This kind of thinking is as useful to non-tech founders as it is dangerous to technical founders.
For the non-techs, it's important for them to get their heads around the possibility that they may be wasting large quantities of worker-days doing what could be automated with a bash script.
For the techs, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Deciding to automate something when there's a cheap SAAS offering is often a destructive thing, mainly because even developers are prone to underestimate complexity and maintenance costs, and to goldplate a solution that's already "good enough".
I'm not saying Don't Automate. I'm just suggesting to be very cautious about undertaking any automation initiative. The things to automate are the baggage which you will take on your journey, and as such, they should be directly related up your core product/service. Something like a mailing list handler is probably not, and typical of the kind of underestimation that can take place (what happens when you discover your homebrew mailing list is blocked by every big mail provider's spam filter?).
I agree with you - I think most programmers have this mentality automatically, whereas the non-tech guys often don't. We're hiring for non-technical operations/customer-service/biz-dev roles a the moment and we find ourselves leaning towards people with a technical background.
I just don't know how much this "instinct to automate" can be taught.
For the non-techs, it's important for them to get their heads around the possibility that they may be wasting large quantities of worker-days doing what could be automated with a bash script.
For the techs, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Deciding to automate something when there's a cheap SAAS offering is often a destructive thing, mainly because even developers are prone to underestimate complexity and maintenance costs, and to goldplate a solution that's already "good enough".
I'm not saying Don't Automate. I'm just suggesting to be very cautious about undertaking any automation initiative. The things to automate are the baggage which you will take on your journey, and as such, they should be directly related up your core product/service. Something like a mailing list handler is probably not, and typical of the kind of underestimation that can take place (what happens when you discover your homebrew mailing list is blocked by every big mail provider's spam filter?).