Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
by folkhack on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:24PM
(#21326998)
> Is there a possibility of ...automating, this kind of automating?
Nah - I'm going to be cocky for a second so please take this with a grain of salt... Automation is the only job that's safe from automation ;)
That being said, it's prime for development of tools... I've been working on taking a lot of my workflow out of Charles Proxy and moving it onto a more "man-in-the middle" model that can replay certain web traffic... PARTS of what I do, but automating the automating is probably the most difficult problem that I've had to solve (ie: building my own tools).
Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
by radcon on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @03:34PM
(#21327684)
They're already automating the exact job you've been describing:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/uipath-rpa-series-d/?rende...
Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
by pacoWebConsult on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:15PM
(#21328083)
To expand upon this, UiPath also announced acquisitions of ProcessGold (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-process-gold...) and StepShot (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-stepshot-add...) as a step towards bringing the process documentation and automation planning tasks down to the level of understanding that SMEs and BAs have about automation. These tools will be a really great addition to the ecosystem as I (and clearly they) have found the most difficult work in this space to be understanding the client's existing process and planning to automate it.
I understand that, like regular application programming, a lot of this kind of automation comes down to requirements-gathering and formal specification of workflow.
But, in theory, could there be some kind of sufficiently-advanced software wizard that does most of your job? Maybe by monitoring entry-level employees' interactions with the software-to-be-automated over some period, and using that as a training input to a workflow guesser?
I'm not imagining that you could be cut out of the loop entirely, mind you, but rather that you'd reduce the human-interaction man-weeks part of your job down to a few hours of pairing with a domain expert to clean up the output of workflow-guesser into a final model.