I don't automate my job specifically (I'm a tech trainer, currently) but when I have optimized myself heavily using AutoHotKey. I spend most of my time these days between Slack and a bash prompt, and so I have created macros for myself. I lean on it pretty hard, and have cut down the amount of typing I do simply because I can now type "yyy" to get "Yup." and other silly optimizations that save me time and effort, mostly cumulatively. There are few big optimizations to be gained this way, but they add up. I also have entire phrases and paragraphs macro'd for the same reasons, as well as common typos. It doesn't sound like much but these things save me a lot of time.
Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#22My first job was doing restock for a small independent retailer. The only report we could print showing inventory was inclusive of all the items we had ever carried, regardless of current status. The software was very limited and there was not much in the way of filtering. The best you could do was break the report up into ranges by vendor. So my job was to go through the alphabet printing reports (e.g. "every item f…
Fascinating that they switched to a worse manual methodology.
I wonder if there is a big difference between: a) an automation system that only the coder understands b) an automation system that is transparent and accessible to managers
Many coders get to point (a) but the system can't actually be trusted or relied on if the original coder moves on.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#23Haven't totally automated my entire job but a small portion of what I do is configuring a fresh aws account some core services (SMTP, NTP, LDAP etc etc) and the associated VPC configurations before handing it off to the devs.
Wrote a pretty simple python script that takes some inputs, cidr range, account name, jira ticket etc, and sets up all the terraform, ansible groupvars, ssh key generation, secret storing and a few version control check-ins. Reduced the footprint from a few hours to literally less than one minute.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you delegate managing too?
Yes, but let me elaborate. I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable. If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you. Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too. I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had m…
Nice answer.
The bosses I have been most happy to work for had such systems in place.
Scrum/Agile (while sometimes derided) if well executed can help with this. If the team is 'self-organizing'.
Although you had little to do, I imagine you probably have to nudge things in the right direction every now and then.
Another aspect I think is important is hiring good people. Hire bad people and you will be a busy manager!
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#25My first job was doing restock for a small independent retailer. The only report we could print showing inventory was inclusive of all the items we had ever carried, regardless of current status. The software was very limited and there was not much in the way of filtering. The best you could do was break the report up into ranges by vendor. So my job was to go through the alphabet printing reports (e.g. "every item f…
Fascinating that they switched to a worse manual methodology. I wonder if there is a big difference between: a) an automation system that only the coder understands b) an automation system that is transparent and accessible to managers Many coders get to point (a) but the system can't actually be trusted or relied on if the original coder moves on.
I think they (management) viewed the job as a mostly grunt brute-force sort of problem. By automating parts of it I managed to save myself some time and hassle, but it's not like they told me to start taking half the day off or tried to leverage my talents elsewhere. Other than saving a lot of paper my system didn't really impact their bottom line in a way they could easily see. Even though I trained my successor on using my system neither they nor anyone else in the company was interested enough in computers to take on the ongoing maintenance of the system, despite being just a few hundred lines of perl that an amateur programmer could probably figure out (I was definitely an amateur programmer when I wrote it). When it came time to upgrade their POS software and the vendor refused to copy and reinstall my scripts they had no choice but to return to the vendor-approved process because they had no one technical who could own the system.
At the time I thought they were fools for abandoning such an improved process, but older-me sees the difficulty of the position I left them in. From their perspective they get roughly the same result from having some other cog do the grunt work and hiring a real-deal computer specialist at $$$/hour to be on call to fix problems has the potential to cost much more.
They may have been foolish after all, they ended up going out of business. I think their biggest mistake was allowing their POS vendor to basically lock them in (by being unable to export any of their data in any convenient way) and not demanding/being willing to pay for the sorts of changes I was hacking together to just be incorporated into the official system.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#26I deal quite a lot with JIRA at my job, as this is a corporate tool. Often, I get questions about the content of these JIRA issues, by issue key: either orally ("hey, what about PRJ-12345 ?"), or in plain text format in email, i.e. "PRJ-12345" _without_ the hyperlink of course. That could result in going to a https://jira.domain.tld/browse/PRJ-12345 , or even https://anotherjira.domain.tld/browse/QSK-54321 (yes we ha…
I do this by using the JIRA search integration with a prefix, and I have one prefix per relevant JIRA instance I have to talk to. 'j PRJ-12345' is what goes in the search bar and I zip right there.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you delegate managing too?
Yes, but let me elaborate. I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable. If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you. Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too. I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had m…
> it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you.
What if the person leaves the org?
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but let me elaborate. I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable. If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you. Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too. I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had m…
> it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you. What if the person leaves the org?
In the longer term that is usually a good thing. If they’re the only person who fixes things, that also implies the correct knowledge sharing isn’t happening.
We strive to remove any single point of failure from a hardware point of view, and for me, people are no different
The only exception to this is sales, it’s usually your top biller who you can’t promote - because you want them out there selling. Luckily sales people usually respond to money rather than titles so it’s important to reward those efforts. It’s why some sales people earn more than their managers and 6 figures+ is the norm for good sales people.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but let me elaborate. I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable. If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you. Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too. I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had m…
Nice answer. The bosses I have been most happy to work for had such systems in place. Scrum/Agile (while sometimes derided) if well executed can help with this. If the team is 'self-organizing'. Although you had little to do, I imagine you probably have to nudge things in the right direction every now and then. Another aspect I think is important is hiring good people. Hire bad people and you will be a busy manager!
Absolutely, if you truly want to automate your day job, you need the best people propping you up.
Luckily I did, and if I didn’t I removed the rot fast - that can spread and really make your life difficult.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#30I am a trader. A million different factors drive commodity prices, and their significance ebbs and flows over time in unpredictable ways. So typically you'll have a spreadsheet that monitors one of these occasional factors. You run it 98 days in a row and it's irrelevant. This lulls you into complacency on the 99th day, where you don't look at it, and on the 100th day suddenly it becomes relevant again and you didn't notice it in time because you hadn't checked the spreadsheet.
So my agenda has been to move the analysis corpus into Python, directly talking to Bloomberg and other data sources. Then these things run automatically and can flag me when they're significant. Rather than trusting me to check scores of spreadsheets and wading through endless True Negative results.
When I started working, Excel was the powertool that allowed a junior to outperform dinosaurs using calculators, and make an outsize impact. My feeling now is that Python and similar tools are the equivalent of my Excel 20+ years ago, and Excel is the 'desk calculator'.