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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?

#241
post #135

Creating Jira accounts and giving them access to the right projects. It's one of my jobs.

Python/Selenium is your friend. I did something similar in past ;)

Never checked, but I would expect it to have an API for that.

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by old and rich i mean exactly what you described -- a person who works as a manager, is middle aged, and makes a healthy six figure salary. that's "rich" to most people. the ceo in a 20M mansion certainly qualifies also.

A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4. And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager. In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need t…

i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people.

my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.

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

#243

Our 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?

It’s not entirely clear what kind of PDFs you are building, but I’d like to hear more.

I’ve done this for 13 years (Mostly Quark instead of InDesign, but the same tools and tricks).

Let me know if you want to work together.

rusty

[you can email, feepish @ google’s free email]

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

#244
onboarding new developers so they understand the essentials of our archeitecture and code base.

that includes writing up all the documentation. (what, you thought youd just create a sleek ui with the documentation provided by users? no! thats the hard part!)

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

#245
post #241
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python/Selenium is your friend. I did something similar in past ;)

Never checked, but I would expect it to have an API for that.

It's a library which you can use in many languages. I use it in Python to automate many sites.

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

#247
post #134

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…

Maybe 8-10 years ago there was a solution (an AD add-on/schema) I was looking at which set a password change frequency dependent on the password complexity - so a shitty 8 char, lowercase password would be acceptable but might be forced to change every 5 days. Drop a number and something uppercase in there and you might get 15/20 days. Drop a proper password and you might get 90-180 days.

I really wish that had taken off (or, more accurately I guess, had a real business case).

As an industry we tout one set of rules/principles but then enforce a slightly different version.

My main passwords (the ones I have to remember, and not store) are all over 20 characters long and maximally complex and I change them very, very rarely.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4. And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager. In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need t…

i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people. my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.

Everyone in the USA is rich to "most people", but context is important.

A small to mid sized startup manager is not (usually) rich enough to not need his job or care about job performance.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4. And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager. In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need t…

i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people. my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.

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