At work, we have a system that has not been updated in many MANY years. Its essential, but because of budget constraints, we cannot update it. Also the new system is SaaS and is 10x (no joke) expensive.

We had around 10 people entering the same documents into the system in a typical form. Its a variation on three different criteria. They spent 40 hours a day just doing this work...

I got tired of having to pull info out of the system and automated it away with Selenium. When my manager saw what it could do, he asked if the document side of things could be done the same way. I created a prototype and boom, solution complete. It been stable for close to a year now. The 10 people now have new responsibilities (most making more $$ from what I hear).

But like the picture above, its a Jank solution. It literally just runs 24x7 throwing things from one system into another system, then pulls the info into another system. And you can see the screen running. But it does work...so im going to call it a success(?)

[–] Quant@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

40 hours a day, now that's some dedicated employees :O

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago

Lol that's what I get for no coffee today. I'll keep it up for a laugh.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system's UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago

Yeah gotta love that report that takes an exorbitant amount of time to make...which is no longer used/only used for a tiny bit each year.