Automation, redefined

This developer is responsible for a daily report to the managers at a semiconductor manufacturing site, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

"He had put together a process to automatically send out the report every weekday morning at 8 a.m.," says fish. "This report was a big deal and he had worked on it for several months to get it automated."

The report does show up in managers' in-boxes pretty reliably, although there are occasional problems. When that happens, the developer gets a call and the report shows up again.

But eventually the chip business takes a downturn and the developer is laid off.

And starting the very next week, the report fails to appear in managers' mailboxes.

Fish and his colleagues aren't sure what's wrong, so they start looking for the automated process to generate the report.

But they can't find evidence anywhere that a batch job was ever set up to run the report.

"Finally someone suggested he might have been manually running the report every day," fish says.

"'Well,' his manager said, 'that would explain why the report ran three hours late when he was on vacation in California.'"

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