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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.
That area of the chart is for people with really repetitive jobs/hobbies. There are MANY jobs where you do the same 5-10 minute thing 50x a day.
I have a lot of repetition in my job (CAD modeller). Even just knowing keyboard shortcuts & setting up shortcuts for frequently used operations can easily net me 5 seconds per operation. I want to spend my energy on solving the task at hand, not on how to use the tool in the moment. I don't want to move the mouse away from the work area if I can help it.
Maybe not as frequent 5 per day - but scripts for really bottom of the barrel stuff: