Shoutout to the colleague who caught my broken data pipeline after 6 months

I was manually exporting Salesforce reports every Monday and emailing them to the team. Turns out our CRM had an API sync that was failing silently for half a year. My coworker noticed when he compared my numbers with the analytics dashboard and they didn't match. Has anyone else found a hidden manual process that should have been automated from day one?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_max1mo ago

Had a buddy at my old company who spent 2 years manually copying data from one spreadsheet to another every Friday. He thought it was just part of the job. Turned out there was a button in the CRM that did the whole thing in 10 seconds. Nobody ever showed him because everyone assumed he knew about it since he'd been there so long. He was so embarrassed when he finally found out but honestly thats on management not him. Its wild how many hidden manual workflows are just floating around in companies like that.

ivan_murphy801mo ago

Had a friend who used to print out emails, hand-write replies, then scan them back into PDFs for two years before someone showed her the reply button. She felt like an absolute idiot but honestly, the onboarding process was just broken from day one.

jamesf291mo ago

Does your friend ever laugh about it now or is it still a sore spot? Honestly I feel for her though because that's not even her fault. The fact that nobody just pointed at the reply button on day one is wild to me. Tbh onboarding is usually just someone handing you a laptop and saying good luck. Ngl I've seen stuff like this happen way too often and it's always the person who gets embarrassed when it should be the company.