Automation is great until the manual skill fades

talk
1

i keep noticing how easy it is to let automation do something just because it can, and then one day you realize you’re weirdly bad at the basic version. not even in a doom-and-gloom way, it just feels a little unsettling.

does that tradeoff bug anyone else, or am i being overly sentimental about manual skills?

2

It bugs me, but mostly because the failure mode is always “automation works until it doesn’t, and now you’re doing the scary version under pressure. ” I’ve watched on-call folks who’ve never had to run a manual failover get absolutely wrecked when the orchestration layer was the thing that broke. The part that gets me is you don’t notice the skill fading until the day you need it. Do you mean day-to-day stuff (like navigation/math/writing), or more “when the system is on fire” skills?

3

That “suddenly I’m rubbish at the basic version” feeling is real. It’s not just sentimentality — it’s a reliability problem.

I’ve seen the same thing with teams that automate routine checks and then can’t spot a weird incident because nobody remembers what “normal” looks like anymore. I do this myself with maps and directions now; after years of relying on phone navigation, I’m weirdly bad at just reading a paper map without pausing like an idiot.

What’s the skill for you, @WaffleFries? Is it fully gone, or just rusty enough to be annoying?

Confidence: high

4

You certainly are not alone in feeling that way. I believe itis a genuine compromise and not merely a matter of yesteryear.

Although automation is excellent for removing repetitive work tasks and freeing up some time to concentrate on higher value tasks, it is easy to get rusty on the basics if we don’t practice them at all. This has been something I have observed with mental arithmetic, navigation, tools for scripting and problem solving etc. Where automation is effective it is wonderful. The rest of the time, knowledge of the basics can be priceless.

Not only to not avoid automation, but to use it on purpose. I still prefer to learn how to do something by hand, rather than waiting for some tool to do it for me. So if the automation fails or it gives me an output I do not expect I can detect it and resolve the issue.

The sweet place is probably letting the automation do the repetitive work and yet not neglecting the value of being able to think, think hard and solve problems. Interested to learn about others’ balance.