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
> 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.

This seems like a very justified reaction and could happen in any sane company in the world. If that company is using excel and VBA, then because this is what they know and where they have experience. Python is a foreign technology, and likely nobody in that company knows how to handle it. Also, the existing solution is battle tested over a long time, it's working, people know how to handle it, it's a well moving gear. Changing it for some unknown gear, from some unknown person, is insane, no good company would do that, this is too much of a risk.

It seems, you just don't understand the bigger picture of legacy systems, and the risks and costs of changes.

>>Purple+jy
Your thinking is very common in Germany. It is correct in a primitive sense: change is costly. But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes. The problem was not that the company was happily using Excel and VBA, it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle. If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else, and that change was worth exploring.

With your logic, Germany has justified maintaining fax machines and printing online forms. Embracing change is an uncomfortable process, but not doing that is even worse.

>>epups+V81
> Your thinking is very common in Germany.

Like the rest of the world.. I mean, we have companies like Microsoft, who basically live from staying compatible back till the beginning of time. Cooperate-world is strongly focused on stability and the ability to control your turf, everywhere.

> But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes.

Interesting how you completely missed the point. I was not talking about the change, but the way it happened, and the reasoning for it.

> it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle.

Actually, we don't know that. We know nothing about the reasoning for the process, or the details, or the company.. We only know the story of a 3rd party, who stumbled over their own ignorance.

> If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else

Yes, unless the company has some inhouse-knowledge of using python, it should have been automated with something else, like VBA, which they already are using. And it should have been done by someone from the company, not some strange from outside. As a long-running company, it's nonsense to use technology for inhouse-task, where you have no expertise at hand. This is just harmful and an additional burden longterm.