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Comment by iinnPP | Hacker News Reader

I worked HP CS in Highschool and during my time there I created a HTML/JS replacement for a unbearably slow tree system that made a 10+ second network call every single question(often 20+ questions and a tree copy was required for notes). Mine was instant.

They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.

At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.

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Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag.

The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.

So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.

Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.

> understandably

why?

I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).

>my AHT flagged me

Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?

Average Hold Time

Average Handle Time actually

Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame.

It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.

This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.

This comment is so spot on, it’s also big in military circles, especially over past 15 years. It can even be said that frequent (over) use of acronyms is based in insecurity

Musk's Acronyms Seriously Suck memo:

https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...

That highly prestigious in-group of call-center workers....

It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.

If you're not part of their industry, just look up the acronyms instead of getting mad. "Audience" is laughable, they are not posting solely for your entertainment.

And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.

    > over the past decade

You must be young. Do you not think there were similarly acronym infested tech speak in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s? All of those decades also had plenty of certification testing.

If yours was instant, why would your AHT decline? Shouldn’t you be way faster? On many questions you would have saved over 3mins on network calls alone.

I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.

The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.

A good business would have promoted you to the dev team so they could reduce that metric for everyone.

As an intern at @bankcompany I decided to go one step further than what my ticket was asking for and decided to implement something that crunched data in a very obvious way. Was nicely asked to revert it, because @bankcompany already had several fulltime employees doing exactly the same thing.

I've seen this in many groups. Every time I laugh thinking about private enterprise efficacy. Then I shed a tear. Distribution problem.

AHT?

Average Handle Time

Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.

Assistant Head Teacher

> made someone look bad

That, or that it DoS-ed the database.

It was offline.

And making each click trigger a 20 second DB query doesn’t?

How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?

If you prefetch all those options in the background, I bet the DB would be unhappy.

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