Re:Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
by schnevets on Thursday May 14, 2020 @09:54AM
(#23179505)
Exactly - intern labor is cheap, flexible, and there's a "wax-on wax-off" mentality where they may learn by proxy but are also in a safe environment where they won't hurt themselves or the company. A script and the associated automation could become the expectation or could lead to a key-man-dependency-risk.
It may be lucrative for the friend to take the script and turn it into a product. but then they'll need to market, sell, document, optimize, and do a million other tasks.
There has always been a dead zone between "automated script that makes me work a bit more efficiently" and "product that can make everyone with this job work a bit more efficiently". Fortunately, new technology is narrowing this gap.
A manual process is robust, fault tolerant, and easy to adjust to new circumstances or changing business requirements.
A Python script is fixed, and they day it breaks down due to some slight change in scraped data, you have to pull in a developer to fix it. For a company without dedicated staff to support such automation, it is a high risk.
Ad-hoc automation can turn workflows into Rube Goldberg machines. A Python script here, an Excel macro there - soon nobody knows whats going on and nobody dares change anything.
Developers often think only one step ahead: It was manual, now it is automated with a script. Win! A business have to consider that larger picture - future support, maintainability, risk etc.