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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

#171

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.

[deleted]

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

#172
at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company) one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system, format it in a specific way, save it to a shared drive and email to a few different people. it was really repetitive, fairly simplistic and the report from the ERP was very consistent.

after about 2 weeks of doing this every day i thought there had to be a way to automate it, so I did. i set the ERP report to be emailed to me, set an email rule to save attachment to desktop with a naming convention (from the specific sender), then my excel macro would identify the current date's file and run roughly 30 min after the report's usual sending time and format it as required, then send to an email list.

this was supposed to be the first hour to hour and a half of my day. once i was confident it worked, i let it rip and enjoyed hour and a half breakfast every morning, or roamed the office talking to other interns, etc.

a couple months later i mentioned to my manager that maybe automate it and save some time but they had no interest and brushed my comment off. so i kept enjoying my breakfast and free time for the rest of my time there.

my "automation" wasn't complicated at all, just took some creative thinking and a bunch of attempts to get it right. sometimes people either a) simply dont want to believe things can be automated because it "devalues" what they do or have done in the past, or b) are happy having tasks like this assigned to underlings so they "know" and can easily explain what that person is doing at any given time.

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

#173

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…

$90,000 per year is more than enough to max your 401k, an IRA, and live anywhere that isn't a coastal city.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're plainly against any work at all right now. If they shift towards better working conditions and pay, then great.

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

#175

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.)…

He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the same thing.

Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and understand the situation?

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

#176

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 watched a similar thing happen once. A greybeard was brought in to whip things into shape. He did so. Automated everything and made 100+ linux boxes run like a top. New owners came in, and they weren't the nice kind. He got stressed out and had a heart attack and was gone for several weeks. Things hummed along while he was gone, and his perceived value went down because things "ran just fine without him", ignoring that it was because of him.

They ended up firing him and giving me his responsibilities, which was a laugh because he and I had drastically different jobs, and he was far more experienced and capable in system administration and automation than I was. I too left less than a year later.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People need work to feel fulfilled." I never thought I'd see Stockholm syndrome in the wild.

Are you kidnapped or held against your will by your employer?

Are you able to keep a shelter over your head and food in your belly without work?

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

#178
post #148

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.

Like TheDailyWTF stories, this is in the category of stories where even if the literal person who wrote that wrote fiction, something that is effectively the same story is true for someone. As developers who start writing big servers learn, scale matters. Crap you'd never think twice about when running a script on your workstation will bring your entire service down. There's 7-ish billion people in the world. Entire…

This exchange has been the long drawn out version of:

> > Story

> r/thathappened

r/nothingeverhappens

---

Where subreddit "ThatHappened" is a sarcastic one, a response to far-fetched and unlikely sounding stories, implying they are not true. Such response has been overdone enough that subreddit "NothingEverHappens" has become a reply implying that unlikely sounding things actually do happen.

And all of it is a real-world version of the joke "a person walks into a bar, and hears one of the regulars say 'number 38' and the other regulars laugh. A bit later another one says 'number 17' and they laugh. The person asks a regular what's going on, and they say 'we have all been here so long and told the same jokes so often that we know all the same jokes and just refer to them by numbers. Try one yourself'. The person says 'number 22'. Nobody laughs. The regular shrugs, eh, it's the way you tell 'em".

But suggesting that joke plays out in real life might be r/thathappens . But it does happen, and people do laugh.

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

#179

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.

Just in the sense that a job was displaced by automation, so the worker is collecting a check from someone wealthy that benefits from said automation.

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

#180

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.

Assuming the story is true, they're preying on ignorance. You're describing normal employment and service contracting. The law firm has a huge misconception about the complexity of the task and the human labor required for normal and exceptional operations. Even the spreadsheet sanity checking could probably be automated. This is a few thousand dollars of consultant time to setup, and maybe a few thousand/year to maintain.
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