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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?

#211

Post by eli_gottlieb »

beamatronic wrote: post #208
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #188

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). 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?

I'm sorry, yes. $500k for a decent small condo, but that'll be a down-payment on a decent house.

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

#212

Post by crystalPalace »

pknerd wrote: post #24

I automated entire process of applying jobs on Glassdoor by using Python and Selenium. Already sold to a few students.

This sounds interesting and potentially very useful. Would you mind sharing a link to your project or giving a more in-depth description?

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

#213

Post by CaptSpify »

bryondowd wrote: post #210
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.

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…

I used to work for a company basically copying and pasting data from one excel spreadsheet to the other. I didn't know how to program yet, but I knew there had to be a better way, so I learned macros. I spent ~20 minutes a day working. I worked part-time and when I left, my boss commented on how I got done more than all of the full-timers there.

I personally think the biggest benefit to every company would be to drill into people's heads how software should automate your day to day work. Software people think that way, but most employees don't.

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

#214

Post by 33W »

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 don't have to get that specific with time, just hours worked, but I use IFTTT to track the hours I am physically at the office. Beyond that I'm pretty good about remembering work done offiste or at home.

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

#215

Post by gigatexal »

gigatexal wrote: post #183

Database changes. We can't use database projects just yet but I'd like to find a way to automate it much the same way that you can apt-get install things.

if anyone has any suggestions about dependency management and automated deployables in the MSSQL world I'd be open

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

#216

Post by beachstartup »

Johnny555 wrote: post #201
beachstartup wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

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

#217

Post by SubuSS »

hosh wrote: post #174
DashRattlesnake wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically spl…

That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal. Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. I do thin…

I would try purely emailing / chatting with someone and compare that against the relationship you build with someone who is right there. You probably are not going to be available on video, so there is a lot of transcoding happening between you and your email / IM etc. and that loses a bunch of info. Not to mention the lack of impromptu hallway conversations and general social bonding.

It is the same problem we face with remote offices - closer is considerably better unless we figure a way to be omni-visible in a better way. I don't think a good enough solution exists yet. It doesn't help that people associate working from home with laxer schedules / attire / locations etc. which also interferes with the omni-visible thing.

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

#218

Post by geofft »

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…

> 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.

But (as 'eli_gottlieb pointed out) the only people who can do that are those who can afford to relocate to San Francisco or perhaps a few other places, and the initial cost of that is increasing commensurate with demand.

We have, in the tech industry, found a very good way of creating interesting and well-paying jobs that will outlast a lot of the coming automation. We have so many of those jobs, and they keep being created, such that, as you say, workers are in an unusually good negotiating position compared to other industries.

Meanwhile, the housing supply in San Francisco is much closer to fixed; of course if they don't decide to build housing it's very fixed, but even so there's only so much land there. So if the demand for workers continues to be high, the price of housing will continue to increase.

It is a class issue to extend these benefits to people who otherwise couldn't afford the initial investment to relocate to San Francisco in this market and the emergency fund to keep living in San Francisco past unicorn-collapse-of-the-week while looking for new work. If we figure out how to increase supply to keep up with what looks like unquenchable and long-term demand, we'll be solving a major crisis for thousands of small towns that aren't San Francisco.

I don't need remote work for myself; I have the good fortune to be a 10-minute (NYC) subway ride from my tech job. I want remote work for all the people who could be my coworkers.

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

#219

Post by m-p-3 »

Delegating some rights to some managers in Active Directory. For example allow them to add or remove access to specific groups in a way that is intuitive to them.

It would allow us to focus on other stuff, and they would be able to quickly grant access without waiting after us at all.

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

#220

Post by BjoernKW »

gigatexal wrote: post #215
gigatexal wrote: post #183

Database changes. We can't use database projects just yet but I'd like to find a way to automate it much the same way that you can apt-get install things.

if anyone has any suggestions about dependency management and automated deployables in the MSSQL world I'd be open

It's called Flyway: https://flywaydb.org/
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