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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?

#191

Post by xiaoma »

pyrophane wrote: post #181
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.

One thing I've noticed in this thread and in other HN comments is a change in the way people talk about remote work. What used to be considered a perk seems to have turned into a right, and even a class issue (the corporate masters oppressing the workers). Personally, I don't really buy it. There are trade-offs with remote workers. They are harder to collaborate with, and they generally require more process to manage…

>"Tech workers today are doing alright. We make six-figure salaries, have our health care paid for, and, because we are in demand at them moment, are frequently pampered by our employers."

You may and I may, but the vast majority of tech workers do not make six-figure salaries. Ironically, you may be insulated from that fact due to limited geographic mobility in terms of professional life.

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

#192

Post by xiaoma »

hosh wrote: post #153
DashRattlesnake wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

That's weird. It's totally normal for couples to run mom and pop shops together. Most businesses historically (and maybe even up through today) have been run by families. It's human. It's natural.

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

#194

Post by majewsky »

douche wrote: post #187

Daily standup meetings. I'd build a robot, tape a picture of my face onto it, and program it to tromp over to the conference room, zone out for fifteen minutes as everyone goes around the circle like it's kindergarten show-and-tell, then read my commit messages for the day before, the titles of the tickets I've picked out to work on today, and finish with "No roadblocks". It'd save me an hour a day in interruptions a…

We recently switched to holding the daily standup in Slack, using a simple

  /remind Time for the daily standup! Say what matters and where you need help. everyday at 10 AM
(Before, the meeting was in voice chat, not a physical standup since we're at multiple locations.)

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

#195

Post by nikolaj »

knieveltech wrote: post #193

Time tracking. Like, the physical act of figuring out how much time was spent on X task for Y client and then logging that in. And no, cheesy little desktop apps that provide a UI and timers for this are not the answer I'm looking for.

The challenge we faced and still face is more making it clear on how to classify time to the rank and file team (I work in a digital agency).

We are pretty much ~90% now.. ..some lessons learned:

1. Just have people track rough time per day (a couple hours here, a couple hours there), but make sure it is done daily. The resolution will hold up when you analyze it. What seems rough each day, ends up being quite accurate over weeks/months.

2. Don't be strict about budgets AND ask for perfect accuracy in time tracking. You are offloading the responsibility of good estimates to the team, and boxing them in.. screwing your long term job costing.

3. Build a dashboard that summarizes project / account status and is as useful and obvious for Project Managers & Leadership, and they will become advocates in promoting good time tracking hygiene. (I guess this is a basic truism in general.. build systems where the best way to use it is the easiest way.. )

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

#196

Post by majewsky »

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.

Is it really "phone screen" rather than "phone screening"? I was wondering for a bit why (or how) you would automate the screen of someone's phone.

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

#197

Post by beachstartup »

Johnny555 wrote: post #93
beachstartup wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices. the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're ol…

The manager at my company that keeps this "no full-time telecommute" policy is in his mid-40's. And he's not rich. Well compensated, yes, but not 20 million dollar home in Atherton and a Tesla rich, more like "drives a BMW 4 series from his Peninsula Condo", but he's certainly not rich enough to not need to work. So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".

i'd bet that isn't his policy, he's just the mouthpiece.

but that's just like, my opinion, man.

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

#198

Post by atmosx »

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.

JIRA is terrible in my opinion but has evolved and many (most?) small, medium and big software houses use it.

There are more alternatives than I can count did you look elsewhere? For some reason people continue using JIRA and investing time and money on it. JIRA has an awful interface, is unnecessarily complicated, has a learning curve (when it shouldn't) and you actually need to know SQL in order to create helpful views for trivial things (e.g. have a proper view of hours/projects worked per week).

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

#199

Post by atmosx »

ju-st wrote: post #78

Ordering of stuff from central IT. 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. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!

Seems like you guys should choose more wisely who you're doing business with.

There's no real excuse for delivering a dev server in 4 vm in months. You sure he ordered one server and not say a dedicated cluster of 4.000 servers?

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

#200

Post by sofaofthedamned »

user5994461 wrote: post #161
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice, thank you!
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