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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 sh

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.

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.