I saw some similar things in the accounting department at my previous employer, and on the flip side I've met many people who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing steps that a computer could do, but worse.
I think the important bit is to have tight integration between the person writing the code and the person with the domain-specific knowledge that the code is performing - ideally they should be the same person.
As we move away from seeing computer programming as a specialised skill for a class of elite engineers and towards something just generally useful like reading and writing, I can see this yielding huge dividends economically.
That’s not meant as flattery, it’s just pointing out that the efficiency gains of universal computer literacy will not be realized.
> will not be realized.
Not quickly, but give it a few decades. In particular, you will probably have to wait for another generation of teachers.
Exactly this. Not everyone can work for Google (or even for a B-grade software firm!), but in many instances all you need to do is string a couple of libraries together in order to get order-of-magnitude productivity gains.
I disagree - we spend years from age two teaching literacy. It's a skill that needs practise, but it's a relatively new invention that has enormous benefits. Software is too.
(Mind blowing fact: The walls of jericho were built 2,000 years before writing was invented)
We had a data hunting that would go out into supermarkets and collect data, but oftentimes with errors. Supervisors would sift through all of them and spend 4-5 hours a day removing/fixing/joining faulty entries.
I saw that, wrote two Python scripts to automate it (~2 weeks from start to deployment). All that workload automated immediately, and to my knowledge it's still in use today.
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“You’ve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do.” My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from other stores. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their store’s price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days.
“You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts,” my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked all around.
After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitor’s price from a file, found the product in the store’s database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, so he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.
This is the power of computer programming. A computer is like a Swiss Army knife that you can configure for countless tasks. Many people spend hours clicking and typing to perform repetitive tasks, unaware that the machine they’re using could do their job in seconds if they gave it the right instructions.
If only that was what actually happened when people took initiative in this way...
I worked at an international company with its own terrible email marketing system.
I wrote my own email builder based on their templates that allowed me to visually build emails and then just copy and paste in the code!
I also wrote a Ruby script that iterated over a CSV/Excel spreadsheet file supplied on a regular basis to generate HTML page, which I then pasted into their horrible CMS!
The previous person in my job used to have to do all those things manually and it took forever!
The key win for me was convincing the head of IT to enable WSL on my work supplied Windows 10 Laptop!
Having access to Linux made everything possible!
I've seen many shops where the amount of code for dev and QA tools significantly exceeds whatever product they ship.
There was a whole team of people doing this job and this one script got through what a whole team of engineers were doing in about 30 seconds