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One of the easiest periods in my career is when I was in charge (with one other coworker) with modifying a certain capability in a large, distributed "web appli

One of the easiest periods in my career is when I was in charge (with one other coworker) with modifying a certain capability in a large, distributed "web application" (it was a for a DDOS detection/mitigation appliance and associated web UI). Every time it needed modification, there was around 50-75 code locations that had to be tediously updated. When I first encountered it, I had created a document outline all the locations and the pitfalls around modifying them, along with tests to verify them. I performed the process a couple of dozen times over the 2 years. It was trivially easy, easily tracked, and I was always given plenty of time to get it right (good managers). I've never had a project manager happier with me because my estimates were always spot on (it's the type of work that is easy to estimate after the first 2 or 3 times you do it), and management understood exactly what I was doing, and no one else wanted to do it. I have since found that people still really don't want to do that work, are grateful when I will do it, and (except for one instance) management recognizes it as important, slow, tedious work. The only issue I have is that it gets boring, and so 80% of the effort goes into motivating myself to get it done ;)

tharkun__ 5y ago
I've said it before here on HN I think but I always find it interesting/hilarious to what lengths people go to avoid a little bit of manual work. Like something that literally takes 2 minutes of manually doing the same sequence of click/type combo for 40 items total. Instead they must spend 2 days trying to automate it. And very likely still fail to do so. Then on the other end I once automated a process ('running a report') that took one of the senior Devs at that place an entire day to compile in: exactly one day. Suddenly that report could be run when people actually needed it (once a month) but they only ran it every half year because of cost and blocking a resource for an entire day. Your case feels like it might be somewhere in between (given I have zero context/actual knowledge of what these updates are/why they can't be centralized somehow. Has anyone tried?
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Not there anymore (my story was about 6 years ago), and I was able to reduce it somewhat, but it was mostly a case of lots of, effectively, microservices that needed updating in case-specific manners. To reduce it further would take major architectural changes that would take more time than simply doing repeating the process I had created, even if done for a couple of decades.

tharkun__ 5y ago

I've said it before here on HN I think but I always find it interesting/hilarious to what lengths people go to avoid a little bit of manual work. Like something that literally takes 2 minutes of manually doing the same sequence of click/type combo for 40 items total. Instead they must spend 2 days trying to automate it. And very likely still fail to do so. Then on the other end I once automated a process ('running a report') that took one of the senior Devs at that place an entire day to compile in: exactly one day. Suddenly that report could be run when people actually needed it (once a month) but they only ran it every half year because of cost and blocking a resource for an entire day. Your case feels like it might be somewhere in between (given I have zero context/actual knowledge of what these updates are/why they can't be centralized somehow. Has anyone tried?

gilbetron 5y ago
Not there anymore (my story was about 6 years ago), and I was able to reduce it somewhat, but it was mostly a case of lots of, effectively, microservices that needed updating in case-specific manners. To reduce it further would take major architectural changes that would take more time than simply doing repeating the process I had created, even if done for a couple of decades.