101–110 of 510 posts
As a rule, I always do the work assigned to me just a bit shy of the target.
And, I always automate my work. And I never say a word of it to anyone.
I work in an engineering firm and most of my colleagues are clueless about programming.
Am I cheating? Perhaps. Do I feel guilty? Absolutely not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how is he taking it on himself to decide what work needs to be done? He was hired to perform a set of tasks, and has written a script to accomplish them. You could argue he has taken it upon himself to decide how the required work is done and then one could say "so what?". If the business is happy with his output then everyone is a winner. To think its an employees job to suicide their employment is not the actions a…
Employees are resources to the business, as the work changes, the resources change, it's not his job to decide how he should be resourced in the business. It's literally why HR is called HR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I don't know what jurisdiction you're referring to, here in Canada what he did would likely be illegal, and the other instance would not. I don't know of a locality where what typon said is illegal. It's not difficult to get creative when pursuing theft of company time, and here I doubt you'd even need to get that creative. I'm an EIR at a law firm so I will ask and report back.
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.)…
> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly.
I've also seen worse waste in other industries.
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Oh no, won't someone think of the businesses?
Depends on if you care about other people I suppose. The West subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move society forward, so yes, till that changes, do think of the business imo.
These are fun to read. I laughed at the one where the guy shared a photo of his bong and TV setup at home. One of his major innovations was creating appropriately-named folders for his work. And seriously, a lot of businesses don't know how to get _that_ organized. They are good at other stuff. Also noteworthy IMO are the jobs you don't need to automate--just bring yourself, do your normal thing with baseline effort…
I'm talking, like, you understand how external drives are represented, know how to cut & paste files & kinda know what a filesystem is and how it's laid out (not what a FAT table is or anything like that, I mean just how folders and links/shortcuts practically work and such). If you can do more than basic arithmetic in Excel, you're basically god. If you can write batch scripts (like this person, assuming it's true) or a little glue-code python, that's beyond what the others around you could even imagine.
I'm not sure whether this is a UX failure or there's just too much necessary complexity to make things better. To some degree I think the basic metaphors we use for representing computer concepts and UI to ordinary users are badly underdeveloped, or in some way misguided. Certainly I think the "iOS is dumbing things down and making people unable to compute!" folks have things exactly backwards.
Sounds very very boring to me. I have no clue who would pay someone 90$ for copy and pasting files from left to right. But if this is true I still don't envy him. When his gig is up he has nothing to show and is stuck were he was when taking that job. Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed or not making a real difference.
The right answer is "start finding a second job, now." Make $180k for 8 hours and 10 minutes of your life! Or alternatively, keep on keeping on and market yourself as a legal document management automation specialist when you bounce.
> Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed or not making a real difference.
I have a wife and kids to help me feel needed, and a garden that needs tending when I want to feel myself making a difference. Work is work. 90% of jobs are filled to the gills with bureaucracy and designed to ensure the average employee does very little and accomplishes nothing. Might as well enjoy it when they make it easy to enjoy.
I didn't automate my job, I just did a good enough job that things stopped breaking, and I had less and less to every day. Eventually I'd just show up, make rounds, wait for things to break, make rounds again after lunch, wait until quitting time. I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear…
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.
Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs. Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted highly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$90K just to move some files from one folder to another seems high too. Either the job involves more than what's he saying, or it's simply fake.
Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern or something, this is not skilled work.
There might be an element of deliberate fraud if this guy is spelling out the difficulty of the job as justifying his pay to management. I've seen very clever goldbricking similar to this, where management doesn't know enough to understand what good IT looks like, or how to value IT work.