zlacker

>>nicbou+(OP)
This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf.

I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer and easier to fill.

>>nicbou+1
The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they would have don it already.

In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.

>>Firmwa+72
When you're a bit older and have done more consultancy, you'll realize this isn't the case.

It's just that most people are quite conservative, the middle manager your gf approached was the wrong person, the manager didn't want the headache of the discussion that happens with their superiors (who wrote it, what happens if it goes wrong, where's it sending the data, how much money does he want, etc.) and also simply don't trust some random like you.

If she'd been an external consultant talking to the upper echelons, they'd definitely want this, but not as some random python script. Probably as a nice easy to install Excel plugin.

So you were talking to the wrong person.

What she should have done is use the script to work less and get accolades for being a fast and efficient worker, and never shown it to her boss.

By the way, that's exactly what I did for a g/f myself 4 or 5 years ago, and I specifically warned her not to tell her boss about it as it'd be seen as a problem, not a boon. She loved it, turned a week's worth of work into 1/2 an hour, letting her get on with the bits of the job she actually enjoyed.