Ask HN: As a Developer What Tedious Task Do You Find Takes to Much of Your Time?
9 comments
Having to fill out User Stories/Tickets and PRs with random information that I don’t even use but management says is important. Wish I could just ask my computer to create it for me and populate the same silly fields with the same things every time.
User stories/Tickets has been a common theme, Im curious if this work is exclusive to specific set of actions or if you are constantly are having to respond with different sets of data like specific testing notes, PR comments, etc. ?
In most instances you could fill out the story/ticket with successive paragraphs from War and Peace and not one person would ever notice. Mgmt. wants their "required fields" to be non-empty, but not one manager ever checks the actual content of those same fields. And the only report they ever pull to look at is the report of "X is missing content in field Y" report.
I definitely can see the point you are drawing at here, but In cases of code review, testing notes, PR comments - which typically is the bulk of the work in tickets for programmers (-mind you if your team has a PM) this is just not feasible. lol :)
Not sure about tedious but code reviews do come to mind. IMHO code reviews are super important but the context switch between coding and reviewing code gets to you at some point.
Yeah I can definitely resonate with that, but a-lot of the early insight and best practices I gained early on in my career were established doing code reviews. So I generally see them as a positive.
yeah for me too, I learnt so much from code reviews and how to do a good code review, it is a super important workflow
Setting up test data for non-trivial contexts.
Proofreading.
For instance, in my daily routine as an engineer, I spend about 5-10 minutes everyday reviewing my calendar to type up a quick list of availability to respond to emails or Slack messages requesting time slots for a meeting. While there are services that seemingly solve this process by allowing people to book available times directly, For many of us these options often aren't suitable or considered “professional” enough when dealing with sophisticated clients or teammates. So I resort to manually sending out a simple list of my available times slots for each day of the week.
I suspect many of you face similar, time-consuming tasks that could be streamlined or automated. Candidly my co-founder and I are exploring solutions to automate these mundane tasks through a new platform and community. So we are looking to gather more insights into the specific day-to-day tasks that you feel are a waste of your valuable time.