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It's Always the Process, Stupid

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#121
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, I have seen process stifle above average people or so called “rockstars”. The thing is, the bigger your reliance on process, the more you need these people to swoop in and fill in the cracks, save the day when things go horribly wrong, and otherwise be the glue that keeps things running (or perhaps oil for the machine is more apt). This is a case of bad process. No process is perfect, but the who…

Very often paperwork is the necessary process. I’ve seen multiple engineering teams who used to accept essentially any customer escalation, for example, until they found themselves essentially being DDoSed by poorly explained tickets filed at much too high of a priority. Now they have forms that customer-facing folks have to fill out explaining in detail what’s going wrong, why an escalation is required, and naming t…

Paperwork is a tool, not a process. Maybe the right process does involve paperwork, maybe it doesn't. Further, even if the right process involves paperwork, it doesn't mean that adding more paperwork has improved the process.

And it's important to note that our opinions on what is slow are often biased by our time with poor process where things seemed to be getting done quickly because they weren't being done properly. You can cook chicken in a fraction of the time if you don't check whether or not it's reached temperature; a process that prevents salmonella is slower, but it's not slow.

Your example is a case of shifting from bad paperwork to better paperwork. Tickets were being filled out, but not with the required information and the wrong people were labelling things poorly. The newer process involves information that should most definitely be recorded on a good ticket. People might complain about having to go through the process, but is there any actual evidence that it has introduced excessive delay to legitimate high priority tickets? My guess would be that actual high priority tickets are the ones you most want a detailed explanation of what's going on, and the ones that should be immediately reviewed by a senior person to verify accuracy.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#122
post #106

I have always found writing documentation to be incredibly helpful for clarifying my thinking. It prevents me from doing mental hand-waving around details, and often times writing down a process that I have done a thousand times is the thing that makes me realize how I can cut steps or improve it. I'm now in the process of trying to hand off chunks of the work I do to run my business to AI (both to save time but also…

Question: could you use something like (example) Selenium to perform some or all of those pre-LLM tasks?

I could (I mean in theory - practically, I'm not technically proficient enough to do so), and in fact one of the most promising web browsing agents I've tested is director.ai, which just writes Stagehand code on the fly to achieve the objectives you give it. Unfortunately it can't be invoked via API yet, so doesn't work for my use case.

Honestly, it takes such a relatively small amount of time that it makes sense to just do it myself until there's an agent that can easily handle it; I'm really only spending time trying to automate it now as a test of AI capabilities. If I actually wanted to get it automated tomorrow, the most time-efficient way to do that would just be to involve a VA from somewhere cheap for the work I'm doing.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved. The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving thems…

Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on. I do agree on execs congratulating the…

Sorry, but the multiple colleagues I've lost through multiple rounds of layoffs were not simply "people thrown at a problem". They were helping keep the lights on, which is now my responsibility for no increase in pay.
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