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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

#41

Post by wonderwonder »

neom wrote: post #10
typon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when a company makes surplus profit from its employees' labour and doesn't compensate them for it accordingly, is that also considered theft?

No. That is in fact not how the law works at all.

"By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business."

That's not how the law works either. If employee A, B and C all have different processes to do the same task and employee A is faster than the other 2, employee A is not stealing and neither are the other 2.

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

#42

Post by pietrovismara »

Miner49er wrote: post #21
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #15

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…

HN really lives in a some sort of wealthy bubble. $90k is plenty of money to save for retirement in most of the country. If it's not, then the majority of people in the US will never be able to retire.

OP doesn't realize that 87% of the US population (being one of the richest in the world) makes less than $90k.

That means that by his view 9 persons out of 10 won't be able to retire. Which I actually believe is true.

The irony of admitting this while at the same time praising this system with statements like

>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".

What kind of growth are we seeing? Why should we have a positive attitude about work, when it's just a mean of transfering wealth upwards?

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

#43

Post by reaperducer »

I automated the most time-consuming tasks of my job about a year after I joined the company.

Instead of sitting back and gloating about it on social media, I used the extra time to take on additional projects and to help other departments in order to increase my value to the company.

When the COVID cuts came, I was labeled "essential" staff. So while the rest of my department was downsized from over 50 people to fewer than 10, I was able to keep my job.

I'm glad I took the high road.

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

#44

Post by mbg721 »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #39
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #15

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…

The side-hustle culture is a cancer. > delivering additional value for his employer for which he must insist on additional compensation Good luck with that. /r/antiwork is a societal response to this exact sentiment. "Oh make a decent amount more than the national average and still cant afford to retire? Simple, monetize what little free time you have left!" No, the requirement for a side-hustle is due to the decades…

A traditional side-hustle wouldn't be for the same employer (or any at all).

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

#45

Post by TriNetra »

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.

Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced support services" to his clients. I charged only $950 to build the initial version, but charged monthly maintenance which started from $300 something, and over the months/years went onto $840+ monthly. Mostly, it was Mailman that would require some tweaks re error handling/retry logic, as there were weird errors I would see from different providers once in a while. However, the code would work flawlessly and for months I didn't even need to check it at all.

So, yes it's possible IMO, just that you need to be in a right situation at the right time with the mindset of a hacker (the one who wants to make machine works for him), you can achieve something like this.

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

#46

Post by tamiral »

neom wrote: post #17
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I have this book and haven't read it yet... but will start it! thanks for the reminder.

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

#47

Post by keiferski »

This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing video games, because he automated his largely superfluous job at a law firm which itself likely only exists to deal with bureaucratic or unnecessary cases (assuming this is true, as they have a single absent IT person who handles their entire infrastructure.)

On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.

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

#48

Post by MSFT_Edging »

brodouevencode wrote: post #35

Great engineers try to automate their way out of a job. It would seem like their employer would reward them for using a little ingenuity. Why wouldn't he just come clean about it?

If his employer learned they didn't need to pay him for 40 hours a week, why would they maintain his employment?

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

#49

Post by theturtletalks »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #25
null_object wrote: post #5

I think most of us are feeling some schadenfreude because the poster is ripping-off a law-firm - but the disappointment for me is that (for the most part) (s)he seems to be treating it as an 8-hour day where (s)he simply skips work - which I would definitely find totally soul-destroying. I saw in the follow-up comments that there are is some "passion project" that's being worked on, but apparently it wasn't 'relevant…

Which is why, like most things posted on that subreddit (and online communities in general) should be approached with a bunch of skepticism. The post reeks of "yeah, that happened" vibes.

I really do think it happened. Just look at the explosion of no-code tools that handle this sort of tedious work for small businesses. The caveat is that once the owner figures out they can automate this person's work, that person will be out of a job.

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

#50

Post by mensetmanusman »

I helped someone do this for their accounting job once since I saw them working with obscure data re-entry moving from old DOS systems to SAP. They had a ton of material to manually move over and it seemed painful ergonomically.

I used Sikuli from MIT to deal with the randomly changing window locations.

Management got mad at them for completing the task so quickly (it took a week instead of a few months) since it fell on management to deal with what to do with the data entries next, and they didn’t like a huge stack of work looming. Ha

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