I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.
The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer.
The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building.
After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading.
The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so it's not wise for them to automate anything.
For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the shit hits the fan.
In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't get sued for trying to do simple business.
You can't really automate lawyers, unfortunately, anymore than you can automate accountants. Someone has to assume the liability for giving you legal advice / accounting advice. Computers can't yet assume such liability.
This isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the hardest time getting traction.
I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This $badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how it works today.
Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket.
Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it.
If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.
Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!
It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.
I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf, taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow
Neccessity is the mother of invention. Do you have a need to distribute your job queues to multiple servers? Do you need multi-master db replication? Do you load balance? Do you need to instantiate db backups to recover/inspect data? Do you backup snapshots of every server? The more these things happen, the more likely is your IT to yield and buy rack servers
the way we solved it was getting the COO to approve us taking ownership of infrastructure and transitioning into AWS. That way we have a pretty flexible license where we can spin up servers and manage them ourselves. Certainly time overhead but at least now we don't have to email and pray. This also sends a strong message that if they don't try hard enough they can lose projects and therefore their worth at the company
I left a place a year ago where I ran the lab. I remember the satisfaction of my replacement converting all the VMs into "real computers", and then triplicating the VLAN network I had with layer 1 replacements.
I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would have gotten rid of the VPN server.
I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.)
Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.
I work at a gov't organization and was going to say the same thing. It recently took me two months to get an $11/month pingdom account. There is some office somewhere that has to read the TOS and put the vendor on an "approved" list. They never use credit cards, and have to call the vendor (even for small webapps) to get bank routing numbers. Also, no recurring payments are allowed, they must be able to pay one lump sum. By the time I get an account the vendor already hates me.
hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: [email protected] (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)
hentrep, my startup solves this exactly and we are now live at three Fortune 1,000 firms. Previously, I was a healthcare consultant with mckinsey so I understand the unique challenges in pharma. I would love to chat. Feel free to ping me at [email protected].
90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.
Rotation is a really interesting subject which has true security benefits. Unfortunately manual rotation is a PITA. What works better is to have an automated system rotating the credentials, and then you fetch the credentials as-needed by authenticating with an identity and access management system.
For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators (https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation) for rotating things like SSH keys, database passwords, and cloud credentials. In each case, the rotator changes the credential in the backend (e.g. changes the public key in the authorized_keys file), and then stores the new credential behind an access-controlled and audited API where only you (and other authorized roles) can fetch it.
We have actually developed such a service for internal usage (could not use any of these three because of compliance requirements), it works very well.
The 90 day password thing is pretty universal in my experience, but to be fair NIST has only very recently changed their recommendation on this so you can understand business' reticence to ease off on it.
As for the multiple internal sites and servers thing...well, from a security point of view I totally agree with the requirement for separate passwords but it sounds like you're in need of a proper identity management solution - which isn't really fair to blame security for - it's not usually the security function who are going to implement and own this sort of thing.
Domestic freight, specifically rate quoting and booking.
I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation.
3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our shipping manager's time.
A better version of this: http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live . The corporate bullshit generator. If it could also make powerpoints with nice graphs of merging product timelines, we could replace most of management.
The real problem with phone screens is that unless you (as a recruiter) trust an unbiased third party to do phone screens at the level of rigor that you would do them yourself (rather than being incentivized, as recruiting agencies often are, to try to maximize the number of candidates they give to you), you have to do phone screens yourself with every candidate, requiring NM conversations. If you do solve that problem of trust, then you just need K(N+M) conversations, where each recruiter and each candidate establishes a relationship with one of K third parties, wherein the recruiter is notified about the candidate iff the candidate passes the third party's screens. https://triplebyte.com/ is trying to be such a third party, establishing trust with YC alumni; there are likely others. From a friend going through the process as a candidate, it seems that they have a high level of rigor and are placing him in good later-stage interviews.
Hahahah! You just made me think of creating a chatbot to answer people's questions about me for phone screen interviews, since answering the same questions over and over and over again has gotten me to the point where I sometimes procrastinate getting back to recruiters because I don't want to go through the process for the fiftieth time.
"How much experience do you have with Unity?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "I worked with Unity on projects blah and blah and....". "Tell me more about your leadership in project blah?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "With project blah, I was in charge of X number of people. The project was completed over a period of X months and ...etc."
Shameless plug of a tool I built which might help you with this, especially if you're hiring developers.
It'll automatically research the applicants who apply to your open position and collect github profiles, repos, and do it's best to rate them appropriately.
By the time we'll have an AI that can do that well, the same AI will likely to be able to do both your and the recruiters job, so the phone screen won't be necessary.
The difficult part is that the areas that could be automated are usually the ones that would buy the automation software.
The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization.
I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the benefit.
Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.
As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.
I would like a tool that looks at what people are doing and fills out timesheets automatically. Stop asking your developers what they are working on directly and start looking at their artifacts. For example, if Dev A. just checked in a bunch of code for Project Alpha, there is a good chance they have been working on Project Alpha for the past X hours. If QA person Q just ran a bunch of tests for Project B and updated a spreadsheet, there is a good chance that they have been working on Project B for the past Y hours. Person W just updated a bunch of Wiki pages for Project C? And so on.
Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets" I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of that for me.
Ordering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!
I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project.
Pardon my language: holy shit.
How large is your organization??? All I do at work is build dev environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking dev environment???
Our password policy is pretty terrible. We don't even have our own user profiles. Whenever I'm on a different desk than my own, I get to experience a completely different desktop. With completely different applications installed, settings, etc. I work part-time hence my desk isn't the same permanent spot, so this does occur regularly. So apart from a security hazard, this is also a productivity loss.
I'd also swap everything to Linux (my preference is macOS, but I can see how that'd increase cost). For the kind of development we do, Linux is just as good as the other two.
I honestly don't know how to solve the issue for me easily. Perhaps just install all applications and settings on a thumb drive?
A related question, for my own interests... how able do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools?
As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools that can save a lot of pain and money.
Bringing our main app into various states (and also regular Selenium tests based on the same code, ideally in Clojure). It currently takes dozens of clicks and dozens of pages, all super repetitive to get to most places in the app (super long question / answer based interface). I should have done this years ago when I joined but the pain has finally become great enough that it can't be ignored anymore.
[+] [-] Johnny555|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jehna1|9 years ago|reply
The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer.
The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building.
After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading.
The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so it's not wise for them to automate anything.
For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the shit hits the fan.
In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't get sued for trying to do simple business.
[+] [-] blazespin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzledazzle|9 years ago|reply
I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This $badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how it works today.
Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket.
Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it.
If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.
[+] [-] NumberCruncher|9 years ago|reply
It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.
[+] [-] buckbova|9 years ago|reply
What is the ROI?
What is the cost of the current process (time, money, resources, FTEs, etc)?
What is the cost to implement (time, money, resources, FTEs, etc)?
What will be the maintenance cost?
What is the risk of implementing this?
What is the risk of not implementing this?
Once you have all this take it to your manager or your manager's manager or the business manager this affects.
[+] [-] skyyler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nurettin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SonicSoul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalsushi|9 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would have gotten rid of the VPN server.
[+] [-] jordanwallwork|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hentrep|9 years ago|reply
Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.
[+] [-] pgroves|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robodale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperanalysis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlamba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latentpot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmartin|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Afforess|9 years ago|reply
90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.
[+] [-] kgilpin|9 years ago|reply
For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators (https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation) for rotating things like SSH keys, database passwords, and cloud credentials. In each case, the rotator changes the credential in the backend (e.g. changes the public key in the authorized_keys file), and then stores the new credential behind an access-controlled and audited API where only you (and other authorized roles) can fetch it.
Disclosure: I am CTO of Conjur.
[+] [-] Artemis2|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Netflix/bless
http://gravitational.com/teleport
https://www.scaleft.com
We have actually developed such a service for internal usage (could not use any of these three because of compliance requirements), it works very well.
[+] [-] herghost|9 years ago|reply
As for the multiple internal sites and servers thing...well, from a security point of view I totally agree with the requirement for separate passwords but it sounds like you're in need of a proper identity management solution - which isn't really fair to blame security for - it's not usually the security function who are going to implement and own this sort of thing.
[+] [-] michael_michael|9 years ago|reply
I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation.
3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our shipping manager's time.
[+] [-] kabes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rch|9 years ago|reply
Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.
[+] [-] btown|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
"How much experience do you have with Unity?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "I worked with Unity on projects blah and blah and....". "Tell me more about your leadership in project blah?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "With project blah, I was in charge of X number of people. The project was completed over a period of X months and ...etc."
That's what you're suggesting, isn't it?
[+] [-] deedubaya|9 years ago|reply
It'll automatically research the applicants who apply to your open position and collect github profiles, repos, and do it's best to rate them appropriately.
https://www.hireloop.io
[+] [-] PeterisP|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majewsky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|9 years ago|reply
The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization.
I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the benefit.
Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.
[+] [-] kylixz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corrado|9 years ago|reply
Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets" I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of that for me.
[+] [-] ivm|9 years ago|reply
Mac: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ (our app, the site lacks info but it has export now)
Linux: https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy
Windows: http://www.manictime.com/
[+] [-] ju-st|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamdave|9 years ago|reply
Pardon my language: holy shit.
How large is your organization??? All I do at work is build dev environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking dev environment???
FOUR? How does this happen?
[+] [-] superuser2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|9 years ago|reply
There's no real excuse for delivering a dev server in 4 vm in months. You sure he ordered one server and not say a dedicated cluster of 4.000 servers?
[+] [-] Fnoord|9 years ago|reply
I'd also swap everything to Linux (my preference is macOS, but I can see how that'd increase cost). For the kind of development we do, Linux is just as good as the other two.
I honestly don't know how to solve the issue for me easily. Perhaps just install all applications and settings on a thumb drive?
[+] [-] beat|9 years ago|reply
As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools that can save a lot of pain and money.
[+] [-] pknerd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crystalPalace|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnm1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaoma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadgeidel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pknerd|9 years ago|reply
http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6...
[+] [-] kzisme|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts