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0 pointsmirkules3y ago0 comments

About 10 years ago, I worked for a Toyota supplier. My job as, the only software guy in a house full of hardware people, was to find out every single Toyota and Lexus dealership in America, and then find out what kind of cell phone reception they had (3G, Edge or none) for each of the major carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, IIRC). They imagined this would be done manually so they estimated a few weeks to do the job.

Within 3 days, I wrote a script to locate the dealerships, load each of the carriers' web pages, enter the address/coordinates into their coverage map, then take a screenshot of the results. Each of the carriers, of course, had their own way of displaying the coverage information, but it was mostly a color-coded map (example: green area = 3G, blue area = edge, gray area = no reception). So, I wrote another script to process the screenshots and deduce what kind of reception they had at the dealership (some 3500 in total, if I remember right).

Unfortunately, this feat was met with the proverbial "great, while you're fixing things can you also fix the printer" kind of response, but damn if I wasn't proud to compress a few weeks into 3 days in a clever way, even if I had no one to appreciate it.

By the way, the reason we needed this information is because we were rolling out Lexus RES+ (an early version of the remote engine starter) and they wanted to make sure that every single one of the dealerships could demo the service to potential customers.

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yosito3y ago

This reminds me of the response I got once when working for a government agency. I managed to automate their quality assurance process, reducing a two week manual testing routine down to a five minute test suite. Their response? I got fired for "poor performance". I guess I made too many unproductive government employees fear for their jobs. Lesson learned!

fredrikholm3y ago

Same thing happened to me working as an administrator in a warehouse.

I basically made all midnight-shift administrators redundant (including myself), as their job could be completely automated as long as someone on the floor could put the tickets into a slot. In the morning, the 'actual' administrator(s) would batch-scan these documents which then got picked up by a script I wrote. It categorized all the tickets and sent out the necessary emails depending on which what where when, saving the result to files to be used in reporting (normally written by hand).

They didn't like this, and refused to use it. I tried to explain that the entire office side of the company was filled with this type of low hanging fruit, but they wouldn't hear it.

Company eventually folded due to lack of solvency. When I asked the CEO why this was considering the large amount of paying customers we had, he stated 'rising employee costs'. The headcount of people working on the ground had stayed the same during this entire process, new hires were exclusively doing admin work.

chrismorgan3y ago

But did it match reality? I know that I’ve found both Optus and Telstra’s network coverage maps next to useless in both metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria, Australia, for as long as I’ve been paying attention, which started in roughly 2015. They claim almost total coverage in a way that is simply not true, especially with cheaper phones’ modems (they often have poor antennae) and modems that lack total frequency band overlap (surprisingly common, even among flagship phones from the domestic market), but even on phones with good modems and support for all frequencies. Telstra only say whether it’s 3G, 4G or 5G, with no indication of likely strength (which is extremely important—near me, they claim 4G coverage, but in practice you’ll get a weak 3G signal outside and probably nothing inside, and I believe it’s served from a tower in the next town over 10km away, but of course no one that lives here uses Telstra, when there’s an Optus tower right in the town), and Optus are only a tad better, splitting it into two strengths, without and with antenna.

I wish they’d tell you where the towers actually were, because then even a layman could do a better job of estimating how usable a signal will be.

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