Ask HN: What business processes still waste time every week? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What business processes still waste time every week?

5 pointslzr_mihnea8 comments

Ask HN,

I’m a software engineer and founder. Over the years, I’ve built backend and cloud systems and created a few internal tools to address recurring operational issues.

Before spending time building anything new, I’m trying to understand what problems are actually common today.

So I’m curious: what’s a process in your business that still costs you time every week and shouldn’t? For example: something manual, spreadsheet-heavy, or a tool you tried and abandoned.

If you’re comfortable sharing publicly, I’d appreciate hearing about it. Thanks.

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Problems with scaling have been the biggest timewaster in my career:

1. In some large businesses I've worked in, so many people have been hired that some systems and processes have wound up being controlled by entirely different people from the people who need them. So coordination between people and waiting for people who have little to no incentive to do the thing they're being asked to takes up a large part of the working day.

2. In other businesses, a large fraction, or even a large majority of the employees have had no discernible job except to talk and write about the job performed by the few people doing an actual job. So a lot of time in these businesses would be spent dodging meeting invitations, rejecting grand ideas about revolutionizing the business with AI on the blockchain, saying no to "if you could X, that'd be great" and generally reminding people that they're not in charge.

The great thing about these problems is that you're not very likely to have them in a small startup, but if you decide to grow the organization later, you'll need to be very vigilant about how you scale.

Hey, thanks for the reply! Those do seem like tricky problems, and specific to large enterprises.

Hard to put a pin on how those might be solved.

How have these affected your work?

Many projects have taken longer and been more stressful and had worse outcomes than needed. A lot of the work being done hasn't even been intended to deliver any business value, but to provide an opportunity for one or more people to be seen to be doing something. Actual value creation does occasionally take place as well, but more as a happy accident or a side effect than anything else. I'm very glad I'm not a major shareholder in any of these corporations.

In my experience, the biggest weekly time sink tends to be work that sits between teams rather than inside a single system. Things like manually reconciling data between billing, support, and ops, or preparing the same reports in slightly different formats for different stakeholders. These processes usually start small and “temporary,” but scale quietly as the company grows. The trade-off is that they’re hard to automate cleanly because ownership isn’t always clear. Curious whether the pain you’re seeing is more about fragmented data or about human approval loops that automation alone doesn’t fully eliminate?

Hm, those are quite tricky and involve a higher-level fuzzy area, where the way forward isn't so clean cut.

Would you want to share how your work or personal life has been affected by these?

As a solo person running a website: Accounting and invoicing.

Even for a tiny outfit with quarterly invoicing, it's tedious.

Hey! Thanks for the reply! Have you tried any solutions to fix your issue? Is it something that takes a lot of time or effort?

Timesheets.

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