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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?

#141

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

wellsthrowaway wrote: post #89
iamdave wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. Pardon my language: holy shit. How large is your organization??? All I do at work is build dev environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking dev environment ??? F…

At Wells Fargo, I'd kill for a dev environment in general. We only do production-classified-as-dev. And 4 months? Slow down! We're six months...if you're lucky.

At Wells Fargo don't you kill if there is a sales incentive program to kill?

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

#142

Post by p_ronto »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #96
brazzledazzle wrote: post #64

This isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the hardest time getting traction. I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they…

Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life! It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.

Sweet! I've been automating my own tasks for years and I'd love to do it as a full time job.

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

#143

Post by anacleto »

andrewfong wrote: post #132

I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this: * Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form". * Tag fo…

Holy. Crap.

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

#144

Post by ajford »

andrewfong wrote: post #132

I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this: * Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form". * Tag fo…

That sounds.... painful...

Totally does seem like something that can be nicely automated to some level. Even document tracking and associated metadata (like a list of participants and status of signatures per page, approval of document, etc) would help.

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

#145

Post by rch »

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.

I recently started using WakaTime myself, with plans to integrate with Xero some weekend. I just need an intermediate interface to adjust invoice labels and review billable time. Something similar could work for internal projects - maybe try to get an on-prem WT instance.

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

#146

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

GuiA wrote: post #66
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

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…

Every situation is obviously different, but I've been there. Our equipment had a build cost of just under $100k when were at the pre-production stages.

The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem.

Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware.

Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)

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

#147

Post by dbmikus »

Raphmedia wrote: post #46
migueltarga wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, but I'll need to automate my mug too..

Caffeine pills dispenser at your desk. Everyday at 9h it gives you a pill.

Just hook me up with an IV drip and call it a day.

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

#148

Post by p_ronto »

MooBah wrote: post #105

Interviewing and hiring interaction for seasonal workers. We hire tons and tons of IC's two times per year. We run into bottlenecks due to time on the phone during interviews. If there way a consistent way to screen talent it would save us a ton of time.

I've never used it myself (I'm just a programmer) but perhaps Workable (https://www.workable.com/) might be what you're looking for.

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

#149

Post by deedubaya »

rch wrote: post #104
deedubaya wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't, sorry.

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

#150

Post by pythonaut_16 »

ajford wrote: post #127
digitalsushi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left a place a year ago where I ran the lab. I remember the satisfaction of my replacement converting all the VMs into "real computers", and then triplicating the VLAN network I had with layer 1 replacements. I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would have gotten rid of the VPN server.

So what's the benefit of VMs? I mean, I understand the underlying benefits of isolation and such, but for things that easily fit on small servers (i.e. single/double core small procs with I've gone both ways before, but I seem to be on the other end of the spectrum and prefer small cheap hardware over VMs when possible. Not trying to argue or anything, just curious for someone else's point of view.

Those small things are actually the ideal use case for VMs.

Imagine wanting to spin up a new server so you go and buy that small tower, bring it back, and hook it up.

Now imagine using a VM where you literally go onto a webpage and click a button to provision the same amount of resources.

Additionally, most hardware sits idle most of the time. When you're using tons of towers, it's likely that most of them will sit under 50% load 90+% of the time. With a VM setup, the hypervisor can balance that better so you can get better utilization of your hardware.

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