At some point in the past, computer time was more valuable than human time. The balance changed long ago. While everyone agrees that human time is more costly than computer time, it’s hard to appreciate just how much more costly.
You can rent time on a virtual machine for around $0.05 per CPU-hour. You could pay more or less depending on on-demand vs reserved, Linux vs Windows, etc.
Suppose the total cost of hiring someone—salary, benefits, office space, equipment, insurance liability, etc. —is twice their wage. This implies that a minimum wage worker in the US costs as much as 300 CPUs.
This also implies that programmer time is three orders of magnitude more costly than CPU time. It’s hard to imagine such a difference. If you think, for example, that it’s worth minutes of programmer time to save hours of CPU time, you’re grossly under-valuing programmer time. It’s worth seconds of programmer time to save hours of CPU time.