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I worked for a government agency for just shy of a decade that was extremely behind the times as far as technology goes. My official capacities were never direc

I worked for a government agency for just shy of a decade that was extremely behind the times as far as technology goes. My official capacities were never directly tech related, but I quickly excelled to the top as the "go-to" SME for anything technical almost solely because of my ability to automate the ridiculous amount of monotonous repetitive paperwork through Excel. I would have never used Excel and macros as the tool to automate the things that I did, but these systems were completely locked down without the ability to install anything or use many online services. I eventually started building more complex tools in Access, and improved or was able to do away with many processes that took many man-hours previously. Without the system constraints I never would've had a practical reason to do such a deep dive on Excel and Access to learn ways of accomplishing things that I usually did through programming. In the grand scheme of things, those basic "computer applications" skills have been a huge asset to my career and eventually allowed me to break into some more advanced tech related positions with other agencies off of those accomplishments alone. Sure, there were some annoying requests from people to fix some old spreadsheets they had limping around, but in my situation it was completely worth it.

smm11 4y ago
I was briefly at a place that was also decades behind. Our role was to massage data from a few dozen sources and make sure it fit into the square peg. This was dependent on five people, and the process ran 24-7. Until I automated the whole mess one weekend. Checkpoint emails, files all landed where they needed to be, only I had it via secure channels. I didn't last.
- scrapcode 4y ago
  I was in a union and learned to keep a lot of automation to myself, as they'd really get in a fuss about that sort of thing.
mschuster91 4y ago
One might wonder if it would not be better as a whole if there were a government agency that every government employee, no matter if county, state or federal, could petition to modernize a process without charge for the requestor and their department. The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Ideally the process would be developed as part of a common SaaS framework to make re-use simpler and to develop a common software stack shared across government.
- scrapcode 4y ago
  That would take millions if not billions out of the private software industry.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    In other words 'that would be more efficient and saved massive amounts for the public'?
    - scrapcode 4y ago
      Well yeah, absolutely. As did remote work. But certain industry has shown it's strength of influence lately to bring many of those agencies back to their office spaces (real-estate, office supply, utility, etc). An entirely different conversation for sure, but there are entire industries that exist almost solely to serve Gov't inefficiency.
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  >The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Just like forums not having repeated conversations because everyone checks if their question has already been answered. Actual result is a recursive function where everyone promises their boss that the task is getting done, and the n=0 case is the one guy who knows how to do anything and his 10 year backlog of stupid feature requests.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    A library has librarians. Joe Random would have to contact the proposed agency anyway, and they would in turn first check if something in their catalogue already fits the bill or suggest if the process could be altered to fit an existing digital adaption.
JPKab 4y ago
Government agencies being "extremely behind the times" is the rule, not the exception. Their budgets are tied to "number of butts in seats", and automating things has to be sold to them on the merits of freeing up the butts to do other things, never ever laying the butts off to save money. Your story is a common one. Big corporations also tend to get like this, especially banking/insurance. The Excel to Excel/VBA/Access to developer path is a very common one, and you tend to get devs out of it who have strong domain knowledge in business.
password4321 4y ago
There are different installable options for automating web browsers with Excel, but if you are truly locked down there's https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol.
pessimizer 4y ago
> I would have never used Excel and macros as the tool to automate the things that I did, but these systems were completely locked down without the ability to install anything or use many online services. I got good at VBA through this same situation. I had to do some very complex, auditable number crunching on systems that were completely locked down by the parent company of a subsidiary. Excel VBA worked kind of perfectly, because it generated exactly the kind of output that execs could understand, spreadsheets. I developed a style of working where my output looked like it was the tool i.e. I would put formulas in cells rather than hardcoding results in the output, so people could trace the calculations and play with them in the way they were used to. It certainly wasn't because I loved VBA, I didn't even use Windows at home. I did end up affectionate for Excel, though. All of my personal programming was in functional Erlang at that time, and the idea of having the output of a ton of data processing be a set of spreadsheets that could be further worked with felt a lot like returning a function. Two different companies I was contracting for asked me to do an Excel tricks presentation for their staff. It made me realize how many office drones are anxiously pretending to know how to use Excel, and that more offices should be giving basic Excel classes to general staff.

smm11 4y ago

I was briefly at a place that was also decades behind. Our role was to massage data from a few dozen sources and make sure it fit into the square peg. This was dependent on five people, and the process ran 24-7. Until I automated the whole mess one weekend. Checkpoint emails, files all landed where they needed to be, only I had it via secure channels. I didn't last.

scrapcode 4y ago
I was in a union and learned to keep a lot of automation to myself, as they'd really get in a fuss about that sort of thing.

mschuster91 4y ago

One might wonder if it would not be better as a whole if there were a government agency that every government employee, no matter if county, state or federal, could petition to modernize a process without charge for the requestor and their department. The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Ideally the process would be developed as part of a common SaaS framework to make re-use simpler and to develop a common software stack shared across government.

scrapcode 4y ago
That would take millions if not billions out of the private software industry.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  In other words 'that would be more efficient and saved massive amounts for the public'?
  - scrapcode 4y ago
    Well yeah, absolutely. As did remote work. But certain industry has shown it's strength of influence lately to bring many of those agencies back to their office spaces (real-estate, office supply, utility, etc). An entirely different conversation for sure, but there are entire industries that exist almost solely to serve Gov't inefficiency.
QuarterReptile 4y ago
>The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Just like forums not having repeated conversations because everyone checks if their question has already been answered. Actual result is a recursive function where everyone promises their boss that the task is getting done, and the n=0 case is the one guy who knows how to do anything and his 10 year backlog of stupid feature requests.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  A library has librarians. Joe Random would have to contact the proposed agency anyway, and they would in turn first check if something in their catalogue already fits the bill or suggest if the process could be altered to fit an existing digital adaption.

JPKab 4y ago

Government agencies being "extremely behind the times" is the rule, not the exception. Their budgets are tied to "number of butts in seats", and automating things has to be sold to them on the merits of freeing up the butts to do other things, never ever laying the butts off to save money. Your story is a common one. Big corporations also tend to get like this, especially banking/insurance. The Excel to Excel/VBA/Access to developer path is a very common one, and you tend to get devs out of it who have strong domain knowledge in business.

password4321 4y ago

There are different installable options for automating web browsers with Excel, but if you are truly locked down there's https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol.

pessimizer 4y ago

> I would have never used Excel and macros as the tool to automate the things that I did, but these systems were completely locked down without the ability to install anything or use many online services. I got good at VBA through this same situation. I had to do some very complex, auditable number crunching on systems that were completely locked down by the parent company of a subsidiary. Excel VBA worked kind of perfectly, because it generated exactly the kind of output that execs could understand, spreadsheets. I developed a style of working where my output looked like it was the tool i.e. I would put formulas in cells rather than hardcoding results in the output, so people could trace the calculations and play with them in the way they were used to. It certainly wasn't because I loved VBA, I didn't even use Windows at home. I did end up affectionate for Excel, though. All of my personal programming was in functional Erlang at that time, and the idea of having the output of a ton of data processing be a set of spreadsheets that could be further worked with felt a lot like returning a function. Two different companies I was contracting for asked me to do an Excel tricks presentation for their staff. It made me realize how many office drones are anxiously pretending to know how to use Excel, and that more offices should be giving basic Excel classes to general staff.