3 ms·

Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorifi

Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”

13of40 3y ago
Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
cylinder714 3y ago
Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB
analog31 3y ago
Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
  - analog31 3y ago
    They're doing it with Excel today -- the most widely used programming tool ever. And still handling exceptions manually.

13of40 3y ago

Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.

cylinder714 3y ago

Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB

analog31 3y ago

Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
- analog31 3y ago
  They're doing it with Excel today -- the most widely used programming tool ever. And still handling exceptions manually.