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by kwijibob 2516 days ago
Fascinating that they switched to a worse manual methodology.

I wonder if there is a big difference between: a) an automation system that only the coder understands b) an automation system that is transparent and accessible to managers

Many coders get to point (a) but the system can't actually be trusted or relied on if the original coder moves on.
1 comments
c22 2516 days ago
I think they (management) viewed the job as a mostly grunt brute-force sort of problem. By automating parts of it I managed to save myself some time and hassle, but it's not like they told me to start taking half the day off or tried to leverage my talents elsewhere. Other than saving a lot of paper my system didn't really impact their bottom line in a way they could easily see. Even though I trained my successor on using my system neither they nor anyone else in the company was interested enough in computers to take on the ongoing maintenance of the system, despite being just a few hundred lines of perl that an amateur programmer could probably figure out (I was definitely an amateur programmer when I wrote it). When it came time to upgrade their POS software and the vendor refused to copy and reinstall my scripts they had no choice but to return to the vendor-approved process because they had no one technical who could own the system.

At the time I thought they were fools for abandoning such an improved process, but older-me sees the difficulty of the position I left them in. From their perspective they get roughly the same result from having some other cog do the grunt work and hiring a real-deal computer specialist at $$$/hour to be on call to fix problems has the potential to cost much more.

They may have been foolish after all, they ended up going out of business. I think their biggest mistake was allowing their POS vendor to basically lock them in (by being unable to export any of their data in any convenient way) and not demanding/being willing to pay for the sorts of changes I was hacking together to just be incorporated into the official system.

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