I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.
On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.
From that day everyone did it my way.
I had a manager at work who did not handle tech well. He had a period of unavailability every Friday as he had to do a weekly report.
I walked in on him doing that report, which took been two and four hours, because he be was manually copying hundreds of numbers from a csv file to a report document. By hand!
He was writing down each number in a notepad, using a pen, then switched to the reporting doc and wrote it back, one line at a time.
It took me less than 5 minutes to write an excel macro that did his weekly report automatically, with extra bells and whistles to boot.
This was the absolute worst example of work hard not smart I’ve ever seen.
Had a similar experience. Previous dude took days to come up with a report. I spent a week or two on it, and any monkey can copy paste values and generate the same report in under a hour.
He didn’t even print it, take a photo, and then scan it back in? What an absolute nerd.
At a different job, I had someone print an email, put it in an envelope and post it to an external faxing service…
Oh god. This just reminded me of an old boss. He was a general contractor (very large, and very expensive custom homes ground up builds), and I still don’t know how he was still in business, and more importantly, hadn’t been sued into oblivions. Anyhow, he would use and excel spreadsheet to do his estimates. Ok, not ideal, but could work.
At some point I realized what he was doing, and asked why he wasn’t using any formulas or macros to make it all automatic (he was doing the math with a calculator then entering the info). He didn’t know it was possible. He would manually write down, then transfer info from one sheet to another and of course there were tons of errors. I spent a little time making him a whole new one (his idea not mine) with all the bells and whistles. He never fucking used it.
In a 200 person company, I made friends with some peeps in the marketing department.
Yep, their workflows have tons of automation potential. They are definitely doing hours of work that can be done in minutes. Companies really should have rotations where a dev just sits and watches sales and marketing do any data input work.
I have to enter data into payroll for when a teacher covers a class for an absent teacher. Usually, there are 5 teachers who I pay for one hour each. Each teacher has an ID number.
To pay one teacher I have to enter their ID number. Select their job code from a drop down list, tell the database I am adding to it by choosing or entering A in a box. Then I have to pull the date from a drop down list. Then I enter the digit 1 (to pay 1 hour). Then I enter the ID number of the absent teacher. Then I enter the sub request number created by the absent teacher. Then I click “change.”
I have to do this for all 5 teachers that covered the class. One-at-an-effing-time.
If I had a “dev” handy, I would say, let me enter the ID, date, and job number for the absent teacher. Let me list the 5 substituting teacher id numbers, and the 1 hour should be the default.
Of course there will never be a ‘dev’ around because my county purchased the payroll software and no one who is anywhere near using it gets to make the purchasing decisions.