Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation which makes it sound like robotic process automation, might replicate people interacting with GUI programs? But it's still not clear to me, as to what kind of programs they're using it for.
100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it’s not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.
It might be that what they were automating was different on each customer company. It's only a guess, but it seems viable that they might go to a company, see what easily automatable tasks they're doing by hand, and offer to write a script for that task.
If that was the case, I wonder how they managed to monetize it that much.
After reading a couple of case studies on their website, it looks like GUIs... I'm guessing they use something similar to AutoIT with screen recording. I worked on a lot of AutoIT back in the day... This is probably a good market to get into for any saavy entrepreneur.
A lot of these RPA processes use tools like UiPath to automate clicks on a Windows desktop computer. The article's stated use case (scanning paper applications and entering it into the system) sounds like OCR getting text off the page, doing some sanity checks, then keying it into the system with automated clicks in a VM.
Ordinarily you'd just expose an API to pass through that data, but for lots of legacy systems it's faster and less expensive to have an RPA bot just literally key data into the old interface.
Source: the enterprise things these eyes have seen
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a standard term in that line of business. I did some work for an RPA company a few years ago. They have a nice explanation of the concept here:
My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade.
So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long.
No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.
I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?
If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary.
There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
> If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary.
Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need.
The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.
If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it.
1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve.
2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work.
If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently.
But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.
I believe you’re confusing “nothing to do” with what the OP task was: “making upper case letters mixed case”. It needs to be done right? This work is analogous to what is done every day in every office in every country. Believe it or not, most of what people do is this type of work (again, my opinion).
If there’s not other pressing needs, and there’s a business need for the work, and you have a sure fire way of solving your problem, then take the path of least resistance and keep your staff from being idle.
Having people do that manually is garbage work. It can be done with a quick script by any competent programmer or system administrator. Having people sit down and do that for hours, days, or weeks, is a sure-fire way to kill any interest they have in contributing meaningfully to the business. They will hate you, themselves, the company, and either seek out a new job (best case) or remain and occupy space continuing to do garbage work.
If your staff is idle, give them meaningful work, training, or the day off. All of those are better than giving them garbage work.
There's mechanistic work that this was true for. With the Advent of Fiverr and Upwork you no longer need to do this unless you have some sort of sensitivity on the data (it's personal, or health, or something secret). These companies are the cloud computing of drudge work. You can burst capacity in half an hour.
I had this happen to me. I was hired as a contractor for a big company and was shown to a cubicle I was to share with another developer. Only, I had nothing to do. I was told what I'd be doing when I interviewed but that project got put on hold by the time I started. After about a week of not being assigned anything I started to kind-of freak out. My cube-mate assured me that everything was fine and he explained that the department head was given the OK to hire someone and he took advantage of that opportunity so that he had me available when he needed me.
I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?
Every time I read stories like this I can’t help but mourn the loss of real opportunity for them. Instead, they should have asked to WFH a few days a week and been VERY productive on those days. Then ask “hey, do you mind if I do this job remotely?” and always be just a little more productive than the others.
sure, and by the same logic, any health insurance company who rejects claims unfairly should be supplanted by a competitor who will not and who will scoop up all those patients. unfortunately the health care market and system do not meet the assumptions that are implicit in your line of reasoning, and we do see a lot of such anti-consumer behavior by health insurance companies, even as the profits of health insurance companies soar (proving that they are not at the 0 margin that naive economic reasoning would predict)
Our healthcare costs are not high because six people are redundant.
The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.
Is careless inefficiency of for-profit corporations in a somewhat competitive market ever a root cause of high prices? I think it's more of a sign that they're raking in so much dough it wouldn't be worth their organizational overhead to pay attention to such crumbs. They aren't making a trillion dollars a year by missing things they'd know how to fix if they hung around HN.
That's exactly how I would have played it. Another dream scenario would be to one day be some 'forgotten employee' of a giant company. You know, maybe your project got cancelled, your colleagues were moved elsewhere and you just never got re-assigned and didn't bother to ask. Still receiving your checks, still showing up to the office, but just kind of fart around and do whatever you feel like. Hell, maybe you could even give yourself a few days of remote work a week!
We have an entire 15 person team at my company who's job it is to copy the source control commit logs and paste them in a word document. This document is then kept on a server for a few years, after which it is deleted.
I am not kidding. We don’t even need to replace them, the commit logs are there for exactly this purpose. They can just disappear and nothing would change!
They’re a legacy team, I am sure their time is up soon. What enterprise companies do is gather all the people they want to lay-off and then do it in one shot whenever they need to bump their stock price.
>No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs".
And they were right. His program, put in production, would indeed take away their jobs.
Now in a perfect society (and in neoliberal make-believe), they'd find a more meaningful job to do.
In reality, they'd probably just be tossed aside, fired, and left in the dustbins of history (with cushioned younger people that think they have it made laughing at them for not being able to "adapt" -- the same kind of people that get angry and call it "hate speech" when they're themselves fired and are told "learn to code").
If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. If we were going to do that, we should just pay people for nothing, which is what digging holes and refilling them is.
They would be better off, and so would the company and society at large, if they were put into a new role (at the existing company or a new one) that actually provided value.
>If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value.
Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs.
The reason it helps is, as I see it:
1) Productivity/automation is well up...
2) More people than required are available to work
3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern
4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period.
5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults
6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients)
7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max
The really sad part is all the missed positive externalities. Think about what could happen if a few companies owned up to it and said "hey we'll let you have one day a week helping children with their homework or working on a shared vegetable garden or... or... because [insert outreachy marketing speech]"
Companies would never do it because of competition. Only a token company might do it, when it doesn't need to compete as much (e.g. has a niche, sells luxury stuff with a secure market, where the positive work balance they sell as part of the brand). If many did it, then this good-will gesture would lose the marketing value for the company (since it would be common).
Instead, companies need to be forced to do it, by law -- like they were forced to stop child labor, to have safety laws, to 8 hours workday, etc.
> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings’ services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That’s cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour.
Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?
I don't think you can translate that problem statement into programmer speak without a specific understanding of the problem space and the original manual process.
My best guess is OCR plus whatever redundant checks are necessary to prevent errors, plus CRUD apps and whatever else is needed for occasional manual intervention.
You know how you can use Selenium or (on the command line) `expect` to script tasks that aren't APIable? This guy made a company doing that for GUIs that are commonly in use in Japan. Japan suffers from some early adopter pain in that a lot of the software they have now accelerated productivity greatly when introduced but is now coming up against the shortcomings of non-hookable software and now exists through path dependency alone. Making that automatable turns out to be hella valuable.
That's correct. I had to do some research into the market at one point. From my brief exposure, it's really just "macros" and "macro recorders" of old, being re-sold under the new enterprise buzzword of "RPA".
Other big leaders in the space are Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.
I'd like a bot which ripped the articles from Bloomberg and created a simple lightweight output. It's Getting to the point where I avoid anything on Bloomberg.
I've actually spun off a company to do exactly this for small businesses. Slack, trello, zapier, CRMs...the potential to automate is MASSIVE and a wildly underserved market. It used to be that knowing how to be expert at Excel made you irreplaceable. Same goes now for power users of Zapier and other workflow automation tools.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt might be that what they were automating was different on each customer company. It's only a guess, but it seems viable that they might go to a company, see what easily automatable tasks they're doing by hand, and offer to write a script for that task.
If that was the case, I wonder how they managed to monetize it that much.
[1] https://rpa-holdings.com/en/
Ordinarily you'd just expose an API to pass through that data, but for lots of legacy systems it's faster and less expensive to have an RPA bot just literally key data into the old interface.
Source: the enterprise things these eyes have seen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)
https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/products/robotic-pr...
Many more examples:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Robotic+Process+Automation
So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long.
No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.
There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.
If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it.
1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve.
2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work.
If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently.
But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.
If there’s not other pressing needs, and there’s a business need for the work, and you have a sure fire way of solving your problem, then take the path of least resistance and keep your staff from being idle.
If your staff is idle, give them meaningful work, training, or the day off. All of those are better than giving them garbage work.
That's totally fine. Garbage work makes the most money for bosses.
Then a few days or weeks later some difficult work comes by and you’re understaffed and overworking the people you were able to keep.
Besides, the lower case letters still need to be upper case. Don’t you know that most “work” being done around the world isn’t much different?
That’s how Friday WFH got cancelled at my previous job
I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?
Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.
But I can appreciate that your pet preferences prohibit you from believing this is so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.
Healthcare in the US is basically “cost plus” which means the higher the costs, the higher the profits.
It’s a weird space where many payers don’t really have a drive to reduce costs.
Provider inefficiencies are very real as well.
Aaaah yes, that's the life I tell you!
When I sped it up to five minutes, I’ve never seen someone become so pissed off.
They’re a legacy team, I am sure their time is up soon. What enterprise companies do is gather all the people they want to lay-off and then do it in one shot whenever they need to bump their stock price.
And they were right. His program, put in production, would indeed take away their jobs.
Now in a perfect society (and in neoliberal make-believe), they'd find a more meaningful job to do.
In reality, they'd probably just be tossed aside, fired, and left in the dustbins of history (with cushioned younger people that think they have it made laughing at them for not being able to "adapt" -- the same kind of people that get angry and call it "hate speech" when they're themselves fired and are told "learn to code").
They would be better off, and so would the company and society at large, if they were put into a new role (at the existing company or a new one) that actually provided value.
Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs.
The reason it helps is, as I see it:
1) Productivity/automation is well up...
2) More people than required are available to work
3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern
4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period.
5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults
6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients)
7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max
Instead, companies need to be forced to do it, by law -- like they were forced to stop child labor, to have safety laws, to 8 hours workday, etc.
Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?
My best guess is OCR plus whatever redundant checks are necessary to prevent errors, plus CRUD apps and whatever else is needed for occasional manual intervention.
Read document using OCR
> then check that everything is in order
then verify the consistency of what you read with other data sources that you have available (SQL database, web APIs, CRUD webapps, etc.).
Other big leaders in the space are Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...