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Compulsive automation

Programmers tend to have a disease: we compulsively automate. That is, no matter the task, we are always on the lookout for ways to automate it regardless of how much (or little) we gain by doing so. The problem is that we too often end up with very small, or even negative gains.

Automation can be viewed as a kind of optimization, and everyone knows that optimizing too early can cause problems. Certainly a task shouldn’t be automated unless it will need to be carried out repeatedly and doing so will be costly. However, compulsive automation seems to come in a few other varieties as well.

The first is when so much time is spent on automation that it kills, or disproportionately hinders the overall project. In this case, there might be very good reasons for automating, but the resources to actually carry it out may not exist.

This can happen at the very beginning of a project. Prematurely setting up continuous integration, version control, and a reproducible development environment can, in some cases, prevent a project from getting off the ground. Automation at the “end” of a project can also lead to problems. I personally struggle with this more than any of the others. Deploying an application is a great example.

You’ve got your snazzy new app (or whatever) working and you’re ready to show it to the world. You could set up a snowflake server, but everyone knows that’s a bad idea. So you decide to automate. You then proceed to fiddle around with Chef or Ansible until you run out of steam and never actually deploy anything, or you deploy but never actually make any updates (which would have justified the automation effort).

In the long run, automating deployments is the right thing to do. But when you’re deploying a prototype or a side project the extra time required up-front can hurt your momentum. It doesn’t matter how much theoretical time you’ll save in the future if no one ever sees your work.

A second variety of unwise automation is when automation reduces the burden on the person doing the automating but transfers it to others, sometimes even magnifying it in the process. The implementation of information systems tends to be an ugly business. We often forget that many of the ugliest systems actually seem clean and elegant to their users. Sometimes the price of this elegance is manual effort behind the scenes. This effort can often be eliminated, but doing so usually requires either significant technical investment or the imposition of constraints on end-users. I noticed a great example of this phenomenon on Hacker News the other day (which actually inspired this blog post).

It was revealed that the volunteer who has been (manually) aggregating hiring-related posts for the past four years has decided to step down. Shortly thereafter, a specification for hiring posts was proposed. The spec itself isn’t bad, it tries to split the difference between human- and machine-readability and does a decent job of it. However, it would require anyone who wanted to post a job to read, understand, and follow the spec.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if the same people posted jobs over and over again, but the community discourages posts from recruiters and HR employees. This means that most people who post will only post occasionally, increasing the odds of having to re-learn the spec every single time.

It seems reasonable, given that someone was willing to do the job manually for four years, to assume that the amount of effort involved in aggregating jobs posts is manageable. So a spec would save a relatively small amount of time behind the scenes, but at a large (total) cost on the part of the posters.

To be fair, a spec for hiring posts might make them easier to search, but a couple bullet points with suggestions for how to write an effective job post would solve this problem just as well.

The final problematic form of automation is when the automation itself becomes a larger project than the original task. I think this usually happens because we delude ourselves into believing that the automation project will be “easy”. Even when the automation is fairly straightforward, feature creep can turn a 10 line shell script into a 10,000 line application before anyone even realizes what is happening.

However, this kind of automation isn’t always a bad idea. If the automation tool can be released for use by others, the total time saved across all users may be greater than the time it took to build the solution. We see this dynamic a lot with open source software. Of course the time must still be justified internally, perhaps trading time for goodwill from the community.

So what is to be done? Certainly we shouldn’t stop automating, the benefits are just too great. What we should do is always consider the context in which an automation project exists. We should think explicitly about the benefits of automating and when they will be realized, whether automating will actually put an additional burden on users, and whether the realistic cost of automating is actually worthwhile.

Image credit: XKCD: Automation