A long time ago (2010) at a job far away (Colorado) my boss handed my coworker a laptop with a virus on it, but also with data for an important client. My coworker took the laptop and spent hours removing the virus and making sure that no traces of it remained and that he had saved all the files he could. He was proud of his work and handed the laptop back to the boss.

“What is this?” the boss said, “I can’t bill them $1500 for a $600 laptop. You should have just ordered a new laptop and copied the data over!”

So this job sucked. The average engineer lasted about 3 months. I lasted 3 months. They would say “Today we’re going to learn to parachute!” hand you a parachute and a manual and throw you out of the plane. But it did teach valuable lessons.

  1. Your boss (or your project manager) probably didn’t think this task through before assigning it to you. That’s where you come in. If your boss wanted to be an expert in this task they’d have done it themselves.

  2. Therefore, the task is probably wrong. It probably shouldn’t even be assigned to your team. It probably has the wrong goals, and the wrong time frame. It probably asks for a specific solution when the people who need it haven’t correctly stated the problem. Challenge all of this before you accept the frame and start work.

  3. Think of cost vs. benefit. If it’s going to take 4 days to automate a task that only takes 10 minutes a week, maybe don’t automate it, or don’t automate it now (save it for a hackathon, or assign it to an intern) or instead of spending 10 minutes a week, spend 30 minutes a week where 20 minutes is towards the automation.