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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?

#201

Post by Johnny555 »

beachstartup wrote: post #197
Johnny555 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He put the policy in place when he was hired (before then it was a more loose "come to the office if/when you want to", which worked for a 20 person company, but doesn't work so well with a 50 or 100 person company), along with more regular working hours (flex hours are fine but everyone is generally expected to be in the office between 10am - 3pm to allow meetings to be scheduled)

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

#202

Post by hosh »

xiaoma wrote: post #192
hosh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that it is normal for mom and pop shops. It is also normal for pre-modern dynamics: tribal (hunter-gatherer), family farms, etc, though the case can be made that there is some physical separation.

I've also seen co-living/co-working spaces where couples live and work with other family groups within the same building.

However, I also think that the Millennial generation did not generally grow up with this. Remote work also adds a different dimension too, if each partner of the couple are working with different teams remotely, rather than working together, and each partner does not have visibility into what the other partner is doing all day.

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

#203

Post by BjoernKW »

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…

Remote work is not a perk nor is it a privilege only a certain class of people should feel entitled to.

Commuting has become absolutely insane. Mandating people to sit around in an office for a condsiderable amount of their time regardless of if they produce anything of value is equally insane.

Remote work is a solution to many current societal problems (not the least of which is pollution).

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

#204

Post by jwho82 »

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.

I built my own SaaS tool to track my hours I worked when I used to do freelancing. I can create various tasks under the client's project and then log my hours.

I can then create reports to see how much time I spent on each task for each of my clients. Or even better, I can take those hours and create an invoice out of all my uninvoiced hours and email it right to my clients.

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

#205

Post by NumberCruncher »

iamwil wrote: post #158
NumberCruncher wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nothing fancy. I was in the BI department of a big telco and I inherited a "next best offer" system. It was extracting data from the DWH, doing some scorecard based optimization, picking the right product for the right customer and sending the results to the call centers. The data extraction part was a PL/SQL framework and the optimization was done by a SAS tool. The system was really slow: after a change in the parameters it took 48 hours to recalculate the results. Unfortunately the product line managers loved to change the parameters on the day of the data delivery and my team lead couldn't say "no". So after a couple of month I ended up doing almost everything manually in order to keep the product line managers happy and to keep the deadlines. Practically I took the system step by step to pieces and I worked with standalone SQL scripts, like back in the 90's. After a lot of people were fired and my team lead resigned I was left alone for two months. There was practically nobody to require urgent changes so I used my time to rewrite almost everything from scratch, included the features the product line managers wanted and reduced my monthly workload from 25 days to 3. And I didn't tell about it.

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

#206

Post by beamatronic »

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.

Same here. If I could avoid driving to and from the office I would get 2 hours back each day.

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

#208

Post by beamatronic »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #188
pyrophane wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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). Well, housing in areas with tech jobs has gotten really expensive. As in, $500k USD minimum for a decent house. It's insane , and remote work is the easiest solu…

I think you meant to say $500k is a decent down payment on a house, yes?

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

#209

Post by beamatronic »

atmosx wrote: post #198
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 v…

The earlier versions (3.x) were simpler, yet still customizable, and great for a lot of tasks.

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

#210

Post by bryondowd »

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.

This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman-could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from an HTML document, cutting out portions that weren't supposed to be there with scissors, and then photocopying the cut up page to get a final report to mail out to the client. I'll let that sink in...

It didn't take me long to start editing the HTML document directly to skip the physical work (someone before me had figured this much out, but hadn't been able to teach anyone else well enough to pass it along when he left, just a vague rumor that it had happened). Then I went ahead and made a crude script to edit the documents automatically, ultimately turning an hour long job into a 2 minute one with cleaner looking results. Ended up spending a lot of time at that job just watching TV.

My next job after that was all about automating manual processes, but with less down time since I was automating other people's jobs, rather than my own. I think I preferred the former.

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