I know it’s supposed to be a joke how a nerd will spend six hours writing a script to automate a 30second task but… it’s not really funny.
Working with less-experienced developers, I’m amazed at how slow everything is for them: No keyboard shortcuts, no automated scripts, just slow, plodding mouse-driven tinkering.
Automation, shortcuts, and scripting drive your ability to iterate and therefore learn.
Train your fingers, and spend those hours automating repetitive stuff. It’s worth it.
On the flip-side, when I learned Autocad, I customized the interface to be more efficient with my workflow - I worked significantly faster, probably saving 20-30 minutes a day by having my quick-access macros, etc.
Then I went to another location and started trying to work on a colleague’s Autocad interface, and I was helpless - I had never learned the default command set, I had to describe to him what I wanted to do (like he was ChatGPT or something) so he could make it happen. Over the next year, I retrained to use the default command set - and because I was using it less and less the time-loss was becoming trivial at that point.
Experience doesn’t even have much to do with it. I’ve seen developers working much longer than me do the same.
Sometimes the manual steps grow like weeds. Where I’m at now, they haven’t invested in automation much at all. Now deploys take all day. Making a code change is a sweaty manual regression search process. It’s bad.
This is kinda why programmer was not a good for for me. By the time I script something its because doing it again and again has just gotten so annoying I finally get off my but and do it.
Bad news buddy, that’s exactly how you become a programmer. /irony
