After 4 years of being cautious not to stir the waters it happened again. There was much gratefulness. Then there was much hate. Yesterday I accidentally replaced 17 people department with 3 scripts.

Have they been expelled from the realm then?

If 17 people can truly be replaced with 3 scripts, the company is either *terrible* at knowing what's going on, or no-one is actually doing any work.

@AlmondSauce exactly. Ain't true.

Was it a script that corrupted 17 rows of the HR database? I’ve done that before. Key is to check your ‘WHERE’ clause before running.

My grandma is shop assistant in a bookstore. She was rather slow, so they replaced her and her coworkers with a group of millennials and enterprise grade inventory software. Three months later the shop called them back because the database ended up a mess and throughput fell to a quarter of what she could do with a paper notebook and shouting across the room. A team of good workers beats the best software if the user doesn't know what they're doing.

...Of course, ideal would be to halve the old team who are already familiar with the objective and give them some kind of low automation solution like Excel, that allows them to invent their own techniques, but simply writing a script to do a job you didn't try yourself is likely to lead to high failure rates.

There is a trinity:

Knowledge, Workflow, Teamwork.

You can automate a workflow - but a workflow without a team and knowledge to keep it running is useless.

If you really replaced 17 people with 3 scripts, you didn't "replaced" the people, you created a new workflow.

As soon as the workflow needs to adapt or is too inflexible, people will have to aid with teamwork and knowledge.

True automation is always a lie.

I'll remove this rant tomorrow. Here's a more in-depth version (it was easier than responding): https://devrant.com/rants/4126329/...

@cprn let the rant stay.

It's a nice one. *thumbs up*