<story><title>Learning to code vs. learning to automate</title><url>https://daedtech.com/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-automate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duxup</author><text>I worked at a place where coding was not my job (it was technical support) but I wrote some scripts that automated some stuff.  It was handy and everyone liked it.&lt;p&gt;Then someone in the process changed things that the scripts did not understand.&lt;p&gt;Management came running to me upset that this thing I automated didn&amp;#x27;t work.  Being technical support managers most didn&amp;#x27;t understand (not all but most) that when you change things you need to tell people before the day of and they were quite upset with me.&lt;p&gt;I had saved them enormous time over several years ... but the result was I really just kept doing the same job I always was, not rewarded, and then the day they changed their processes without telling anyone they got upset with me.&lt;p&gt;My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone.</text></item><item><author>rurcliped</author><text>The problem often isn&amp;#x27;t ability to automate. It&amp;#x27;s that the workers
closest to the problem have an overwhelming disincentive to automate.&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a low-level job in Peloton operations. Our Phalange
Team must ensure that, before a bike&amp;#x27;s in-home delivery date is
confirmed, the delivery technician has placed an internal order for a
left phalange. Each of us spends all day navigating between the Sales
app and the Internal Order app.&lt;p&gt;My daughter tells me how I can automate this. But I never do it. Why?&lt;p&gt;1. Even if I were 100% sure the coding would be finished in one day,
the daily metrics for the Phalange Team would still signal a problem.&lt;p&gt;2. It introduces uncertainty. I can tell my manager exactly how long
the manual process takes, but I can&amp;#x27;t tell her how long it takes to
write code.&lt;p&gt;3. It trades off the mean for the variance. Suppose it handles 99.44%
of the cases but there&amp;#x27;s a rare bug where it never sends a delivery
date if the Internal Order backend has a timeout error. On average,
scheduling is 90% faster but some customers aren&amp;#x27;t scheduled at all.
Not an acceptable outcome.&lt;p&gt;4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnick</author><text>I always keep a manual safety step for unofficial automation for this exact reason.&lt;p&gt;Current example: I have a script I run for my wife that de-duplicates some data against historical excel files and submits it via an API to Mailchimp, to tag members for a triggered email. I run this manually for her about once a week. It does not alter anything unless I supply the &amp;#x27;--go&amp;#x27; option. That lets me check the output to see that it makes sense (sometimes they add extra data columns or she forgot to do contact&amp;#x2F;tag setup on her end).&lt;p&gt;I absolutely never have the computer run stuff without me watching unless I control the entire process end to end, it&amp;#x27;s non-critical, or management has requested it officially so I can point to specs when it goes wrong. Usually when I have a semi-automated process that is proven to work, then that&amp;#x27;s the time to bring it up with management to try and make it more official (if they&amp;#x27;re not the sort to drown it in red tape).</text></comment>
<story><title>Learning to code vs. learning to automate</title><url>https://daedtech.com/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-automate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duxup</author><text>I worked at a place where coding was not my job (it was technical support) but I wrote some scripts that automated some stuff.  It was handy and everyone liked it.&lt;p&gt;Then someone in the process changed things that the scripts did not understand.&lt;p&gt;Management came running to me upset that this thing I automated didn&amp;#x27;t work.  Being technical support managers most didn&amp;#x27;t understand (not all but most) that when you change things you need to tell people before the day of and they were quite upset with me.&lt;p&gt;I had saved them enormous time over several years ... but the result was I really just kept doing the same job I always was, not rewarded, and then the day they changed their processes without telling anyone they got upset with me.&lt;p&gt;My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone.</text></item><item><author>rurcliped</author><text>The problem often isn&amp;#x27;t ability to automate. It&amp;#x27;s that the workers
closest to the problem have an overwhelming disincentive to automate.&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a low-level job in Peloton operations. Our Phalange
Team must ensure that, before a bike&amp;#x27;s in-home delivery date is
confirmed, the delivery technician has placed an internal order for a
left phalange. Each of us spends all day navigating between the Sales
app and the Internal Order app.&lt;p&gt;My daughter tells me how I can automate this. But I never do it. Why?&lt;p&gt;1. Even if I were 100% sure the coding would be finished in one day,
the daily metrics for the Phalange Team would still signal a problem.&lt;p&gt;2. It introduces uncertainty. I can tell my manager exactly how long
the manual process takes, but I can&amp;#x27;t tell her how long it takes to
write code.&lt;p&gt;3. It trades off the mean for the variance. Suppose it handles 99.44%
of the cases but there&amp;#x27;s a rare bug where it never sends a delivery
date if the Internal Order backend has a timeout error. On average,
scheduling is 90% faster but some customers aren&amp;#x27;t scheduled at all.
Not an acceptable outcome.&lt;p&gt;4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ozfive</author><text>I can attest to this. I had similar experiences when I was in Aerospace. The complete incompetence of management is staggering and the mentality to stick with what has worked keeps efficiencies down. They instead went after the workers to &amp;quot;work harder&amp;quot; instead of allocating time and money to automation. I finally left and went to work on automation for industries that were receptive to creating tools that would make them more efficient. It&amp;#x27;s exceptionally frustrating to be in such a position, and you are right, it&amp;#x27;s better to do nothing and find yourself a place that fully understands what it means to save time and money by spending a fraction of it to fix while putting functioning processes in place to mitigate the risk of someone changing anything without going through the proper channels to ensure that the tools continue to work.</text></comment>