Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 258 posts

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

#161

Post by user5994461 »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #133
Johnny555 wrote: post #18

I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.

Good idea. I'm an IT contractor. My last contract was at a defence company, so I understand needing to be on their network and it was only 25 minutes away. The current one is anything from 70 to 90 minutes each way and they have nothing on site, it's all in the cloud. But they insist we turn up in the office. It's utterly ridiculous. I would happily split the difference on travelling and work an extra hour per day (i…

> I need to see if Gitlab are hiring for devops / sysadmins as they've got the right idea.

Gitlab just posted in the who's hiring thread, so I guess that's a yes :D

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

#162

Post by enraged_camel »

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.

>>Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!

Many years ago there was a post on an obscure online forum about some guy who hired virtual assistants do to 100% of his work for him for a tiny, tiny fraction of his salary. I don't remember the details, but he would basically go to work and do nothing all day. After a while he started staying at home, and no one at his company even noticed.

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

#163

Post by user5994461 »

ajford wrote: post #134
herghost wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 90 day password thing is pretty universal in my experience, but to be fair NIST has only very recently changed their recommendation on this so you can understand business' reticence to ease off on it. As for the multiple internal sites and servers thing...well, from a security point of view I totally agree with the requirement for separate passwords but it sounds like you're in need of a proper identity managemen…

I'm SO glad NIST put out that new recommendation. I really hate the whole 90 day thing. Argued for days (friendly argument) with one of my co-workers who was partly responsible for our implementation of the 90 day rule on how it wasn't necessarily better, and often lead to stupid passwords with very dumb/simple patterns. Even with the new NIST rec, I can't get him to back off on it, so sadly we'll be stuck on that fo…

It's only a DRAFT at the moment. It may take a while to be finished.

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

#164

Post by user5994461 »

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.

The only easy to use and reasonable tool is trello. You can keep a list of tasks but it's not very practical to see who's doing what.

---

A good practise is to request people (not just developers) to send a weekly email to manager(s). (Keep it concise AND bullet points MUST be understandable by anyone NOT familiar with their projects).

   Major news: single line (if any)

   Done: ...

   Next week: ...
---

And then. Have each team make a google doc. Write down goals/targets for the next month(s) and who's responsible for executing it.

Teams update the document once a month and email it company wide, open to comments.

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

#165

Post by user5994461 »

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.

How do you guys manage to do anything?

Are you even trying?

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

#166

Post by aiisahik »

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…

100% accurate. I did the same and also quit.

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

#167

Post by kgilpin »

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.

Rotation is a really interesting subject which has true security benefits. Unfortunately manual rotation is a PITA. What works better is to have an automated system rotating the credentials, and then you fetch the credentials as-needed by authenticating with an identity and access management system.

For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators (https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation) for rotating things like SSH keys, database passwords, and cloud credentials. In each case, the rotator changes the credential in the backend (e.g. changes the public key in the authorized_keys file), and then stores the new credential behind an access-controlled and audited API where only you (and other authorized roles) can fetch it.

Disclosure: I am CTO of Conjur.

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

#168

Post by user5994461 »

noir_lord wrote: post #37
ythn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my work we just have a Jenkins job that fires the current CEO first thing in the morning

How about a script that does sentiment analysis on the twitter stream for the company and then automatically fires the CEO? If it works we could apply it to the US presidency ;).

Glassdoor has a rating on the CEO. Could use that.

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

#169

Post by romaniv »

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…

This sounds painful, but it also sounds fairly typical. Except usually such work is split between several different people/positions.

No one thinks about it, but one of the main reasons this kind of stuff stays manual is because the typical tools people are using to do it have no (good) integration points. Automating the entire process would require writing a large and complicated system. Automating parts of the process one step at a time is extremely difficult, because implementing most of the individual "steps" will require creating tons of complex integrations, and not result in any immediate productivity gains. Such incremental changes disrupt what people are currently doing and possibly create more stuff for them to do in the short run.

For example:

"Fill in all the blanks, remove brackets, etc."

This is a perfect use case for machine learning or even a simple rule-based system. If you had all the data in one place, it probably would be trivial to automate. However, getting all the data from various systems, converting it to a standard representation, then converting fixed data to target formats and putting it into target systems is orders of magnitude more difficult than the actual corrections/changes.

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

#170

Post by digler999 »

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…

thats like how a compiler works, except for english word docs.
Post reply on HN