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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

#161

This is like the dream. I feel like I would spend the time learning an instrument, or maybe do online learnings to maybe get another job I actually enjoyed doing. Can't even hate and hope things work out for that guy.

In my experience it gets boring very quickly. In my case I hadn't automated anything, the company was just bad at utilizing their staff and they were happy to keep me on the payroll doing next to nothing. It resulted in my worrying about skills deteriorating and being more depressed than usual.

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

#162
post #85
post #31

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.

I was for a few years in college a data entry clerk making $12.50/hr. It was effectively copy/pasting with some extra clicks and being a computer science student at the time I wrote an excel connector that did ~80% of my job. It only required me to intervene on especially hard data entry stuff (lots of math or formulas). There really was no benefit to tell anyone I did this. Not because I wanted to be lazy but it wou…

I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could do it in a minute (it was a slow machine)

Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a "file upload" feature and I figured out the format.

I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data to the format the mainframe needed.

I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's info in the daily Lotus 123 update files.

All of this should have been done in a database but I had just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about computers in the first place.

Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software companies the next summer.

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

#163
post #94

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.

Years ago I was hosting guests from Airbnb. Due to my location I got a lot of English language students coming to Canada for 2-3 long immersion courses. One guest shared with me that one of their assignments was to engage with hosts, even if they weren't planning to ever book; obviously these people eventually did, but it's a bit problematic as it's time not compensated for - sure, it's built into the cost of busines…

Send them an invoice.

You'll never see a penny mind you, but IME (which includes getting pimped out to help the admin office a decent bit in grad school) mystery invoices have a pretty good chance of getting "wtf is this"'d all the way up to the dean's office.

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

#164
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey folks, I'm going to implement this script, I'm concerned in doing so, you will just fire me and keep the script, I enjoy my job and working with you all, is there a way we can find additional tasks for me to do in the business" is a fine conversation to have with your manager, sure.. you don't have to, but in my humble opinion, then pretending you're not stealing from the company knowing what you know, is questi…

ok, lets go with that. What happens when the manager says "yes, implement the script and then we are going to fire you". What if Op refuses to implement the script then and just quits? A logical employee with rational self interest would never have that conversation because they know it likely ends with their termination. So in reality your proposal actually leads to the employee never implementing or recommending th…

Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script and explain it, and then get an intern to run it once a week. If the script isn't written, I now know I can hire a consultant to write the script once. Sounds like a win for me.

Except that's not how it would play out in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution, if they're not excited about ANY other work in my business at all, I'm not sure they are a good fit for my business. As big boy buffet said. Price is what you pay, but value is what you get, the terms of that deal should be pretty clear imo.

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

#165

hot take: this is basically UBI in practice. "different people have different opinions" but it's funny to see the cognitive dissonance. Lots of hate ITT for anti-work, yet HN is usually a hotbed for pro UBI sentiment.

How is it UBI in practice? It is not uniform, and the guy makes $92k which in most areas is well above what a person would require basic income.

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

#166
I did a similar thing almost 20 years ago, I had to manually verify that the image files from one network drive were the same as the image files from a different location (some internal web-page, I think, I had file access to them, too). That was taking me about one hour each working day, in fact each working night/morning, as this was a night job and I had to do that at the end of the shift (6-7AM).

I had started learning some PHP but very quickly realised (by reading on the web) that Python was way better for this job. With the help with the Python docs page, the Python mailing list (very friendly back then with newbies, maybe still is, haven't been there for a long time), of tkinter (excellent library!) and of py2exe I was able to write a quick script on my Mandrake distro at home, turn that script into an .exe, copy it to a floppy disk and use it at work. Just like that, an ~1 hour job turned into a maximum 2-minute job, the time it took me to open the tkinter-based "program" and press a button or two. One or two years later I was getting my first job as a computer programmer, writing Python, thanks in part to that realisation of "I can make this thing way faster and easier by using Python".

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

#167

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.

I used to get 60k and have no work to do for months at a time. "Forgotten employee" situations are certainly real.

I knew a chap who left where I used to work to go to a large UK bank at high end contracting rates.

He returned after a few months saying that the team he joined (which was apparently quite large) had been given no work in that time and hadn't even been given any computers - and they weren't allowed to use their own devices for anything. He said he left simply because he couldn't take the boredom - even though, as he freely admitted, the money was fantastic.

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

#168
post #142

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.

Even if that were true, no harm done… But imagine for a minute it isn't. What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? Plus, we are social creatures, and sometimes we just need to offload our personal stories. Quite often there's a new fun thing that I wish I could write about or tell the world, but I don't because of real consequences to some people, or even myself. Recounting these stories is cathartic…

The harm done is that impressionable young people on /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.

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

#169

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.

The creative writing argument is used all over the place on Reddit though. I once shared an anonymized true crime story that you could verify by reading the previous week's local news where I live, and about half the comments on the thread were people saying it was obviously fictional, congrats on becoming a crime novelist, etc.

Among other things I think it really says something about the way people choose to look into, or not look into things. In a lot of cases it would really easy to casually verify these stories, even if offline or via PM, rather than going with the straight-up subjective interpretation.

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

#170

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?

Why, its a law firm, not a tech company, there are no other jobs for him to do. By giving them the script he would literally "automate himself out of a job". What would be the incentive to keep him?
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