4 ms·

Your story makes me fear every working for a big company. With these exception of a few retail stints while still in school, I've primarily enjoyed working for

Your story makes me fear every working for a big company. With these exception of a few retail stints while still in school, I've primarily enjoyed working for smaller companies. I had a very similar human-powered spreadsheet task which was a massive time sink, and hugely error prone. It entailed looking up values in one sheet, comparing to another, and then combining separate pdf files based on the result of the spreadsheets. After doing it a few times, I decided I wasn't cut out for this kind of task. I fired up Python, scripted everything away, and turned what used to literally be an all say task, into something that took only a few minutes to run. Showed my boss, he was pleased as punch, and I received a sweet bonus at the end of the week. Small companies rule (for their lack of stringent bureaucratic rules).

jiggy2011 14y ago
This stuff isn't exclusive to big companies, I've had similar BS in smaller companies too. Usually when you have a company director who is scared of technology.
- verisimilidude 14y ago
  That's my experience too. I've encountered this anti-technical BS at a company as small as eight. And you're spot on in that case: the two directors spent a quarter of every year at their out-of-state retirement home and otherwise didn't look too kindly upon surprise or change.
specialist 14y ago
Lameness of boss is a bigger factor than company size. This story is of a 80 person company. I had a job working for founder and president. Primary product was very complicated, requiring lotsa training and effort. Think purpose built Adobe Illustrator for creating manufacturing production plans. Kudos to him for making a capable, dependable product that had 80% market share. He was very proud. The growth goal of the company was to "automate" our customer's workflow. After a few years, I understood the problem domain well enough to take a crack at it. I wrote forms-based app that automatically generated the production plans. You spec a couple variables and style of work, and viola, production plan. Took about 1 month to implement. I show my new app around the office. Lotsa excitement. Time to demo to the founder. I show him what's what. He asks me to try a few tricky scenarios. No problem. He then walks out of my office. No "good job". No "I gotta take this call". Dude never spoke to me again. (Our offices were adjacent.) I then figured out that founder didn't want a better solution. He wanted other people to fail trying to find a better solution, thereby validating his awesomeness. My advice to anyone with a game changing idea: Shut up. Figure out an exit strategy. Capture the benefit / reward for yourself.

jiggy2011 14y ago

This stuff isn't exclusive to big companies, I've had similar BS in smaller companies too. Usually when you have a company director who is scared of technology.

verisimilidude 14y ago
That's my experience too. I've encountered this anti-technical BS at a company as small as eight. And you're spot on in that case: the two directors spent a quarter of every year at their out-of-state retirement home and otherwise didn't look too kindly upon surprise or change.

specialist 14y ago

Lameness of boss is a bigger factor than company size. This story is of a 80 person company. I had a job working for founder and president. Primary product was very complicated, requiring lotsa training and effort. Think purpose built Adobe Illustrator for creating manufacturing production plans. Kudos to him for making a capable, dependable product that had 80% market share. He was very proud. The growth goal of the company was to "automate" our customer's workflow. After a few years, I understood the problem domain well enough to take a crack at it. I wrote forms-based app that automatically generated the production plans. You spec a couple variables and style of work, and viola, production plan. Took about 1 month to implement. I show my new app around the office. Lotsa excitement. Time to demo to the founder. I show him what's what. He asks me to try a few tricky scenarios. No problem. He then walks out of my office. No "good job". No "I gotta take this call". Dude never spoke to me again. (Our offices were adjacent.) I then figured out that founder didn't want a better solution. He wanted other people to fail trying to find a better solution, thereby validating his awesomeness. My advice to anyone with a game changing idea: Shut up. Figure out an exit strategy. Capture the benefit / reward for yourself.