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Ask HN: Automating office monkey jobs

1 points by fuqted ↗ HN
My friend just got a new job at a health insurance claims processing company (SF). She told me today that her job mainly consisted of copy / pasting into an excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is passed to higher ups to be approved.

My first thought was that I could automate this. She actually doesn't believe me, which I think is funny.

How is this kind of thing going on in 2016, let alone in the first world - let alone in a 'tech hub'?

Does opportunity exist here? If so, what does it look like?

3 comments

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techjuice
Many tasks like this are completely automated, normally to get this done quickly someone that is really good at automation like a systems engineer will be assigned a very important, large multi-step task that needs to be done throughout the year (think financial, system, inventory reports). The systems engineer will normally turn it into a fully testable and automated system that no longer requires any human intervention.

This is especially the case when the application needs to pull information from systems only the system engineers have full access too that regular development teams have little or no access too (inventory systems, human resources systems, database servers, production web, email, infrastructure, system and applications, backup archives, financial transaction systems, payroll systems, etc.) that access is only granted to the top system engineers in the company.

These automation tasks are normally engineered and receive by-in from executives pretty quickly and go through a few weeks of the full development cycle and normally end up in a cronjob or scheduled task to only been seen again when a few tweaks are needed in the future.

fuqted
Thanks for the response. I'm wondering how companies can still be living in the stoneage like this. I have little engineering experience at the moment and I still feel like, given a little time, I could pull something like this off.

Is salesmanship the main missing ingredient here? Should I grab a job at this company and try to sell this from the inside? (That seems like a longshot)

I feel like a lean, diligent team could be executing on this - modernizing and directly improving margins for companies - enough to pump out a very satisfying lifestyle business. (I say lifestyle biz to imply that this would be kept on a small scale. You'd be in effect killing jobs like this)

Who is doing this at the moment?

techjuice
For the big businesses they are running things like enterprise editions of ORACLE or MSSQL server along with all the middleware and application servers on top, which makes the barrier to entry for the small guy pretty high, since these take some serious time to master which is why you normally only ever see the top highly paid and experienced system engineers handling tasks like this in the big corporations.

Some may bring in a small business to try and accomplish this tasks but if it is a large business it only takes a small team to really accomplish this and fully automate it (two to four top system engineers, a software engineer to create interface for management and the system engineers, along with insuring the API and other security checks for compliance and SLAs are in place.

If you want to get in on something like this insure you have the proper credentials for what the company uses in their infrastructure (SAS, SAP, ORACLE, Microsoft SQL Server, Hadoop, Spark, .NET, Java, C/C++, along with vMWare products, Excel Macros, Office plugins, etc.) and have experience doing data migration, optimized SQL queries and ETL operations. As some of these companies have petabytes of data to deal with, so your small time 200GB database would not give you the experience necessary to work with these massive systems or the insight into how to write proper queries to work with these systems unless you have being doing it for a few years.

If you have experience in many of these you might be able to do it. To keep things small I would recommend building out some prototypes that end up as high quality services or products and go in as your own business. This way you get to keep the work you create, make more off your work and get to benefit off of word of mouth and can get even more customers if they really like your work.

It is hard work to get things like this automated in the various environments but it can be done. Those that come in and do it right benefit heavily as they can focus on more important things like research and development.