3 ms·
Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theo
by jwally 8y ago
Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks.
The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
- jwally 8y agoFollowing up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
- gnychis 8y agoPlease see my response! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835