[HN Gopher] The Reinforcing Nature of Toil
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       The Reinforcing Nature of Toil
        
       Author : kqr
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2023-01-25 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (two-wrongs.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (two-wrongs.com)
        
       | Centigonal wrote:
       | It is is true that toil erodes development velocity and code
       | quality if you have a team of utility players, or if your toil
       | takes up a critical mass of work. However, there are situations
       | where automating toil doesn't increase development velocity:
       | 
       | - You have a developer who is good at manual, repetitive work but
       | has trouble with more creative tasks (toil can keep this person
       | productive as you work to develop their creative potential)
       | 
       | - You have a new developer who needs to learn the system, or your
       | team is inheriting a new project (toil can be a great way to
       | understand the system, its strengths and weaknesses, and possible
       | Chesterton's Fence situations - this is similar to the "don't
       | renovate your house until you've lived in it all four seasons"
       | advice)
       | 
       | - Some toil is unavoidable - our team ingests data from hundreds
       | of websites we don't control. Website operators can change their
       | site content to literally anything, and it's impossible to
       | account for all the issues this can create - even though the
       | fixes can often feel simple and repetitive.
       | 
       | That said, toil is usually unpleasant and feels less impactful,
       | and automating unpleasant work usually has good knock-on effects
       | (happier team members who feel like they're doing impactful work
       | tend to be more productive, stay together longer, and refer their
       | friends).
        
       | passterby wrote:
       | what's with the assumption that evolution does not include a kind
       | of "code review" meaning some sort of "error" correcting scheme
       | or something??
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-25 23:01 UTC)