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I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

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Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#11

Post by i_haz_rabies »

neom wrote: post #3

"For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. " Not a win for the COO/GM/CFO/FP&A/whatever who is tasked with finding efficiencies in the business and doing optimiz…

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 - read this and then see if you still care at all about business efficiency

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#13

Post by pavel_lishin »

binarytox1n wrote: post #7

Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma farmers and therefore more fiction. It's an entertaining read, but not likely true.

I also got r/thathappened vibes, but I choose to believe. Anyone who's worked for more than a few places can name a business that's held together with rubberbands and excel spreadsheets, especially small businesses. This is an entirely believable story.

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#14

Post by lolc »

It looks like this is a case where everybody is happy. A process that was plagued by manual errors now runs smoothly. And there is an admin around to jump in should it break. While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well.

On the other hand, I don't think I could work like that. I always look for ways to improve life, and that includes the life of my customers. Not letting them know that the thing is automated keeps them in the belief that it requires manual action, and that to me is a lie by omission. Likely there are other low-hangig fruit to automate, once you're in the mindset.

Another consideration is when the script does something dumb a human wouldn't have done. Is the operator liable for that? Because after all it was not considered part of the job to automate it? Of course, the likelihood of human mistakes weighs more in all likelihood. But when the firm argues (they're lawyers right?) that the mistakes wouldn't have happened if the employee followed protocol, there may be some ugly liability.

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#15

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

Love the poster's ingenuity and hate his attitude, and the antiwork subreeddit.

Attitude: $90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for this person's retirement, particularly if they encounter major expenses. He should be spending his new free time either developing a side-hustle, a business, or delivering additional value for his employer for which he must insist on additional compensation. I used to be well aware of evidence & case management systems and this person is one decision away from existing software making his perceived job less relevant.

Antiwork: I entered the workforce during a deep recession, and I was a recruiter for infoTech during another recession. I've traveled extensively overseas for work. It will be an employers market eventually, perhaps soon, and the antiwork crowd is going to meet reality head-on when it happens. Nothing wrong with ditching bad employers & developing side-hustles. There is something wrong with demonizing work. Part (by no means all) of the growth one sees abroad is due to acceptance and often positive attitudes about work, with less emphasis on "fairness". Life isn't even close to fair and some societies and people understand how to work with that better than others do.

Let the downvoting and flaming begin (sadly).

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#17

Post by neom »

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #9
neom wrote: post #3

"For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. " Not a win for the COO/GM/CFO/FP&A/whatever who is tasked with finding efficiencies in the business and doing optimiz…

Shouldn't whoever is tasked with finding such inefficiencies realize that a simple script could be written to replace the process of manually transferring files to and from cloud storage?

That is not how teams work. I recommend this book to learn more on how teams work: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Teams-Creating-High-Performanc...

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#19

Post by _bfhp »

I once saw a presentation from a man who build entire products this way. He automates hiring contractor devs based on their review scores, sends them to a huge Trello board that they use to self-onboard and then take on tasks, and automatically tracks of their progress by Trello cards completed and amount of code written.

He said he just spends 10 minutes a day firing contractors that aren't doing good enough, and maybe adding a new card to Trello now and then. This presentation was almost a decade ago so this automation might be a full product of its own by now. No saying if his product was any good or still exists, though

Re: I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

#20

Post by kevingadd »

Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated me, I got transferred to what was effectively a punishment team - officially I was hired as a game designer and then officially moved to the programming department, but then I was moved onto "cinematics", which meant setting up shots, camera transitions, and dialogue timing. Naturally I had zero qualifications to do this. Another person moved onto the punishment team was a QA tester that a lead had actively tried to block hiring. The supposed justification for this was that cinematics were behind schedule (this did seem to be true, at least).

Anyway, within a couple weeks me and the QA tester (who also knew how to code) had written a set of tools to make our work 3-4x faster and improve quality, so the three of us got our work done in a couple hours a day and spent the rest of it doing whatever we wanted - watching tv, working on side projects, reading programming books, etc.

To me the best part was that if I hadn't automated this the rest of the project would have fallen behind, because at that point the entire design department relied on my unauthorized side project (a comprehensive set of authoring and debugging tools for the design team) and I spent some of my spare time maintaining it. Game dev is wild.

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