What if you solve a problem that nobody cares about?

A few months ago, I noticed that a weekly job ran for about 14 hours on Sunday and got curious. I spent some time working on it, and on the following weekend, it ran to completion in 20 minutes. It was a great achievement, or so I thought. But not so to others, because, well, nobody cares, except me. [sigh!]

Not all work is worth our effort. If a long running job doesn't bother anybody or any team, improving it makes no business impact. However, in my mind, whether something is worth doing depends not just on the significance (however small it is) in improving the process, but also on the effort we put in to improve it. In other words,

W (worth of improving a process) = S (significance in improving it) / E (effort needed to improve it)

S can be small, but should never be zero.[note] As long as E is sufficiently small, even if S is not big, W is still a non-trivial value. Since there's not much work to do at our shop anyway (see my "Free time at work" at https://lnkd.in/gbkmzd8s), why not spend some time improving an existing process, any process?

After successfully tuning the process, apart from sending an email to the group and patting myself on the back, what else can I do? Lack of acknowledgement from anybody doesn't mean this achievement should be forgotten. At least I'm going to celebrate it in my year-end performance review, and other documents if need arises.

[note] Can S (significance in improving a process) be zero? In an abnormal environment, it can. In fact, God forbid!, it can be a negative value.

[Update 2026-01] Our servers are on-premise. If they were on cloud, according to one popular price model, we would be charged by CPU usage. Saving on runtime of a job therefore CPU usage would save big on expenses. No doubt this is something the management does care about!

[originally posted on LinkedIn in December 2025]

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