You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)

Re:You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020) by tharkun__ on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @09:08PM (#28216647)

I've said it before here on HN I think but I always find it interesting/hilarious to what lengths people go to avoid a little bit of manual work. Like something that literally takes 2 minutes of manually doing the same sequence of click/type combo for 40 items total. Instead they must spend 2 days trying to automate it. And very likely still fail to do so.

Then on the other end I once automated a process ('running a report') that took one of the senior Devs at that place an entire day to compile in: exactly one day. Suddenly that report could be run when people actually needed it (once a month) but they only ran it every half year because of cost and blocking a resource for an entire day.

Your case feels like it might be somewhere in between (given I have zero context/actual knowledge of what these updates are/why they can't be centralized somehow. Has anyone tried?

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Re:You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020) by gilbetron on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @09:29PM (#28216781)

Not there anymore (my story was about 6 years ago), and I was able to reduce it somewhat, but it was mostly a case of lots of, effectively, microservices that needed updating in case-specific manners. To reduce it further would take major architectural changes that would take more time than simply doing repeating the process I had created, even if done for a couple of decades.

[ Parent | on HN ]