• Hasse de great (unregistered)

    It is all about how to present and sell your solution. No one likes to be told what to do, but loves get help wit a problem.

    If the manager, in question, does not feel the task tedious or see his work as stupid he cannot accept an solution proposed by someone else. I remember programmers and version control in the old days.

    So to sell a better solution it must feel needed.

  • GWO (unregistered) in reply to Hasse de great
    Hasse de great:
    It is all about how to present and sell your solution. No one likes to be told what to do, but loves get help wit a problem. ... So to sell a better solution it must feel needed.

    Hard to overstate the truth of this.

    [See boss doing repetitive task] You: "Man, that looks boring. Would it help if I wrote something that would automate it so you don't waste so much time on it every day?" Boss: "Well, I guess so. Could you do that?" Yes: "Sure ... how would you like it to work?" Boss: "Well, I could type in the date once, and apply it to a selected range ... or maybe a right-click menu option that says 'set to today's date'" Yes: "Sure, I'll see what I can knock up in a few hours, and we'll test it on some test data, and you can give me your feedback" Boss: "Great"

    And suddenly, through the application of basic social skill - NO WTF!

  • gnasher729 (unregistered)

    The boss changes 5,000 lines every day, doing six key presses per line. And the boss doesn't accept the solution where only one (more complex) command would be needed for fear that he might overlook some problem; that fear might or might not be justified, but it makes the one step solution unacceptable.

    The obvious solution would be to reduce the number of key presses per line. For example by modifying the editor so that a single key press will repeat the last action performed. So now the boss still processes 5,000 lines, but six times faster. 83.33% of the possible gains have been realised. And the boss can still check every single line, just faster.

  • Anonymous Custard (unregistered)

    Not read the above comments, so apologies if I'm repeating the obvious, but Devan's boss is a dick!

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to GWO
    GWO:
    Hasse de great:
    It is all about how to present and sell your solution. No one likes to be told what to do, but loves get help wit a problem. ... So to sell a better solution it must feel needed.

    Hard to overstate the truth of this.

    [See boss doing repetitive task] You: "Man, that looks boring. Would it help if I wrote something that would automate it so you don't waste so much time on it every day?" Boss: "Well, I guess so. Could you do that?" Yes: "Sure ... how would you like it to work?" Boss: "Well, I could type in the date once, and apply it to a selected range ... or maybe a right-click menu option that says 'set to today's date'" Yes: "Sure, I'll see what I can knock up in a few hours, and we'll test it on some test data, and you can give me your feedback" Boss: "Great"

    And suddenly, through the application of basic social skill - NO WTF!

    Best case scenario, yeah. Typically what happens is the user, if he even recognises how slow and inefficient the process is, is fully incapable of imagining how it could be any better, so you're stuck in Devan's position: suggest improvements, all of which are shot down for some reason or another.

  • Anders (unregistered)

    The trick to getting your boss to accept changes, is to make them believe it is their idea.

    Failing that, in this situation you would just make what the boss do appears to be doing anything, but an automated script/code in the background would just do it.

  • GWO (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Best case scenario, yeah. Typically what happens is the user, if he even recognises how slow and inefficient the process is, is fully incapable of imagining how it could be any better, so you're stuck in Devan's position: suggest improvements, all of which are shot down for some reason or another.
    So worst case scenario is the Boss keeps doing it the same way, but Devan hasn't wasted any time coding anything up. Which is fine - if he must waste his own time, at least he hasn't wasted any of mine.
  • (cs) in reply to I'm an implementer too
    I'm an implementer too:
    snoo:
    It then lets you go through and manually update the date field of any records you want by simply typing over the relevant range of characters. It also lets you type over anything else you want, but it will only record the underlying (unchanged) record with the new date.
    fle:
    Of course, if you overwrite id 123 with 456 and change the date field too, record 456 will be updated even though you changed the id for what was really record 123.
    snoo, meet fle. fle, meet snoo. Overwriting of fields other than the date gets ignored, true? false? filenotfound?
    snoo:
    It then lets you go through and manually update the date field of any records you want by simply typing over the relevant range of characters.
    fle:
    Devan decided that this was ridiculous and took it upon himself, as part of his job to automate stuff, to implement an export/import mechanism for the selected records. Thus, you could export the data, edit the file, do a change-all and import the data back into the application.
    snoo, meet fle. fle, meet snoo. Devan's boss overwrote dates particularly on special records that needed to be special again today, but a change-all would also overwrite dates on special records that weren't supposed to be special again today, true? false? filenotfound?

    snoofle, it's good you were an implementer at WTF Inc. instead of a boss. Though actually if you were a boss, your contradictory specifications would put you on par with typical bosses that make this industry what it is.

    Or perhaps, for the sake of brevity, we don't print every single detail of the situation in order not to obscure the wtf itself...

  • nisl (unregistered)

    Perhaps the boss has bitter experience of how well Devan has "improved" other areas and knows that there'll be months of data to clean up and millions of dollars to recover.

  • Rusty (unregistered)

    I had a similar thing, except I was handed the student email server, which ran on Linux, to admin.

    My boss showed me how to add a large batch of new students each semester, which involved manually going between Word and Excel, and manually cutting and pasting, etc. In all, it would take about an hour to perform.

    So I wrote a shell script to check the input data, then sort it, then compare it to users who were already in the system, then create an outfile of just the users who needed to be added, then add those users.

    The total time for adding users was then about 5 minutes, with most of that time being for getting the input file.

    At least I got an "attaboy" out of that!

    Rusty

  • JRI (unregistered) in reply to GWO

    You: "Man, that looks boring. Would it help if I wrote something that would automate it so you don't waste so much time on it every day?" Boss: "Are you saying I'm wasting time?" You: "Well... er...a...yeah." Boss: "Start cleaning out your desk while I call HR. I am not going to work with someone with such a hostile attitude.

    Later...

    You reading dismissal letter: "Instead of doing his job he wanders around wasting time and criticizing people. He is a disruptive influence and lowers the team's unity."

  • GWO (unregistered) in reply to JRI
    JRI:
    You: "Man, that looks boring. Would it help if I wrote something that would automate it so you don't waste so much time on it every day?" Boss: "Are you saying I'm wasting time?" You: "Well... er...a...yeah." Boss: "Start cleaning out your desk while I call HR. I am not going to work with someone with such a hostile attitude.

    Later...

    You reading dismissal letter: "Instead of doing his job he wanders around wasting time and criticizing people. He is a disruptive influence and lowers the team's unity."

    A large part of his job was to find the numerous manual tasks that could be automated, and figure out ways to automate them.

    It's not going to get him dismissed.

  • Zoidberg (unregistered)

    I do a lot of similar stuff and in most cases I spend all time writing verifiers and control monitors to actually show the customer that this now works.

    Another win is to be able to show them all the manual errors that have been entered into the system due to manual labor.

    Also adding helpful statistics and nice presentations they can show to upper management helps.

  • (cs)

    Alt + select all rows, type dd just once, done.

  • Devan's Boss (unregistered)

    What Devan doesn't know is that I automated the a long time ago, and recorded the sound of the keypresses to make everyone think I was still doing it manually. I get several hours back each day to browse the Internet and read TDWTF instead. You think I was going to let someone take that away from me???

  • tlhonmey (unregistered)

    I'd have given him my old, AnyKey keyboard. Program <backspace>-<backspace>-d-d-<down> into one of the macro buttons at the start of the day, and then just hold the button down. He still gets to feel like he's typing and review the changes as they go in, but doesn't have to worry about miskeying anything or cramping up his hands.

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