January 29, 2026
The one-second revolt
Is it worth it? (2021)
Commenters say yes: tiny fixes, huge wins — and fewer “OK” clicks
TLDR: Math says tiny daily annoyances add up fast, and the crowd agrees: small fixes can save whole workweeks across a team. Commenters shared real wins (a one‑second pop‑up nuked for 50 hours saved) while others argued the bigger prize is consistent, self-explaining processes that reduce chaos.
The internet is doing math with feelings, and the mood is: fix the small stuff, like, yesterday. Allen Rohner’s piece channels XKCD math to argue that shaving a minute off a daily task can be worth weeks of effort—especially when an entire team feels the pain. Cue a flood of “death by a thousand clicks” stories. The top upvote? Archelaos bragging about nuking a pop-up that stole one second at a time. Across the company, that was 180,000 clicks over five years—roughly 50 hours saved. Cost to fix? Ten minutes. The crowd roared. Someone joked their gym routine is just “pressing OK 3,000 times a month.”
But there’s drama. Not everyone is chasing seconds purely for speed. User dissent dropped a mood-shift: the real win isn’t just time—it’s consistency and a process that explains itself. Translation: fewer surprises, fewer oopsies, happier teams. The debate heated up between “optimize-everything” enthusiasts and skeptics wary of endless “yak shaving” (internet slang for fiddling with tiny tasks forever). Memes flew about banning the spinning wheel, taxing every email ten seconds, and declaring the “OK” button the office final boss. Verdict from the comments? If it bugs many people daily, fix it—for the minutes saved and the calm it brings.
Key Points
- •An XKCD-derived framework suggests spending time on optimizations proportional to time saved, amortized over five years.
- •Corporate re-derivation with a one-year breakeven shows saving one minute per person per workday justifies up to four hours of fix effort per person.
- •In a team of five developers, a 10% flaky test with five-minute reruns costs 1,800 minutes annually (about five workdays).
- •With 10 developers in a monorepo and a three-year breakeven, the same flaky test justifies six work weeks to fix (about 30 workdays saved).
- •Small daily savings (e.g., 10 seconds of email admin) scale across large teams, yielding nearly 140 workdays saved over three years in a 400-person company.