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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

#111

Post by mihcsab »

tbh, something similar happened to me too. I took over a sysadmin job, multiple servers. They had a lot of problems in the backend, because of bad configs, sometimes they spent days resolving the same issues on multiple servers, without trying to fix the root causes. I just took the time and went through the configs and corrected them. Also made some simple scripts that do the same thing that they did manually. No one knows how much is changed in the background, so they don't bother me with how much I actually work with the administration, they just know they used to spend hours with problems before, now nothing really comes up, maybe one problem every two months. Now my job with them is just generating monthly health reports, spending five minutes looking through the logs, making the invoices and being available when something doesn't work.

So yeah I can believe the poster. Some firms never thought about automatization, maybe they don't even know how much is possible, so they are happy to pay the same amount if everything just works, without bothering you about actual time spent with it. Maybe it even works better, than it used to when the other dude did it manually as a full time job.

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

#112

Post by gumbotron »

reaperducer wrote: post #43

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 fewe…

No post body was provided.

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

#113

Post by brimble »

CountDrewku wrote: post #58

Ugh that subreddit is just a cesspool. Most of the stories are fake and it attracts the bottom feeders of society. People need work to feel fulfilled. I get that a corporate job may not meet that demand but this idea that you can just eschew any work and be mentally ok isn't true.

> People need work to feel fulfilled.

I, too, worry about the idle rich and think we should do something to help them find work.

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

#114

Post by nemothekid »

You aren’t being paid to copy and paste files, you are paid so the company can retain your skills in the event anything goes wrong.

If the evidence was gone, corrupted or needed to be changed , they have someone on staff who can quickly remedy that. Isn’t that the point of a high skill job? You get paid for knowing which screw to tighten, you don’t get paid for tightening screws.

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

#116

Post by wobblybubble »

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…

Why does there need to be passion project? He could study philosophy or do whatever that one can do in an office by oneself.

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

#118

Post by ironmagma »

patrickk wrote: post #104
keiferski wrote: post #47

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.)…

This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber: > 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 f…

Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload).

A similar thing could be said of bloated code.

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

#119

Post by thatguy0900 »

dansiemens wrote: post #98
mikewarot wrote: post #60

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…

> 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 of change I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die. They don’t really understand the technology that their jobs are bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-go.

Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers will not thank them for making their job easier with better tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was, let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.

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

#120

Post by mikkelam »

readams wrote: post #100
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.

Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs. Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted highly.

Another take: Antiwork is a much needed uprising in america for low paid workers to finally stand together and stop dealing with an unfair system.

Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is stopped

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