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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

> Well, if you do the math, 15 minutes a day times 230 working days a year equals just shy of 60 hours - or 1.5 work weeks - wasted per year. Multiply that by the size of the engineering organization, and this starts to look pretty expensive.

I hate this type of reasoning. 15 minutes a day is 3% of the day. Multiply that by 230 working days a year and it's 3% of the year. Multiply that by the size of the engineering organization, it's 3%. Your maximum savings here is 3%, no matter how many numbers you multiply it by.

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How large is your morgage rate? Imagine that you could shave 3% off its rate, say, turn 7% into 4%. Would it make a difference for you?

Same applies to most companies. Unless they are in an explosive growth phase, or in a catastrophic collapse phase, 3% change in expense / efficiency of the engineering organization is pretty noticeable.

Going from 7% to 4% is shaving 43% off your mortgage rate—which of course would make a difference. But it’s not even the same order of magnitude as what we’re talking about here.

Companies seem to tolerate the 8% of each Teams or zoom meeting lost on “wait, I can’t get my camera working”, “sorry I’m late; what did I miss?”, etc.

I’m convinced it’s a percent or two of GDP!

>Imagine that you could shave 3% off its rate, say, turn 7% into 4%

That's not how percentages work! 7% would turn into ~6.8% if you shave 3% from it.

While I understand your interpretation, what I meant is subtracting percentage points, not applying percentage points upon percentage points.

My idea was to show that changing some big value by a few percentage points of that big value, e.g. of the cost of running the engineering organization, may have a serious impact on the overall balance.

Engineering organizations are expensive to run, and their cost in a tech-oriented company may even be the dominant cost. Saving even a small percentage of that cost is pretty noticeable, compared to other expenses of the company.

Actually you are ignoring the main argument here that people aren't perfect and that the risk of losing more time due to people getting distracted, reading slack, going on long coffee breaks, etc. is substantial and very real. You lose all that time; not just the build time. And having to wait is frustrating and demotivating. And let's face it, a 1 minute build is actually pretty sweet. I've been on teams where it is closer to 20. And worse. That really sucks the life out of you if you have to sit and wait for that to happen fifteen times in a day. People wasting hours per day waiting for builds, CI, etc. to happen is not cheap.

At my current place they have just replaced the build system.

If I want it deployed to the "higher" dev environments I have to watch it for 20 mins so that I can "approve" the override that my base image (that I have no control over) has security risks and I accept them.

If I want to deploy to production, I have to watch and approve the 20 min gatekeeper, them again at 40 mins, and then at 120 mins accept that I want a change ticket.

If I miss any of these then I have to restart the build process. This is an "agile" workplace.

Fuck everyone who claims they agile doesn't work, just stop calling this shit agile.

It's scaled agile my friend. Or was it scalable agile? Whatever.

All true statements. However, it's conceptually easier to grasp the impact of 3% of my time when I think about what I can or cannot accomplish in a 1.5 week period, rather than a 15 minute period. Some 15 minutes are jam-packed with productivity, while others are a coffee break, so I don't really understand what 15 minutes of my time is worth. Whereas, each work week is nearer to my average productivity, and I have a much clearer idea of what that's worth in terms of work output.

If a person reads this "if you do the math" reasoning and has a different reaction to the same cost depending on how it's presented, then, wasn't it a good thing that the reader was given a variety of ways to think about the cost? (Since, necessarily, the reader's reaction to at least one of the presentations was incorrect.)

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