People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won't pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here's a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
I feel it, fellow automation-human.
To me the automation calls harder than the gains, but when I do fix stuff for my org of 500 or so people, it is so good.
Thanks for this!
Question, can anyone please tell me what job titles cover this skill set? I've seen and performed a tremendous amount of this automation work by data analysts and data scientists, but it doesn't seem to fit the titles. I've seen 'process automation X' as an example but more often than not that title seems to be used for an actual engineer in some assembly line manufacturing job rather than what is essentially a programmer/GUI automator
DevOps for me in hardware (chip design/verification)
You would thing a bunch of engineers would know how to use conputers, but no, they are good at chip deign. Automating stuff for them gives insane benefits and scale.