2 ms·

This seems like one of those problems where the last 5% is going to take 99% of the effort and time. A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly int

This seems like one of those problems where the last 5% is going to take 99% of the effort and time. A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.

newhouseb 5y ago
There's definitely a lot of spaces where this is true but a huge fraction of spaces are not even that complicated. I volunteer my time for various pandemic assistance and basic income work and the number of finance companies (banks, payment processors, etc) that rely on a human being regularly downloading a CSV from one system and uploading it unchanged to another is _absolutely_asinine_.
- majormajor 5y ago
  That does sound near-trivial to automate, but then I've got to wonder how frequently "regular" is? Saving someone 15 minutes a day is gonna be hard to justify spending programmer time on - or paying for a 3rd party solution? Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week?
  - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
    >Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week? I am reminded of the Reddit thread[0] where one guy confessed to having automated his entire job. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_...
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    When I temped at Bank of America, there were 20s of people who effectively just shuttled CSVs between points A and B, and a whole on premise army of programmers who made our work redundant. So...
- qnsi 5y ago
  I have a feeling a lot of people commenting never worked outside IT. I worked in marketing twice and in sales once just to see if I would like other career than programming. The amount of stuff I automated was amazing. The problem is, it's hard to automate stuff for people in a scalable way. There is recent YC startup Axios, but when I tried to automate something with their software, the learning curve was too big. I think the best way to automate the office work would be "automation houses" where people sell software that automates stuff. I think we have this for big companies, but smaller ones are left doing boring jobs
ethbr0 5y ago
There would be no need for 75% of automation if all products had (1) a programmatic interface that covered 100% of functionality & (2) a data standard. Unfortunately, that's something that almost no customer is mature enough to ask for, so down it goes on the priority list, if it makes it at all. At least web apps are slightly better, as some sort of data packet is actually transmitted (even if user-action initiated), so easier to draw an interface line.

newhouseb 5y ago

There's definitely a lot of spaces where this is true but a huge fraction of spaces are not even that complicated. I volunteer my time for various pandemic assistance and basic income work and the number of finance companies (banks, payment processors, etc) that rely on a human being regularly downloading a CSV from one system and uploading it unchanged to another is _absolutely_asinine_.

majormajor 5y ago
That does sound near-trivial to automate, but then I've got to wonder how frequently "regular" is? Saving someone 15 minutes a day is gonna be hard to justify spending programmer time on - or paying for a 3rd party solution? Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week?
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  >Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week? I am reminded of the Reddit thread[0] where one guy confessed to having automated his entire job. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_...
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  When I temped at Bank of America, there were 20s of people who effectively just shuttled CSVs between points A and B, and a whole on premise army of programmers who made our work redundant. So...
qnsi 5y ago
I have a feeling a lot of people commenting never worked outside IT. I worked in marketing twice and in sales once just to see if I would like other career than programming. The amount of stuff I automated was amazing. The problem is, it's hard to automate stuff for people in a scalable way. There is recent YC startup Axios, but when I tried to automate something with their software, the learning curve was too big. I think the best way to automate the office work would be "automation houses" where people sell software that automates stuff. I think we have this for big companies, but smaller ones are left doing boring jobs

ethbr0 5y ago

There would be no need for 75% of automation if all products had (1) a programmatic interface that covered 100% of functionality & (2) a data standard. Unfortunately, that's something that almost no customer is mature enough to ask for, so down it goes on the priority list, if it makes it at all. At least web apps are slightly better, as some sort of data packet is actually transmitted (even if user-action initiated), so easier to draw an interface line.