The Programmer's Time Investment Strategy

Spending 10 days automating a 10-minute task is the hill we die on. It's not about efficiency—it's about principle. Sure, I could just do the thing manually 600 times over the next five years, but what if I need to do it 601 times? That's when my beautiful, over-engineered solution pays off. The ROI calculation conveniently ignores the 16 hours of debugging and the fact that I'll probably leave this job before it ever breaks even. But hey, at least I didn't have to do something boring twice.