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at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company) one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system, format it in a specific way, s

at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company) one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system, format it in a specific way, save it to a shared drive and email to a few different people. it was really repetitive, fairly simplistic and the report from the ERP was very consistent. after about 2 weeks of doing this every day i thought there had to be a way to automate it, so I did. i set the ERP report to be emailed to me, set an email rule to save attachment to desktop with a naming convention (from the specific sender), then my excel macro would identify the current date's file and run roughly 30 min after the report's usual sending time and format it as required, then send to an email list. this was supposed to be the first hour to hour and a half of my day. once i was confident it worked, i let it rip and enjoyed hour and a half breakfast every morning, or roamed the office talking to other interns, etc. a couple months later i mentioned to my manager that maybe automate it and save some time but they had no interest and brushed my comment off. so i kept enjoying my breakfast and free time for the rest of my time there. my "automation" wasn't complicated at all, just took some creative thinking and a bunch of attempts to get it right. sometimes people either a) simply dont want to believe things can be automated because it "devalues" what they do or have done in the past, or b) are happy having tasks like this assigned to underlings so they "know" and can easily explain what that person is doing at any given time.

hinkley 5y ago
We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution to this problem was to complain about every procedure we weren’t following exactly. One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs. We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki pages into a different set of files. By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was handled by a CI/CD job.

hinkley 5y ago

We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution to this problem was to complain about every procedure we weren’t following exactly. One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs. We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki pages into a different set of files. By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was handled by a CI/CD job.