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Comment by TheLudd | Hacker News Reader

One interesting factor that I rarely see discussed is this: Let's say a DevOps person does some improvement to internal tooling and a task that devs had to oversee manually now is automated. Every dev spent about 2 hours per week doing this task and now they don't have to anymore. Now, have we saved 2 hours of salary per dev per week?

Not sure. Because it totally depends on what they do instead. Are they utilizing two hours more every week now doing meaningful work? Or are they just taking things a bit more easy? Very hard to determine and it just makes it harder to reason about the costs and wins in these cases.

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They have saved _more_ than two hours per dev and week. There's a compound factor and now code can be more reliable (less outages or emergencies fixing bugs) etc. Also having a sane working environment helps engineers not quitting, which is very expensive if they are replaced.

You've freed up 2 hours per dev per week so they can work on something else that might generate profit. Even if they goof off for an hour, that's another hour doing something useful that they weren't doing before.

You've also possibly saved some money by automating a task that was previously manual, reducing or eliminating human errors that could have compounding costs.

And as someone else pointed out, you've made the work environment a little better by not wasting the devs' time on a silly manual task, which might reduce turnover.

In such a clear-cut example, I think we have saved the two hours.

Yes. You work 2 hours less, but what do you produce in those two extra hours? Can you say that your company now spends X dollars less or earns X dollars more? I don't think it can be that clear.

And what is your theory? That it’s better to not save those 2 hours since they will just go to waste anyway? Or that there is diminishing returns to saving work as people will tend to just spend longer on other things they were already doing? How can you be sure those 2 hours will not actually be used by most to do very productive things that in the end look like +4 hours in return??

No. I am not saying that it is a bad idea to do this.

I am saying:

Given you have saved two hours per person per week

Then the value for the company is _not_ equal to two hourly salaries per week. The consequences are just not that simple.

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