Are you more of an explorer or an automator?

🙋 Questions
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We hosted a Test Exchange today (a virtual and casual gathering with icebreakers and breakout room sessions).

One of the icebreakers was around “do you think of yourself more as an explorer or an automator”

The response was just great and not really what I was expecting.

exploreautomation
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My assumption is that we are all natural explorers, but not always automators.

I’d love to get a wider input into the poll to see where you would put yourself. And of course, any comments or observations are welcome!

Do you see yourself as an explorer or automator?

  • Explorer
  • Automator
0 voters
4 Likes
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Clearly an automator. I simply enjoy it more than purely exploring.
Which doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy the exploration (and learning) that is necessary for good automation.

4 Likes
3

Automator, I guess?

I like to create things, and it doesn’t suit the “explorer” theme, in my opinion.

On the other hand, exploring by creating a PoC of a solution, huh.

In the Anno game series, I think we can say we are exploring other worlds by designing and maintaining trade routes and setting up new colonies.

But then again, “automator” suits well in optimizing, for example, production chains.

3 Likes
4

An exploring automator, does that count? I always looking out for things how to make your work (and life) easier; often using automation

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5

I participated in an online poll around this very question 2 weeks ago, it was not asked in a binary form like this though. Not sure what platform it was on. I was a bit surprised by the results - and to be honest making the question binary although creating more clear data, for me, hides the underlying activity cost.

Automator. I do a fair bit of both, but I use automation specifically as a tool to cover more ground and to find certain domains of “watering hole” that bugs with congregate around.

2 Likes
6

I switch between the two.

I enjoy exploring but I can’t stay with a single topic/item for too long, so I go from different angles: process, business, statistics(revenue, data, apis, …), analysis(user,finance, call-center, surveys, reports,…), optimizations, code, pipelines, data, UI/UX, external systems, integrations, backward technical discovery, history of changes and decisions, other products within the company, using tools owned by other departments, …and so on.

I also like playing with code.
I noticed recently that I do more exploring than coding when I’m an Automator(in longer automation projects). This is due to the shifting nature of things, the predictability: the data changes, the product is unstable, the code is randomly failing, errors that I trigger in the logs(without seeing there’s a problem), the optimizations that can be done to reduce execution time, debugging failures with various methods, deciding whether I should do some refactoring and how, and so on.

2 Likes
7

Explorer, can’t automate jack-diddly at the moment, but I will soon :star_struck::facepunch:

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8

I suppose both depending on the context and what needs to be done.