The Workaday World

I'm still trying to figure out the politics of my new job, and this week got another surprising lesson, at least to me. We have lots of tedious manual processes that I've wondered why people put up with them. Now I know.

Last week, my cohort and I worked through the laborious process of closing the books for the end of the month. We started at about 4pm and finished up at 11:30pm. I was frustrated and exhausted, he was jubilant. From my point of view, the whole thing was a pain in the ass, for him it was 7 1/2 hours of overtime, even more than usual. Probably because my inexperience slowed him down.

The next day he pointed out that he usually does the process from home, where he can do other things during the long periods of computer processing, but he always books 6 or more hours of overtime.

This week, I took one of the most manual parts of the monthly process and wrote some scripts do the work. I had a chance to test them out in our development environment since it needed a month end close for some other things they were doing. I ran my scripts. Less than 10 minutes, they were done, versus a solid hour of typing away for the manual method. Not only that, I had complete logs of the process that showed there were no errors. I was jubilant, some of my colleagues were not.

I am threatening their "rice bowl". My nature is to improve things, these other guys are more into milking things. I wonder how this will play out?