
We employ someone to type data from one database printouts into another database - DanBC
https://twitter.com/invadingpirate/status/1268560762387271680
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justtopostthis3
My very first job as a young teen was basically this!

I asked if I could just have access to the origin database instead of getting
printouts, automated the whole thing, and continued to get paid for 15
hrs/week or whatever the legal limit was to spend about 4 seconds clicking
"run" and the rest of the time goofing off.

Even convinced them to let me set up remote access and work from home once I
demonstrated how much faster I could work that way. Good times.

~~~
heavenlyblue
You probably ended up costing them the same amount a professional solution
would cost but since you’ve spread that cost (and risk) over a large amount of
time it was justified.

~~~
justtopostthis3
Eventually I confessed because I wanted to work on some other technology
problems the company had, and the owner of the company sat me down for a chat.

She explained that legally, the company already owned any software I made on
company time, but she wanted to buy it from me properly anyway, and asked me
to write down a price.

I wrote down what I thought was a completely insane amount and she frowned and
shook her head. "Sorry, I don't think we can pay that." She wrote down another
number and passed it back.

She'd just added more digits to my number. It was more than my take home pay
for the entire year.

After I accepted, she explained how sometime in the past they'd paid 10x that
price to a "professional" firm for a prototype that didn't even work.

Several years later, at another, bigger company, I created a solution to a
similar but larger scale problem we had in my spare time and offered it up for
free. (I never learn.)

Instead, they signed a $2.5 million deal with a "professional" firm to create
something.

That CEO bet me $100 it would be running smoothly in production in 6 months,
but I could only take the bet if I didn't quit. I patiently explained how
their proposed solution could not even work in theory, and wished him good
luck.

10 years later, they were still doing it manually.

~~~
heavenlyblue
> After I accepted, she explained...

That’s _exactly_ what I was thinking about when I wrote that comment.

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DanBC
The first tweet doesn't fit into the title bar. It says

"Can you believe that we employ someone to print out data from one database
and then type it into another database?"

And the twitter thread is full of people (mostly in healthcare) who are not in
anyway surprised this happens, or who think this is not as complex as some
solutions could be.

I'm submitting it because lots of people on HN want to find ideas to work on,
and this kind of interoperability is one idea that could be worked on.

Awk is amazing, but they're not going to use awk.

~~~
goto11
> this kind of interoperability is one idea that could be worked on.

Definitely, but the challenges are probably not technical.

~~~
thehoff
This! I work at a place where some people do not want this type of "magic" to
happen. They don't trust numbers if they don't key them in themselves
(realistically a thin veil for job security).

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belorn
On the surface it sound silly but it can be a very complex problem where
automatic tools would take too much time and work compared to having a person
doing it manually for the data which is relevant at any given day. Maybe the
output from the database is old an application using mixed character encodings
(with corruption and errors), spanning relationships design long forgotten,
with the primary function to get any useful data from the application being to
print it out.

To take a real example, an organization has a internal website where workers
post reports. What the programmers did not expect is that what workers
actually do is to write the report first in a word processor and then drag and
drop the text into the form. This produce a bunch of garbage characters which
the database accept but when it need to be printed back out things crashes.
While the fix they did was to add a filter to the input, I can easily imagine
others fixing the output so that it doesn't crash and which then any future
applications also need to copy in order to handle the garbage data in the
database, especially if you need to move data from one database to an other.

A better solution is naturally to print to file and have a person manually go
through it in order to detect corruption. No need to waste paper.

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ebg13
When I knew someone who worked for the NSA, they told me that the accounting
department worked this way and that it regularly caused their salary payments
to be wrong. This was years ago, though, so maybe it's changed.

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collyw
I want to find 3 or 4 jobs like this that I can do from home. Apply a bit of
Perl and I can probably have an easy life. Better than the constant churn of
keeping up with industry trends.

~~~
chrismatheson
The large assumption is that these kind of places will allow any sort of user
programable software to exist on these systems.

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m463
I immediately thought -- is this a legal firm?

There may be good (ish) reasons for a legal firm to do strange things like
this.

