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Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

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Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#101

Post by tyingq »

The difficult part is that the areas that could be automated are usually the ones that would buy the automation software.

The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization.

I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the benefit.

Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#102

Post by jXCw1N0jtH3 »

k__ wrote: post #92
cakoose wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person. Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?

Depends greatly on the job, I think. If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary. But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?

I'm in marketing and working remotely is kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest. I typically want to have in-person chats with product managers, developers, etc. about something or other on more or less on a daily basis.

I'm a huge fan of remote work, I've had a full-time remote position previously, I just think sometimes it doesn't work with the culture of a team or business. I don't think that means anything is broken.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#103

Post by rch »

cableshaft wrote: post #77
rch wrote: post #38

Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants. Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.

Hahahah! You just made me think of creating a chatbot to answer people's questions about me for phone screen interviews, since answering the same questions over and over and over again has gotten me to the point where I sometimes procrastinate getting back to recruiters because I don't want to go through the process for the fiftieth time. "How much experience do you have with Unity?" : "I worked with Unity on project…

Pretty much! I'd also include narrative answers about challenges overcome, accomplishments, etc. and boilerplate about how great the company is, respectively.

It's critical to have the interviewer side fully automated as well, so the bots can all talk to one another and just ping us when things match up. Imagine the hyper conversations from the movie Her, but for jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#104

Post by rch »

deedubaya wrote: post #47
rch wrote: post #38

Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants. Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.

Shameless plug of a tool I built which might help you with this, especially if you're hiring developers. It'll automatically research the applicants who apply to your open position and collect github profiles, repos, and do it's best to rate them appropriately. https://www.hireloop.io

Does it have a natural language interface, e.g. Slack bot, or something I could integrate with AlchemyAPI?

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#106

Post by fortyfivan »

Artemis2 wrote: post #33
Afforess wrote: post #6

Security. 90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.

Are you referring to one of these? https://github.com/Netflix/bless http://gravitational.com/teleport https://www.scaleft.com We have actually developed such a service for internal usage (could not use any of these three because of compliance requirements), it works very well.

I'm from ScaleFT, thanks for the mention. I'd be curious to hear more about what specific compliance requirements we couldn't meet.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#107

Post by jenkstom »

blakesterz wrote: post #56

Onboarding of new customers . I feel like we must do this different than most places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be " good enough " so far (support has been perfec…

If nothing off-the-shelf works, then you may need either a customization of an existing product or an entirely new product. If there's nothing out there like it, then this is a competitive advantage for your company and you should consider investing significant resources into it. Hire a developer or consulting company that creates such software.

Just keep in mind that maybe 1 in 5 of those projects actually succeeds, so do a lot of due diligence up front. Don't go with "lowest bidder" and make sure your project manager has profound domain expertise and works very closely with the development team.

Paying twice as much to a proven implementor is worth it if the lowest bidder fails to pull off the project. In that case your rate of return is going to be rather bad.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#108

Post by pinky07 »

kylixz wrote: post #58

As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

Have a look at Odoo, it integrates all you need in a single software: project management, forecast/resource planning, timesheet, bug tracker, integration with github, communication tools, ... (as well as integration with sales and billing/accounting):

https://www.odoo.com

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Odoo

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#109

Post by jenkstom »

xiaoma wrote: post #99
chadgeidel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is a "feature" not a "bug" due to regulation. I'm not saying it's bad or good (I understand why).

Someone asks what I manual processes I want automated, I tell them. Actually, automating "dealing with regulation in general" would be the most amazing thing ever.

Keep your fingers crossed for artificial intelligence. It's going to be a wild ride.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#110

Post by solipsism »

BjoernKW wrote: post #95
GuiA wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical) Sometimes I can work from home if…

> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken > Please tell, what's broken in my org? What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does. The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in…

Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.
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