4 ms·

If you don’t mind me asking, what specific area do you specialize in with your consulting work? I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.

by m_a_g 3y ago

fxtentacle 3y ago
I do any kind of research and software development. But the most profitable tasks tend to be finding a new angle for how you can automate something. In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment. Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
- ido 3y ago
  I wish you a ton of success, we need a lot of streamlining and digitalisation here! I hope you’ll do some good work for the government next as there’s so much red tape and antiquated methods.
- cudgy 3y ago
  Nice. Your work eliminates jobs and transfers their salary to the business owner! Seems more like bean counting than tech. Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.
  - whstl 3y ago
    That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries. Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand. Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.
    - cudgy 3y ago
      There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs. My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.
      - whstl 3y ago
        This is not about consolidation. The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes. I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it. Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with. Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.
  - fxtentacle 3y ago
    You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners. However, what is the better option here? A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs. B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs. My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  >Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands. Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more. Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity. I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use. God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.

If you don’t mind me asking, what specific area do you specialize in with your consulting work? I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.

by m_a_g 3y ago

If you don’t mind me asking, what specific area do you specialize in with your consulting work? I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.

fxtentacle 3y ago

I do any kind of research and software development. But the most profitable tasks tend to be finding a new angle for how you can automate something. In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment. Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.

ido 3y ago
I wish you a ton of success, we need a lot of streamlining and digitalisation here! I hope you’ll do some good work for the government next as there’s so much red tape and antiquated methods.
cudgy 3y ago
Nice. Your work eliminates jobs and transfers their salary to the business owner! Seems more like bean counting than tech. Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.
- whstl 3y ago
  That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries. Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand. Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.
  - cudgy 3y ago
    There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs. My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.
    - whstl 3y ago
      This is not about consolidation. The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes. I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it. Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with. Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners. However, what is the better option here? A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs. B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs. My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.
nebula8804 3y ago
>Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands. Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more. Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity. I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use. God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.