> It's finicky technology that is hard to make sustainable
This 100 times over. The only way I've been able to make it work is being one heck of a generalist. I've found that training on what I do is near-impossible and I don't even know if I could scale a real company in this beyond myself.
Well, UiPath's valuation is currently 7B... But yeah. They have an "academy" for training RPA developers, forums/ social presence, big sales teams, a process for developing automation, an "automation framework", a marketplace for automation activities, etc.... all these are stuff outside of the core software (robot/"activity executor", orchestrator, and studio for designing said activities).
Maintaining & expanding the automation is a heck of a challenge though. Like, once you got the stuff deployed, make sure that it works without headaches, in the face of other software/ OS upgrades. The robots/automation services are essentially a "fleet of microservices" that you have to maintain for a customer whose strength is likely not IT, and who will change the infrastructure from underneath your "microservices". It's a hard problem, but I feel we're well positioned to tackle that, and if we do, the sky is the limit really.
(disclaimer: I work for UiPath, though that should be obvious from the message)
Right on! Yeah - I would love to learn more about what the bigger guys are doing.
Everything you're saying is 100% something I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and ongoing support is a huge struggle to workout with the companies I've implemented software at.
Looking at your product offerings made me chuckle - I definitely have versions of a lot of what you do! My robots are called workers, my orchestrator is called a broker, etc etc ha. Lemme know if you guys are ever looking for a remote automation engineer w/tons of cloud experience ;)
A big challenge with the Blue Prism world is getting the people who will lose their jobs to map the processes Robotic processes will automate. Fiddly, tricky and easy to automate a vast number of errors. Only works once extensively tested and results verified.
Ignore analyst and sales hype at your peril.
- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't integrate with third-party SCM. If they tried to roll their own, that's a bad sign
- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked
- Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff
- Never promise anyone you'll automate 100% of their workload. Never try to automate 100% of their workload. Never hesitate to tell a VP you're not going to automate 100% of their workload. There's value in 50%+, get the easy win and move on. Only come back when you've gotten all the easy wins
- RPA is fundamentally about target selectors (or match rules, or whatever else your tool calls them). Their robustness is the only real feature of an RPA platform, and a smaller toolset is going to result in some fragile, quick-to-break stuff
Ultimately, RPA is about one thing: creating a more tactically malleable layer on top of your existing software. Development and change speed is the biggest advantage.
It shouldn't ever be a core system, but it should be where you prototype functionality.
Perfect. Also, set project start boundaries to ensure realistic goals and expectations. Under promise and possibly over deliver - all too often data and information discovery reveals unforeseen problems and opportunities
I've got a story about how we were spec'd at handling 50% of incoming workload, hit 60% on the first iteration, customer got so excited that we pushed, and project ended up being canned when we failed to hit the (then) final 95% target.
Taught me a big lesson about realistic messaging and never up-negotiating expectations.
Everyone listen to this - this is 100% accurate and SUPER applicable. Have reached out via email - thanks for the offer to chat in your other comment =)
(A) Selenium's UX isn't nearly where it needs to be to upskill an analyst to create their own automations.
(B) Selenium's Windows app compatibility is haphazard.
(C) Selenium doesn't have the kind of corporate support it would take to expand compatibility quickly enough to catch up with its competition.
The RPA space is the Linux desktop problem in a nutshell. Polish and niche compatibility are the final 10%.
Nobody on the open source side has the interest in making a VB6 app work. And nobody on the corporate side really wants to use it for more than what they're currently using it for.
I can't overstate the sheer number of bizarre situations a tool needs to be able to handle to be effective here.
Because being able to automate something 95% of the way to completion is usually a lot less valuable than 100% (note: talking about percentage of happy-path process, not of total incoming workload here).
This is a problem with almost any type of automation. I wouldn't say our software (I am only familiar with UiPath) is finicky. GUIs are finicky, but there are ways to deal with them. That's the stuff a good RPA dev can handle.
I was automating before I started at UiPath, and GUI interaction adds a new layer to automation, of course. But it is still maintainable when you implement them using best practices and CI/CD. I didn't have UiPath at my previous job but it would have made a lot of our automations more reliable and more maintainable. We're also making strides to address these types of problems easier.
I strongly believe that UiPath should a tool in any automation developer's toolbox, as well as GUI testing. UiPath is also pretty easy to use, so business users can automate simpler tasks on their own after going through the academy.
The industry is exploding, and good devs are in high demand. Salaries are high, and you can download Community edition and get certified for free.
It's developer friendly and easy to use. It has an IDE for creating automations. I know a lot of devs might think they don't really care about an IDE, but when you're automating interfaces it makes it _way_ easier. It also is not limited to web browsers.
It's a very simple automation. It just gets text from a browser and inserts it into notepad. But it's a 3 minute video that does something. Check out Selenium tutorials and compare how much you would learn from a 3 minute video. You don't have to dive into the HTML, you just click on what you want to click/type into/scrape and it knows what you want.
But it still has all the power a developer would want. You can create custom activities using C# and VB. The product itself is not open source, but it is very extensible and flexible. The workflows it generates are text files, which work well in source control. It has source control integration built in, which a custom diff tool. It enables code sharing and encourages code reuse.
The only downside I would point out is that it only runs on Windows for now, which might be a problem for linux only shops.
This 100 times over. The only way I've been able to make it work is being one heck of a generalist. I've found that training on what I do is near-impossible and I don't even know if I could scale a real company in this beyond myself.