PowerAutomate In Non Software Jobs

Last Modified: Dec 13, 2024

At time of writing I work in office administration, i.e booking meeting rooms for other people, booking catering for other people, raising requisitions to buy things for other people which get approved by a chain of other people. Recently, exec management above my office has been pushing to automate everything, because doing this supposedly reduces work. Notice that this was not pushed by anyone with any background in software development, i.e the industry which is solely about automating things with computers.

PowerAutomate is a Microsoft package that lets you link your oring tasks together with cute little boxes and lines and makes everything better. Except of course it doesn't, it's a high-level programming language that just happens to look simple, but which is actually obfuscating an immensely powerful and complicated application that links together a variety of cloud-based services.

Now all of this would be great to actually learn. Except nobody is teaching anyone in my office how to do anything. There is no executive-level plan for how to teach anyone to do any of this. For added context, I've had to teach nearly everyon in my office how to use Excel. Because nobody actually understood how to do anything more complex than type in a cell until I coached people and hassled them to do the in-house training.

It seems absolutely ridiculous that we're all now expected to magically be able to use PowerAutomate. My colleagues don't know the difference between data types. And why the fuck should they? Why the fuck are we being expected to be unpaid incompetent software developers? Maybe like with First Aid training, I could get a bonus to my salary for learning these skills which aren't on my fucking job description, but no, not only are we expected to teach ourselves to be developers, handling high-stakes data that affects the whole school, but we're also expected to do this for fucking free. And that doesn't even incorporate the stress of things going wrong, losing data, loss of confidence from service users, and endless maintenance of these systems. The biggest pain in the ass for me is that I can't easily open up a code editor, and just write code. I have to use the horrible sprawling PA interface that supposedly makes everything easier for the novice, but which to me is just window dressing to sell it to code-illiterate managers, looking for yet another way to scam their employees out of money.