We employ someone to type data from one database printouts into another database | Hacker News Reader

We employ someone to type data from one database printouts into another database

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21 pointsDanBC15 comments

My very first job as a young teen was basically this!

I asked if I could just have access to the origin database instead of getting printouts, automated the whole thing, and continued to get paid for 15 hrs/week or whatever the legal limit was to spend about 4 seconds clicking "run" and the rest of the time goofing off.

Even convinced them to let me set up remote access and work from home once I demonstrated how much faster I could work that way. Good times.

You probably ended up costing them the same amount a professional solution would cost but since you’ve spread that cost (and risk) over a large amount of time it was justified.

I think you're heavily discounting the "that's the way we always done it syndrome". However, they were willing to give the "kid" a shot.

Eventually I confessed because I wanted to work on some other technology problems the company had, and the owner of the company sat me down for a chat.

She explained that legally, the company already owned any software I made on company time, but she wanted to buy it from me properly anyway, and asked me to write down a price.

I wrote down what I thought was a completely insane amount and she frowned and shook her head. "Sorry, I don't think we can pay that." She wrote down another number and passed it back.

She'd just added more digits to my number. It was more than my take home pay for the entire year.

After I accepted, she explained how sometime in the past they'd paid 10x that price to a "professional" firm for a prototype that didn't even work.

Several years later, at another, bigger company, I created a solution to a similar but larger scale problem we had in my spare time and offered it up for free. (I never learn.)

Instead, they signed a $2.5 million deal with a "professional" firm to create something.

That CEO bet me $100 it would be running smoothly in production in 6 months, but I could only take the bet if I didn't quit. I patiently explained how their proposed solution could not even work in theory, and wished him good luck.

10 years later, they were still doing it manually.

> After I accepted, she explained...

That’s _exactly_ what I was thinking about when I wrote that comment.

The first tweet doesn't fit into the title bar. It says

"Can you believe that we employ someone to print out data from one database and then type it into another database?"

And the twitter thread is full of people (mostly in healthcare) who are not in anyway surprised this happens, or who think this is not as complex as some solutions could be.

I'm submitting it because lots of people on HN want to find ideas to work on, and this kind of interoperability is one idea that could be worked on.

Awk is amazing, but they're not going to use awk.

> they're not going to use awk

Or `dir`. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Indexer

Damn... the cleverer Gustavo would use that trick and spend the rest of his week playing Solitaire or browsing HN...

> this kind of interoperability is one idea that could be worked on.

Definitely, but the challenges are probably not technical.

This! I work at a place where some people do not want this type of "magic" to happen. They don't trust numbers if they don't key them in themselves (realistically a thin veil for job security).

On the surface it sound silly but it can be a very complex problem where automatic tools would take too much time and work compared to having a person doing it manually for the data which is relevant at any given day. Maybe the output from the database is old an application using mixed character encodings (with corruption and errors), spanning relationships design long forgotten, with the primary function to get any useful data from the application being to print it out.

To take a real example, an organization has a internal website where workers post reports. What the programmers did not expect is that what workers actually do is to write the report first in a word processor and then drag and drop the text into the form. This produce a bunch of garbage characters which the database accept but when it need to be printed back out things crashes. While the fix they did was to add a filter to the input, I can easily imagine others fixing the output so that it doesn't crash and which then any future applications also need to copy in order to handle the garbage data in the database, especially if you need to move data from one database to an other.

A better solution is naturally to print to file and have a person manually go through it in order to detect corruption. No need to waste paper.

When I knew someone who worked for the NSA, they told me that the accounting department worked this way and that it regularly caused their salary payments to be wrong. This was years ago, though, so maybe it's changed.

I want to find 3 or 4 jobs like this that I can do from home. Apply a bit of Perl and I can probably have an easy life. Better than the constant churn of keeping up with industry trends.

The large assumption is that these kind of places will allow any sort of user programable software to exist on these systems.

I immediately thought -- is this a legal firm?

There may be good (ish) reasons for a legal firm to do strange things like this.

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