[hn_temp_10_1_19]

I just walked from a job after a week and a half. Applied and interviewed for a junior full stack java/angular developer position. Really excited for it.

Got and accepted an offer just to show up day one to a weird point & click/drag & drop visual programming thing called BluePrism. Tried to make myself like it, but couldn't stick it out.

Moved 800 miles for that job too, just to get bait & switched.

[filoeleven]

Ah, Blue Prison. One of several RPA (robotic process automation) tools—AKA glorified screen scrapers—that all cost tons of money, work horribly with web apps, and have no public documentation on improving the situation. Each one has its own special way of interacting with a browser, and none of them is half as good as scripting with Selenium.

I have to support clients who are all getting into RPA and wanting to know how to use it with our web app that was never designed with those in mind. If the tech were better, it’d be fine and I wouldn’t even know about it. As it is, it’s a ton more work for everyone involved than just asking us for an API. But then you don’t get to watch a browser window change magically in front of you, I guess.

[noway421]

Heard that a friend of mine had to use something similar at one of his jobs, and he was miserable. Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

I think it felt like an extremely arcane thing to learn and just not something exciting to work with.

Sometimes we forget how blessed we are with the DX in mainstream programming languages.

[hn_temp_10_1_19]

> Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

I made an honest effort to get into it for more or less those reasons. Now I'm just bumming around unsure of what to do.

[jimcsharp]

There are so many of these companies. Lil' mini-SAPs running around, deploying high touch sales teams to large companies and get foisted on whoever's unlucky enough to do work for them...

A place I contract for did this, and then they bought something again 5 years later - still Lego development, but it doesn't do much to hide that it's a thin layer over ASP.NET WebForms so we're getting a bit closer to 2007 anyway.

[Jaruzel]

Never heard of BluePrism, so had to Google it: https://www.blueprism.com/why-blue-prism/

Looks like a Visio type application that churns out code automagically, a bit like Scratch[1] for Grown-Ups.

--

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

[honest_tovarich]

Holy molly .... dude ... that’s hilarious

[hn_temp_10_1_19]

In 6 months I'll probably agree. But right now, I just feel lost, depressed, and not sure what to do.