKCD cartoon is brilliant, but it's a model based on assumptions. If those assumptions don't hold, the modeled outcome will differ from what's in the cartoon. I think automation has more value than the cartoon suggests... at least for my kind of work

what other assumptions am I missing?? probably a lot.. let me know what I'm missing.

Could assumptions go the other way making automation worse? oh yeah... there's an XKCD for that, of course: https://xkcd.com/1319/  ht @MikeKSmith who used that xkcd at Rstudio::conf

and @tdhopper reminded me that everything I've ever written was probably more articulately stated by @johndcook on his blog years ago: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/12/22/automate-to-save-mental-energy-not-time/