6 ms·

We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?

ladberg 6y ago
Not OP but I had a friend who has interned at a few record labels. He's not really a programmer, but knows enough about programming to know what kind of task should be automated. He described a portion of his job to me that he and a bunch of other entry-level workers spent a few hours a day doing (basically scraping and storing data off the internet to be sent to business people for analysis). I worked with him to develop a Python script do basically automate half his job in a few hours that could have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars. The company didn't want to dedicate/hire an actual programmer to maintain it, so they kept paying employees to manually scrape the web. The crazy part is the next summer he interned at a different company and literally the exact same thing happened. He re-made the original script, saved tons of work, and the new company still didn't end up using it after he left.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  Does he get paid at the internships?
  - ladberg 6y ago
    Yep, but not as well as tech internships. Still, the company was throwing money down the drain because they didn't know that even a semi-competent programmer could automate those jobs.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Oh, many companies have only themselves to blame for being blown away by technology.
- goto11 6y ago
  Are these companies irrational? Perhaps, but there might also be an important point. A manual process is robust, fault tolerant, and easy to adjust to new circumstances or changing business requirements. A Python script is fixed, and they day it breaks down due to some slight change in scraped data, you have to pull in a developer to fix it. For a company without dedicated staff to support such automation, it is a high risk. Ad-hoc automation can turn workflows into Rube Goldberg machines. A Python script here, an Excel macro there - soon nobody knows whats going on and nobody dares change anything. Developers often think only one step ahead: It was manual, now it is automated with a script. Win! A business have to consider that larger picture - future support, maintainability, risk etc.
  - schnevets 6y ago
    Exactly - intern labor is cheap, flexible, and there's a "wax-on wax-off" mentality where they may learn by proxy but are also in a safe environment where they won't hurt themselves or the company. A script and the associated automation could become the expectation or could lead to a key-man-dependency-risk. It may be lucrative for the friend to take the script and turn it into a product. but then they'll need to market, sell, document, optimize, and do a million other tasks. There has always been a dead zone between "automated script that makes me work a bit more efficiently" and "product that can make everyone with this job work a bit more efficiently". Fortunately, new technology is narrowing this gap.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Bulk downloading and resizing photos in weird spreadsheets. Managing attributes and taxonomies for ecommerce. Capitalizable hour analysis for software projects. That's just stuff from the last few weeks. None of these are hard to automate but the workflow integration is the tricky bit.
- jamestimmins 6y ago
  Do you know why they don't just use an existing API that does image resizing automatically? Presume it's the integration challenge, but I'm curious if you know /why/. Also, what does "Capitalize hour analysis" mean?
  - Gollapalli 6y ago
    I doubt they know such an API even exists (or what an API is!). Most companies aren't run by hackers, assuming there's an API that does the thing they want to do isn't the natural response.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Sure A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this. A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easily access your T$ (Canadian tax form), offer letter, certifications, police checks, etc. Software to manage which options a client ordered and what their selection was of that option as well as autogenerate the appropriate SQL queries from a client config template. The current process consisted of a mega word document with people fiddling around manually with it. Happy to provide more.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  That first one can be done with teseract ocr pretty cheaply. I think a lot of people just don't know how much software can do. You just need to standardize the form and then there's a human data validation step in there.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using tesseract for our attempt too.
    - Eugr 6y ago
      There are commercial OCR software packages that can do it. FineReader is one example (and it's been around for ages).
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        FineReader seems like it would have done the job.

Not OP but I had a friend who has interned at a few record labels. He's not really a programmer, but knows enough about programming to know what kind of task should be automated. He described a portion of his job to me that he and a bunch of other entry-level workers spent a few hours a day doing (basically scraping and storing data off the internet to be sent to business people for analysis). I worked with him to develop a Python script do basically automate half his job in a few hours that could have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars. The company didn't want to dedicate/hire an actual programmer to maintain it, so they kept paying employees to manually scrape the web. The crazy part is the next summer he interned at a different company and literally the exact same thing happened. He re-made the original script, saved tons of work, and the new company still didn't end up using it after he left.

dillonmckay 6y ago
Does he get paid at the internships?
- ladberg 6y ago
  Yep, but not as well as tech internships. Still, the company was throwing money down the drain because they didn't know that even a semi-competent programmer could automate those jobs.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Oh, many companies have only themselves to blame for being blown away by technology.
goto11 6y ago
Are these companies irrational? Perhaps, but there might also be an important point. A manual process is robust, fault tolerant, and easy to adjust to new circumstances or changing business requirements. A Python script is fixed, and they day it breaks down due to some slight change in scraped data, you have to pull in a developer to fix it. For a company without dedicated staff to support such automation, it is a high risk. Ad-hoc automation can turn workflows into Rube Goldberg machines. A Python script here, an Excel macro there - soon nobody knows whats going on and nobody dares change anything. Developers often think only one step ahead: It was manual, now it is automated with a script. Win! A business have to consider that larger picture - future support, maintainability, risk etc.
- schnevets 6y ago
  Exactly - intern labor is cheap, flexible, and there's a "wax-on wax-off" mentality where they may learn by proxy but are also in a safe environment where they won't hurt themselves or the company. A script and the associated automation could become the expectation or could lead to a key-man-dependency-risk. It may be lucrative for the friend to take the script and turn it into a product. but then they'll need to market, sell, document, optimize, and do a million other tasks. There has always been a dead zone between "automated script that makes me work a bit more efficiently" and "product that can make everyone with this job work a bit more efficiently". Fortunately, new technology is narrowing this gap.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Bulk downloading and resizing photos in weird spreadsheets. Managing attributes and taxonomies for ecommerce. Capitalizable hour analysis for software projects. That's just stuff from the last few weeks. None of these are hard to automate but the workflow integration is the tricky bit.

jamestimmins 6y ago
Do you know why they don't just use an existing API that does image resizing automatically? Presume it's the integration challenge, but I'm curious if you know /why/. Also, what does "Capitalize hour analysis" mean?
- Gollapalli 6y ago
  I doubt they know such an API even exists (or what an API is!). Most companies aren't run by hackers, assuming there's an API that does the thing they want to do isn't the natural response.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Sure A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this. A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easily access your T$ (Canadian tax form), offer letter, certifications, police checks, etc. Software to manage which options a client ordered and what their selection was of that option as well as autogenerate the appropriate SQL queries from a client config template. The current process consisted of a mega word document with people fiddling around manually with it. Happy to provide more.

gonzo41 6y ago
That first one can be done with teseract ocr pretty cheaply. I think a lot of people just don't know how much software can do. You just need to standardize the form and then there's a human data validation step in there.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using tesseract for our attempt too.
  - Eugr 6y ago
    There are commercial OCR software packages that can do it. FineReader is one example (and it's been around for ages).
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      FineReader seems like it would have done the job.