
The Most Mindnumbing of Office Tasks Made One Man $360M - monsieurpng
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-19/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks-made-one-man-360-million
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seibelj
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.

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
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.

~~~
colechristensen
What you should mourn is the healthcare costs being passed on to the patients
to pay these people.

Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real
sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.

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MSM
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.

~~~
prepend
They are high for many reasons including the six people redundancy.

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.

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0898
Let me see if I have this right: robotic process automation means automating
ordinary desktop software by simulating cursor and keyboard inputs?

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blakeburch
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.

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r00fus
Does anyone know exactly what his "bots" were automating? Article is low on
that content.

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anfractuosity
Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation](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.

~~~
andylynch
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.

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sarcasmatwork
[https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-
office-t...](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks-
made-one-man-360-million-1.1216472)

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TurkishPoptart
Damnit, I had 5 years of box-ticking work I could have done, but now I can't
because of this guy!

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goatherders
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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simonw
_> 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?

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scarejunba
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.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Wow. This article says almost nothing at all.

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neonate
[https://outline.com/XWtspH](https://outline.com/XWtspH)

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metaprinter
This is gonna be a mechanical turk 100% guaranteed

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paulio
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.

~~~
greggyb
Firefox has a built in reader mode which works on Bloomberg (and basically all
places I've wanted to use it).

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-
clu...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-
web-pages)

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lph
tl;dr: if you call computer programs “software robots”, Bloomberg will think
you’re a genius.

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llampx
I prefer to call them wizards, it sounds more... magical.

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kgilpin
“Wizards” also sounds kind of Windows 98 :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_\(software\))

~~~
llampx
That's what I meant :)

