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Comment by mthreat | Hacker News Reader

I think the most important part of this post is "Well, fuck that."

Update: Actually it's this part: "Well, double fuck that."

I had this same moment at work not long ago. My boss gave me a task to compare user permissions exported from a directory (not a database). The output was ridiculous and it could easily take 10 hours to work through lining it up and correlating just 5 users. They had been doing this by hand for 6 years before I got there. Within a few minutes of her explaining it to me, I flat-out said "I don't want to do this, so here's my plan". 30 hours of Bash scripting later, I had the task completely automated, and we could run through 20 users in less than 2 seconds, with the output going straight to Excel.

You can't be afraid to tell your boss you think a task is ridiculous, but you'd better be prepared with a better solution.

I once worked in an office where at the start of every month we'd get a cell phone invoice for 30-some phones listing every call made in the last month in an Excel document. One of the secretaries would then print out the whole thing spend the next two weeks going through it with multiple colored markers annotating it with who had which phone one which days and checking for different classes of violations of the cell phone usage policies.

Another secretary realized that he could make it a lot faster by just copying and pasting the data into different sheets for each person and then highlighting it in Excel. Then he wrote a macro program that would automate the highlighting once you'd done all of the copy and pasting. This cut the total work load down to a few days.

I was very derogatory of the whole thing and insisted that it was absolutely appalling that humans were spending so much time doing obviously machines' work, so I got assigned to fixing it. I ended up with an HTML+JavaScript application that would read the invoice file and monthly phone directories to automatically match up names with numbers for every day, calculate policy violations, and write the results to a new Excel spreadsheet in the established format. It cut the total human time involvement down to 5 minutes per month and time to wait for results down to about an hour.

Once we had the phone records available on the first day of the month, demand suddenly rose for even more detailed and different kinds of analyses. So it turns out we still spent more than two weeks on making reports, but only because new ones kept being demanded since they could actually produced on demand.

I especially enjoyed the fact that he kept it on the down-low. Just use your super-power to do 4 days worth of work in 20 minutes and righteously goof off for the rest of the week. Win.

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