[arethuza]

2 jobs ago I had a management level position ("Head of Architecture") for a decent sized engineering multinational.

My fondest moments are actually when I helped people do mind numbingly awful tasks by automating stuff - this was not my day job but I had a lot of freedom.

One guy was so delighted that I had scripted in less than an hour some ghastly bit of spreadsheet work that he estimated was going to take him a few weeks that he immediately ran out and bought me a bottle of wine!

[AeroNotix]

This is partly why I miss it, sometimes. The work itself is largely pretty easy to do and the impact can be huge. Not just in a time-saving way, but to the people involved and ultimately the company.

I often think about the sheer volume of tasks like this the world over where a tiny Python, or even say, AutoHotKey script could automate it. The amount of hours mankind must spend on utter drudgery astounds me.

[41b696ef1113]

By far, my favorite accomplishment from last year was (effectively) automating a barcode lookup. The historical process took 5-10 minutes and was performed 5+ times per day. My half day of scripting now saves ~1HR of daily labor. Nearly a year after I created it, and one woman still stops me every time she sees me to thank me for improving her job.