Well, actually, I do have a bit more food for thought. In a lot of ways, the things we consider challenging don't make a blip on management's radar or on the bottom line that The Important PeopleTM look at. I spent several months on a parsing project that saved another group from having to invest in fancy workstations that would have cost $100K a year, each, and another few months when I first got here building a specialized-environment launcher in shell script that is spreading rapidly throughout the whole lab as THE way to run eCAD tools, but neither of those apps has even been acknowledged.
What gets recognition are these simple little 'gluey' things that help people get their jobs done faster and more easily. The more basic the improvement, the more people it helps and the better things run. These silly little webifiers and spreadsheet dumpers aren't much from our perspective, but they sure do help things work better, and that's the real value in what we do. | [reply] |
It is the simple things that are often the most useful. One of the accounting staff where I used to work used to spend about 2 hours each day manually comparing two data dumps (one from the accounting system and one from the bank) to make sure all the transactions matched up. They would print out both reports and use a ruler to match up lines.
It took me about 2 hours to write a little webapp where the two files could be uploaded, and it would spit out a report of all the ambiguities in about a second.
It amazes me that every worker these days has a computer on their desk, but the majority still don't have a clue what computers are really good at. They are used for writing memos and playing solitaire!
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[...] but neither of those apps has even been acknowledged.
Hmm .. I would recommend you document those cool tools so that you can remind your boss at Performance Evaluation time how useful Perl is, and how skilled you are at using it. You should add those to the living document that is your resume, as well.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds
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