211–220 of 510 posts
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You’d be surprised. I interviewed at a multi-million dollar firm and there were two IT people there for the whole firm.
Two is infinitely more than zero.
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I personally know someone who claims to have automated his work with Excel after learning how to code. He ended up telling his manager after feeling guilty. He got a promotion and eventually left the team to become a real software engineer. The rest of his team was eventually let go since they were not needed. This was at a large company you have definitely heard of. Its possible that my friend lied or exaggerated th…
When I worked at HP over a decade ago it was literally my job to walk into a department and find processes that were automatable, implement whatever program or automation was necessary and gtfo. One of the highlights for me when working there was automating a process which took three people thirty days to perform. I made a point to unnecessarily optimize the program to the point where it ran in a handful of milliseco…
My fondest moments are actually when I helped people do mind numbingly awful tasks by automating stuff - this was not my day job but I had a lot of freedom.
One guy was so delighted that I had scripted in less than an hour some ghastly bit of spreadsheet work that he estimated was going to take him a few weeks that he immediately ran out and bought me a bottle of wine!
If this is true or not, I had a situation in my past where I was developing an ecommerce API as a business that had both web and backend. Basically, it made integrations take a day instead of 3-4 months. I hired some offshore developers to use my API to setup for new clients, effectively making a killing as I could still charge quite a lot for this specific integration and yet undercut all the competition. Long story…
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> While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well. if they knew, they might be tempted to fire the person and keep the script. OP talks a big game about how it's running on their own hardware, but the company has a legal claim if it was developed during the workday. not smart to play legal games with a law firm.
Maybe, but unlikely. They want someone to be available to fix/update and perhaps do other things too. Part of your salary as support staff is being there when they need you.
They could probably do that for less than 90k/year, but it's still gonna cost them.
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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…
I've read through this thread and you're doing a pretty poor job of convincing me the employee should speak up. The employee has two choices: 1. Say nothing and keep collecting a paycheck. 2. Speak up about the script and start a conversation that has the possibility of leading towards termination. It's a pretty big no-brainer for what they should do.
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+1 for sikuli. Very nice little tool that makes it very easy to do something that would otherwise require a lot of specific knowledge
AutoHotKey and Pulover's Macro Creator[1] (which spits out AHK scrips from mouse and keyboard input) can do a similar job in a windows environment, and can trivially click on UI elements on the screen via PixelSearch. It runs lightning fast too, and is simple to learn. I've used it to automate simple web games for shits and giggles. [1] https://www.macrocreator.com/screenshots/
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.
Eh, if the user is in the Midwest or South, I'd believe this story. I wouldn't believe it on the coasts though. One of my first jobs out of the military was being a sysadmin for a national company with next to zero IT infrastructure. I was interested in scaling their storage infrastructure due to some commitments I found in their contracts, but they had no cognizance of their systems capabilities. I was also NAASCO c…
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.
I personally know someone who claims to have automated his work with Excel after learning how to code. He ended up telling his manager after feeling guilty. He got a promotion and eventually left the team to become a real software engineer. The rest of his team was eventually let go since they were not needed. This was at a large company you have definitely heard of. Its possible that my friend lied or exaggerated th…
Its sort of similar situation.
Join Zoom. Use a heart or snaps emoji in the first five minutes. Turn off camera. Leetcode.
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 had a similar job. Probably 1 hour of real work per day. It was awesome at first. Quickly I started to hate it. I spend all day dicking around so when I went home I had already done all of my hobbies. I imagine that if I had that job now instead of in my early 20's I would be able to fill that time with more interesting things and/or family time. But I left that job because I feared I was losing any skills I had an…
Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my leadership chain.
There were a bunch of different phases during my time there that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work" phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML documentation passed W3C validation after that), the "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy" phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase, and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot" phase.
I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net negative for me.