[sithadmin]

You're not really oversimplifying. RPA is duct tape for situations where it's drastically cheaper to automate personnel doing repetitive tasks out of work and have a fraction of the original team supervise a fleet of(rather persnickety) 'bots' that insert keystrokes and clicks in a legacy application, as opposed to building proper systems integrations or rebuilding the underlying legacy app entirely.

I understand the niche, but I don't particularly care for it. It's an enabler for shortsighted, 'keep the lights on but cut costs and corners' operating strategies that usually go hand-in-hand with technical debt accumulation and brain drain.

[wodenokoto]

I’ve worked adjacent to RPA and I’d like to think they were saving personnel from the most tedious and hair-pullingly annoying work routines.

Not using RPA is like not using macros in your text editor, because they are automating programmers out of work.

Some data can only be accessed through a legacy gui and it needs to be cross referenced with several proprietary databases that also can only be accessed through a gui.

Even if you begin migrating these it can take years if not decades. Meanwhile shit needs to be done.

[crispyambulance]

> Even if you begin migrating these it can take years if not decades. Meanwhile shit needs to be done.

Yep, that's the key thing. The ERP systems which have their tentacles all over every part of the organization make changing stuff out effectively intractable.

I don't know if it's intentionally like this (by design on the part of the vendors) or if it's just a consequence of people being terrified of change.

[netizen-936824]

Increasing interoperability sounds like a good reason to move the data to things that don't use GUI only proprietary interaction, rather than a good reason to throw some duct tape on. But that takes actual work

[wodenokoto]

I don’t think even the RPA department will disagree on that one.

But while the 3rd 100million project to rewrite that legacy, proprietary cobolt data app is faltering, the RPA department is actually making it accessible via a rest api that activates a virtual mouse that clicks around and ctr+c,ctr-v the result back to the user.

The curse of building great digital infrastructure in the 80s is you might get stuck with it 40 years later.

[ethbr0]

Also, and I think this is underappreciated by the HN crowd, because they don't work at these types of companies -- interfacing with legacy business-critical applications.

Most software products that companies buy have interoperability as either the least prioritized feature or as something to be actively prohibited.

The best, brightest, most modern examples of software, we are not talking about.

[jerf]

"as opposed to building proper systems integrations or rebuilding the underlying legacy app entirely."

Spinning the blame around a bit, I've often thought that part of the problem is we keep building GUI toolkits that hate this usecase. If they supported this better, the RPA stuff would be less awful.

Appletalk almost did it, but my impression is that it is dead now.

Websites have decent support for it, but trying to use it in practice still involves a lot of little compromises everywhere. It still breaks pretty easily, and the workflow is bad even when you learn all the tricks.

But there's a lot of useful code buried in GUIs. If there was a way to write scripts against the UI, in a discoverable, testable manner, this would be a much more sensible strategy. And you wouldn't necessarily have to hire developers just to maintain a "real" solution.

But we persist in treating this as a fifth-class citizen in our widget sets, so... here we are.

I mean, yeah, it would always be a bit of a tech debt pit, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near as bad as it is now.

[tomrod]

"Legacy" in that the apps work well enough for the business need and redevelopment costs are justifiable, typically.

[Spooky23]

It has its places but overall I’d agree.

I worked with some folks who were sold on it for streamlining/tying processes from Salesforce that were on a mainframe and an awful peoplesoft thing.

It was ok… but it just felt wrong. Nobody learned anything… they literally recorded a half dozen people doing the tasks and looked for variance.