Eating
Soylent comes close
Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
151–160 of 258 posts
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#152A better version of this: http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live . The corporate bullshit generator. If it could also make powerpoints with nice graphs of merging product timelines, we could replace most of management.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#153Earlier 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.…
> 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. Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to s…
I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication.
One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#154Our company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files, and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online. I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience this in their organization and want to work together on something?
Check out pandoc. With it you could convert your documents into Markdown. Then use common *nix text-utils to merge the parts you want into a single file and then load it to InDesign. Check out this article (http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/) that inspired me to automate protocol specs extraction from Word documents (bluurgh).
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#155This 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.
By jump ship, you mean you now consult? or work for contract to fix/automate a company's process and move on?
As someone who's interested in this kind of work, do you have any advice?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#156Earlier 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.
How's that joke go? Everybody has a testing environment, some people are lucky enough to have a separate environment to run production in?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#157A related question, for my own interests... how able do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools? As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools t…
Feel free to email me to bounce some ideas around. I do this too. No bs or strings.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#158This 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.
what was your job? what did you automate?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#159Robotics & PLC Programing: Automate DEA state creation from CAD-Cell Descriptions, state-transfers and all-state-covered-automated-proofing- im so sick of all those forgotten states and the blame that usually gets shifted towards the moving actors aka robots.
Is the program based on finite state automata/machines?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to s…
I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything…
> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication.
Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically split team, it felt like two gigabit LANs joined by a dial-up WAN link, since the in-person communication was so much more effective.
Humans have literally spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person. That software has probably had more effort and refinement put into it than Slack, Skype, and Outlook put together.