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I used to work for a large corporation. I was on a team of 10 people. My whole job was to run three queries and copy and paste it to excel and send it off on tuesdays. I would do it on Tuesday mornings and it took me about an hour.
My teammates had similar tasks. They were in charge of one report or handout and they would automate so much it would take them about an hour to do.
One day our manager tells us we are getting a new team member because our work load is going to increase substantially.
The new person got their own report. And they messaged me once, “I am done with my report what do I do next?”
I responded, “wait until next week and do the same report”
I was at the company for ten years.
I left the tech world and now work for a medical device company. All I can say is I'm extremely happy to be working from home with the 3 hours of meetings and 1-2 hours of work I have each week. And the director wants to get me a junior because I'm managing so many projects. Hell, I'm actively drumming up work and it takes weeks for anything to happen.
Sure I took a bit of a pay cut, but I'm not on call 1 week a month and I'm not being run ragged everyday either.
I used to be in medical device, be aware everything takes forever. Minor changes were atleast 6 months. I added in a step to have an operator look at some component under a microscope for damage to increase yield. Basically if the component was damaged it wasn't detectable till much later and cost went from about 5 dollars to about 800. It took 9 months to implement and we didn't even have to buy anything or hire anyone.
I'm definitely aware now. We're global and that means even more overhead with multiple regulatory bodies. Our products are several years to their first market, and at least another year for the global rollout.
And I'm just over here writing software and trying to reduce toil for these insane people who hand-roll excel files like they're databases and applications.
If your company was anything like mine find a group of people who you work well with in your normal departments and try to use them whenever possible. For example basically every document released needed a signature from manufacturing, R&D, regulatory, quality. Technically I would contact the manager of each department with quick overview and ask them to assign someone, but I would also include a quick note like "I would appreciate if John could be assigned to this if he has availability". Typically I would also typically of already contacted John and checked if he had availability and if it was within his ability, typically they were willing but sometimes was told stuff like "I would love to but I'm on vacation for 2 weeks starting Monday" or "I could but I haven't work on fault tolerance stack up analysis since college, I recommend Tim as he can give a more thorough review of your analysis". All good things to know before starting out on a project.
Also if you need something done quickly prepare ahead and alert everyone and typically people will comply but don't use this too often. For example one time we had an improvement project, we were told we could use a Friday but report had to be completed and released before Friday morning or people's surgeries would need to be delayed(long story how we got in that situation). I wrote the whole report the week before assuming everything went smoothly, only thing missing was the specific numbers from the test. I sent it out the week before and asked for a pre-review so everyone agreed on the verbiage. I wrote a macro script to do all the analysis and verified it work with previous data sets compared to manual analysis. Test took 6 hours to run, finishing of report took 10 minutes, sent out for review to all signatories and cc'd my boss, the director and the dvp emphasizing urgency. Dvp replied all throwing his weight behind it. Everything was approved and released with an hour to spare before eod. I only did that sort of thing 5 times over 8 years in that role so people respected my request. I know people who said everything was urgent and no matter what the real priority was it got put into the normal queue for most people. Typically I budgeted a week just for reviews in my timeline, we got that one done in about 35 minutes.
Did you have to pretend to be busy the rest of the time? Not having anything to do 99% of the time sounds dreadful.