My biggest mistake as an RPA developer
Please explain to me what the use of RPA is.<p>Here&#x27;s my background in the subject: I have met with team of a dozen people that spent half a year doing something that turned out to be the functional equivalent on an SQL one-liner.<p>They could not within our meeting slot accurately describe what it is they were doing, apart from &quot;automating tedious work&quot; (yes, but what is that work, specifically?) and kept insisting I was simplyfing their work (which was very likely true, but not from a lack of trying). Not a single line of this code was in git, there were no tests written, and there was no migration path concerning changes in the external data sets.<p>I have seen a lot of visual programming and business process modelling tools, and written my fair share of LabVIEW back in the days, but with these tools everything old seemed to be new again and evey lesson had to be re-learned. I later learned that certain executives had attended a big Gartner event with RPA in the magic quadrant and promptly set up this team upon returning. Of course, today &quot;AI&quot; has replaced RPA, but that team is still ticking away.<p>Is there something to these tools, or is it just the latest iteration of preying on C-level executives with budgets to fill?