Making 4,000 Hours Disappear
Automation that saved more time than it took to build.
Built automation for internal processes at Barclays — SQL integrity checks, Selenium-based test suites, and a solution that standardized across 17 applications and saved 4,000 man-hours annually. The more interesting lesson: automating a bad process just makes the bad process faster.
What it is
In banking, compliance and reporting processes accumulate like geological layers. Each year adds new requirements, and people adapt by adding manual steps. By the time I arrived, there were workflows nobody questioned because they'd always been done that way.
I automated SQL integrity checks with Python scripts running daily, built a Java program with Selenium and Spring Boot to automate application testing, and standardized that solution across 17 other applications — collectively saving 4,000 man-hours annually.
What was technically interesting
The automation itself wasn't the hard part. The hard part was understanding what to automate.
Automating a bad process just makes the bad process faster. Before writing a line of code, I spent time with the people actually doing the work — asking what they were doing, why, and what they'd change if they could. Several of the steps I ended up automating turned out to be unnecessary entirely. The final solution was simpler than the original process, not just faster.
The fact that one solution could be standardized across 17 applications was the real insight: the manual work looked different in each application, but the underlying problem was the same.
What I learned
Understanding the problem is more valuable than being good at the solution. I probably spent more time talking to people than writing code — and the code was better for it.
Also: the people doing repetitive manual work often know exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it. They just haven't been asked.