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It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. In large/high

It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. In large/high stakes settings, being risk averse and knowing the limits of your understanding are very good traits. Imho, this IT guy did his job, more or less. What was the testing plan for this AHK script? What edge cases were considered? Unit tests, integ tests.... was there a preprod environment for it? A trial run? Can you safely roll back if / when bad data shows up? What's the retry strategy for network or up/downstream fault tolerance? Is there alarm or monitor coverage for bad scenarios? I'm not saying a bunch of people typing are error prone, if that's your take on my post. I just think that there's a VERY different set of risks (and therefore mitigations) between a distributed manual process and a large scale automated one. The IT guy might have on some level recognized this and judged the possible loss to be way more than the "guaranteed loss" of the not-broken current process. If I were an IT guy with low level skills, I'd be proud of myself for making that hard call.

jimmaswell 6y ago
You absolutely do not need all that red tape to use a script written for a well-known program. The IT guy just didn't care to spend the teensiest mental energy to save people an enormous amount of work. "No" is the easiest, safest call possible, not a hard call at all. People like him should be shamed.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  Spoken like someone who's never caused a prod outage at a real company, I guess. I'd say that - outside of some startup or small company that has few (or no?) users - the cautious approach is right. The IT guy knew that he was a podunk pissant warden of a very, very small portion of very, very large organization (an org of a few hundred people is basically nothing compared to the vastness of many oil companies) and that the value that his org provided was compromised by this automated approach, without knowing how to mitigate that compromise. He made the right call, assuming he was just there as a bulwark against exactly this.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    There's no "prod outage" here. It was a data entry script.
    - WaxProlix 6y ago
      What happens with that data, though? Is this a non production data entry job?
      - airstrike 6y ago
        Same that would happen with the manual typing process. The workflow either includes a process for auditing data quality or it doesn't, regardless of how it was entered in.
        WaxProlix 6y ago
        Okay, is that a manual process or not? Why not start with automating the testing and not the entry?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Because testing is probably not done at all. And even if it was, it isn't the bottleneck in this story.
  - jsharf 6y ago
    It's a data entry script. If it fails they just do their job the old way until the guy fixes it. It's typing text into forms. Just make everyone do things the "old way" once a week so they still know how to do it if the script ever fails.
    - WaxProlix 6y ago
      Okay, but after a week (or two or whatever), how do you rectify the issue you found? It's easy to say get those people back and have them start entering again. What about the customers whose information was inaccurate, the resources that were misallocated, etc? Do you think data entry is done for fun? At AWS we use massive metrics and piles of data to decide what's right; why would an oil company be different, just because their metrics are collated by hand from smaller oil wells into larger spreadsheets or whatever? "By Hand" doesn't mean "totally without value", that's completely wild. Does your super low opinion of data entry people cloud your vision of their value? There's not been a response to my question of how you reconcile things after this script messes up for the first time; how does that happen? What's the DR plan? if you have real business and real clients working on this data, tell me what the plan is; it shouldn't be that hard.
- i1856511 6y ago
  "Shamed", come on. You don't ask the guy in charge of maintenance to validate new tools. That person's job revolves around stability, and they will always make the safest possible call. If a new tool is needed, a steering committee of some kind should be used, and IT will be one part of that.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    Where I work, IT in general has little say about what tool I use on my PC. They do periodic scans to check that I don't have any known unsafe tools, or tools that are known not to be OK without a formal license. But otherwise, as long as I'm not violating a license and not circumventing my virus scanner, I can use whatever tool I want. Work would come to a crawl if IT had to validate every single tool used in our company. The notion that this is within IT's scope is flawed. It's the equivalent of asking a government agency to vet every single product that is produced by any company for consumer safety in the whole of the United States, and then rejecting most of them because of the lack of resources to thoroughly vet them.
    - WaxProlix 6y ago
      Would they get in trouble when someone used an automation tool that submitted hundreds of thousands of empty or even worse completely incorrect records, with no reconciliation plan? If so, then they're completely right to stop some novice programmer from bringing their scripts to bear. There's no reason to take that risk if they have the funding for the current human solution. Bring it up to the superiors and pitch it, talk to some devs. I've seen groups lose hundreds of millions of dollars when one of these excel vbscript python enthusiast AHK things go off the rails. It's a mess, and - again - risk aversion is the most reasonable stance from a business standpoint. He's not a hacker founder, he's a business IT manager. Edit to say, it sounds like you work at a company with <500 engineers, maybe even <500 employees total. That's fine! It's good even, but it's not an experience that's easily exported to the realm of Actual Business, at least not exactly. As a consultant, I've had billion dollar companies that need the fast fix (python script with a csv datastore to keep some account info or whatever) and I've worked for companies where this sort of approach would get you insta-canned. They're both right enough, but assuming one size fits all is absolutely crazy. It sounds like the mega oil corp above was the latter, at least to me.
BeetleB 6y ago
> It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. Once again, if I wrote my own Python script they would not be involved, and my Python script is as error prone as using AHK. Think of AHK as similar to a compiler + linker. By rejecting AHK because someone can write a program that could screw things up, you might as well just prevent people from writing scripts and compiling programs. > I'm not saying a bunch of people typing are error prone, if that's your take on my post. I just think that there's a VERY different set of risks (and therefore mitigations) between a distributed manual process and a large scale automated one. You've essentially argued that IT should oppose any automation that is not thoroughly tested. And how will they determine how well it is tested? Do they have those skills? Where I work, IT is more concerned about security (viruses, theft, etc), licensing, and things that can break the machine. They don't prevent people from using APIs to mass edit databases as long as you do it to data you own or have permission from the owner. They don't own the data, so you're free to screw it up if you're careless. Ensuring my program is bug free and well tested is the job of my team/org/data owners, not IT. You're merely pointing out that this IT person has been given more power than his skills warrant.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  Okay but if you have an organization whose lead of IT isn't capable of verifying some automation - be it AHK or Python or VisualBasic or F# or haskell or whatever - then it's fine for them to say 'no'. You can go over their head, and that's also okay. Or ask them to bring in someone who's an expert in the technology you're using. > You've essentially argued that IT should oppose any automation that is not thoroughly tested. And how will they determine how well it is tested? Do they have those skills? In large scale, business critical applications? Yes. All everything should be thoroughly tested and/or canaried, with several levels of validation before production releases. > You're merely pointing out that this IT person has been given more power than his skills warrant. I think I'm pointing out that his job is to be a safeguard against rogue wanna-be programmers whose ability to destroy things far outstrips their ability to test for things (or even think about edge cases). If that's true, they've done a fantastic job.
i1856511 6y ago
Exactly. A lot of programmers, or programming enthusiasts, thumb their nose at IT staff who naturally push back on stuff like this. In their mind, to play devil's advocate, they're seeing IT as unnecessarily burdensome, and getting in the way of automation. The IT staff are probably naturally welcoming to the general idea of automation. However, to elevate something up from an off the cuff script that's described as "depraved" to the level of an actual business tool that can be relied upon, is a HUGE time and money sink. Validation is a very complex problem as you have described. This is the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware. If business management isn't setting this as a priority for IT, and if IT is already overwhelmed with the "known" quantities of work, then it just isn't practical to officially adopt. I see it like this: It takes 1 "effort point" for a data entry staffer to manually enter the information tediously. It takes 10 effort points for the same staffer to write the AHK script to automate it. (Good for the staffer, assuming there's no flaws, and their reward is a longer lunch break.) To truly validate an automation as a business tool would take something on the scale of 150 to 200 effort points and involve lots of conversation - assuming there even is a framework for new tool validation established that can be used. IT knew this and made the right call. If company management wants to adopt a new tool without research and validation, that can be reckless.
keeganpoppen 6y ago
why even have programmers if they have to convince someone that doesn't understand what they're doing that it's been implemented correctly? the justification of an ignorant person not understanding it (assuming, i guess(?), that they are also incapable of learning it, apparently?) and thus not allowing a massively more efficient improvement to be put in place as somehow a job well done seems crazy to me. (at least in theory managers are supposed to provide something to the table). well, i guess to all the other programmers who, like me, leave any and all places like this. i acknowledge that not everyone is wired the same way, but it just seems blatantly obvious that the left hand wants "innovation" and the right hand... does stuff like this.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Everyone wants innovation, but no one wants responsibility. So anything can go as long as someone else signs off on it.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. In large/high stakes settings, being risk averse and knowing the limits of your understanding are very good traits. Which raises the question, why does such a person even have the authority to make calls on what software can or can not be used within the company? You shouldn't have the right to make these kind of decisions without basic understanding of how software works (beyond "I click stuff and things happen, magic!"). > What was the testing plan for this AHK script? What edge cases were considered? Unit tests, integ tests.... was there a preprod environment for it? A trial run? Can you safely roll back if / when bad data shows up? What's the retry strategy for network or up/downstream fault tolerance? Is there alarm or monitor coverage for bad scenarios? Without understanding of how software is built, those are questions the IT guy can't possibly ask thoughtfully. They become a mere checkbox ticking exercise. And most of them don't apply anyway. > If I were an IT guy with low level skills, I'd be proud of myself for making that hard call. It's not a hard call. It's the easy call. The ass-covering, responsibility-mitigating, work-minimizing, consequence-free default deny call.
silasdavis 6y ago
Some good points. Some more context: this made a manual process semi manual. You still had to enter the data and the target programs still flew around (on screen) on the background. I think the risk profile was similar. > Unit tests, integ tests.... was there a preprod environment for it? A trial run? Can you safely roll back if / when bad data shows up? Nothing of the sort :) But... Let the adequate be the enemy of the less awful?

jimmaswell 6y ago

You absolutely do not need all that red tape to use a script written for a well-known program. The IT guy just didn't care to spend the teensiest mental energy to save people an enormous amount of work. "No" is the easiest, safest call possible, not a hard call at all. People like him should be shamed.

WaxProlix 6y ago
Spoken like someone who's never caused a prod outage at a real company, I guess. I'd say that - outside of some startup or small company that has few (or no?) users - the cautious approach is right. The IT guy knew that he was a podunk pissant warden of a very, very small portion of very, very large organization (an org of a few hundred people is basically nothing compared to the vastness of many oil companies) and that the value that his org provided was compromised by this automated approach, without knowing how to mitigate that compromise. He made the right call, assuming he was just there as a bulwark against exactly this.
- airstrike 6y ago
  There's no "prod outage" here. It was a data entry script.
  - WaxProlix 6y ago
    What happens with that data, though? Is this a non production data entry job?
    - airstrike 6y ago
      Same that would happen with the manual typing process. The workflow either includes a process for auditing data quality or it doesn't, regardless of how it was entered in.
      - WaxProlix 6y ago
        Okay, is that a manual process or not? Why not start with automating the testing and not the entry?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Because testing is probably not done at all. And even if it was, it isn't the bottleneck in this story.
- jsharf 6y ago
  It's a data entry script. If it fails they just do their job the old way until the guy fixes it. It's typing text into forms. Just make everyone do things the "old way" once a week so they still know how to do it if the script ever fails.
  - WaxProlix 6y ago
    Okay, but after a week (or two or whatever), how do you rectify the issue you found? It's easy to say get those people back and have them start entering again. What about the customers whose information was inaccurate, the resources that were misallocated, etc? Do you think data entry is done for fun? At AWS we use massive metrics and piles of data to decide what's right; why would an oil company be different, just because their metrics are collated by hand from smaller oil wells into larger spreadsheets or whatever? "By Hand" doesn't mean "totally without value", that's completely wild. Does your super low opinion of data entry people cloud your vision of their value? There's not been a response to my question of how you reconcile things after this script messes up for the first time; how does that happen? What's the DR plan? if you have real business and real clients working on this data, tell me what the plan is; it shouldn't be that hard.
i1856511 6y ago
"Shamed", come on. You don't ask the guy in charge of maintenance to validate new tools. That person's job revolves around stability, and they will always make the safest possible call. If a new tool is needed, a steering committee of some kind should be used, and IT will be one part of that.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Where I work, IT in general has little say about what tool I use on my PC. They do periodic scans to check that I don't have any known unsafe tools, or tools that are known not to be OK without a formal license. But otherwise, as long as I'm not violating a license and not circumventing my virus scanner, I can use whatever tool I want. Work would come to a crawl if IT had to validate every single tool used in our company. The notion that this is within IT's scope is flawed. It's the equivalent of asking a government agency to vet every single product that is produced by any company for consumer safety in the whole of the United States, and then rejecting most of them because of the lack of resources to thoroughly vet them.
  - WaxProlix 6y ago
    Would they get in trouble when someone used an automation tool that submitted hundreds of thousands of empty or even worse completely incorrect records, with no reconciliation plan? If so, then they're completely right to stop some novice programmer from bringing their scripts to bear. There's no reason to take that risk if they have the funding for the current human solution. Bring it up to the superiors and pitch it, talk to some devs. I've seen groups lose hundreds of millions of dollars when one of these excel vbscript python enthusiast AHK things go off the rails. It's a mess, and - again - risk aversion is the most reasonable stance from a business standpoint. He's not a hacker founder, he's a business IT manager. Edit to say, it sounds like you work at a company with <500 engineers, maybe even <500 employees total. That's fine! It's good even, but it's not an experience that's easily exported to the realm of Actual Business, at least not exactly. As a consultant, I've had billion dollar companies that need the fast fix (python script with a csv datastore to keep some account info or whatever) and I've worked for companies where this sort of approach would get you insta-canned. They're both right enough, but assuming one size fits all is absolutely crazy. It sounds like the mega oil corp above was the latter, at least to me.

BeetleB 6y ago

> It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. Once again, if I wrote my own Python script they would not be involved, and my Python script is as error prone as using AHK. Think of AHK as similar to a compiler + linker. By rejecting AHK because someone can write a program that could screw things up, you might as well just prevent people from writing scripts and compiling programs. > I'm not saying a bunch of people typing are error prone, if that's your take on my post. I just think that there's a VERY different set of risks (and therefore mitigations) between a distributed manual process and a large scale automated one. You've essentially argued that IT should oppose any automation that is not thoroughly tested. And how will they determine how well it is tested? Do they have those skills? Where I work, IT is more concerned about security (viruses, theft, etc), licensing, and things that can break the machine. They don't prevent people from using APIs to mass edit databases as long as you do it to data you own or have permission from the owner. They don't own the data, so you're free to screw it up if you're careless. Ensuring my program is bug free and well tested is the job of my team/org/data owners, not IT. You're merely pointing out that this IT person has been given more power than his skills warrant.

WaxProlix 6y ago
Okay but if you have an organization whose lead of IT isn't capable of verifying some automation - be it AHK or Python or VisualBasic or F# or haskell or whatever - then it's fine for them to say 'no'. You can go over their head, and that's also okay. Or ask them to bring in someone who's an expert in the technology you're using. > You've essentially argued that IT should oppose any automation that is not thoroughly tested. And how will they determine how well it is tested? Do they have those skills? In large scale, business critical applications? Yes. All everything should be thoroughly tested and/or canaried, with several levels of validation before production releases. > You're merely pointing out that this IT person has been given more power than his skills warrant. I think I'm pointing out that his job is to be a safeguard against rogue wanna-be programmers whose ability to destroy things far outstrips their ability to test for things (or even think about edge cases). If that's true, they've done a fantastic job.

i1856511 6y ago

Exactly. A lot of programmers, or programming enthusiasts, thumb their nose at IT staff who naturally push back on stuff like this. In their mind, to play devil's advocate, they're seeing IT as unnecessarily burdensome, and getting in the way of automation. The IT staff are probably naturally welcoming to the general idea of automation. However, to elevate something up from an off the cuff script that's described as "depraved" to the level of an actual business tool that can be relied upon, is a HUGE time and money sink. Validation is a very complex problem as you have described. This is the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware. If business management isn't setting this as a priority for IT, and if IT is already overwhelmed with the "known" quantities of work, then it just isn't practical to officially adopt. I see it like this: It takes 1 "effort point" for a data entry staffer to manually enter the information tediously. It takes 10 effort points for the same staffer to write the AHK script to automate it. (Good for the staffer, assuming there's no flaws, and their reward is a longer lunch break.) To truly validate an automation as a business tool would take something on the scale of 150 to 200 effort points and involve lots of conversation - assuming there even is a framework for new tool validation established that can be used. IT knew this and made the right call. If company management wants to adopt a new tool without research and validation, that can be reckless.

keeganpoppen 6y ago

why even have programmers if they have to convince someone that doesn't understand what they're doing that it's been implemented correctly? the justification of an ignorant person not understanding it (assuming, i guess(?), that they are also incapable of learning it, apparently?) and thus not allowing a massively more efficient improvement to be put in place as somehow a job well done seems crazy to me. (at least in theory managers are supposed to provide something to the table). well, i guess to all the other programmers who, like me, leave any and all places like this. i acknowledge that not everyone is wired the same way, but it just seems blatantly obvious that the left hand wants "innovation" and the right hand... does stuff like this.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Everyone wants innovation, but no one wants responsibility. So anything can go as long as someone else signs off on it.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> It seems weird to expect someone with no programming training (an IT guy) to either build or sign off on something they have no understanding of. In large/high stakes settings, being risk averse and knowing the limits of your understanding are very good traits. Which raises the question, why does such a person even have the authority to make calls on what software can or can not be used within the company? You shouldn't have the right to make these kind of decisions without basic understanding of how software works (beyond "I click stuff and things happen, magic!"). > What was the testing plan for this AHK script? What edge cases were considered? Unit tests, integ tests.... was there a preprod environment for it? A trial run? Can you safely roll back if / when bad data shows up? What's the retry strategy for network or up/downstream fault tolerance? Is there alarm or monitor coverage for bad scenarios? Without understanding of how software is built, those are questions the IT guy can't possibly ask thoughtfully. They become a mere checkbox ticking exercise. And most of them don't apply anyway. > If I were an IT guy with low level skills, I'd be proud of myself for making that hard call. It's not a hard call. It's the easy call. The ass-covering, responsibility-mitigating, work-minimizing, consequence-free default deny call.

silasdavis 6y ago

Some good points. Some more context: this made a manual process semi manual. You still had to enter the data and the target programs still flew around (on screen) on the background. I think the risk profile was similar. > Unit tests, integ tests.... was there a preprod environment for it? A trial run? Can you safely roll back if / when bad data shows up? Nothing of the sort :) But... Let the adequate be the enemy of the less awful?