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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 ass

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

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