Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 510 posts

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

#261

Post by giantg2 »

brodouevencode wrote: post #226
giantg2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he be rewarded? They would likely try to save that $90k by replacing him, or give him a lot more work with very little increase in comp. If there's anything I've learned in 10 years, you keep your mouth shut when things are easy because if you speak up they screw you with more work and the same (or nearly so) pay.

This is a very cynical way of looking at things. And maybe rightly so given your experience. Every job I've ever had though there's never been a shortage of work - the few examples that I can recall of whenever one of my engineers frees up a significant amount of time I gave them harder things to do and a recommended a raise (Im a lead not a people manager) to go along with it.

My company will give you more work. Just no raise or promotion to go with it. I honestly don't see most companies giving raises with additional work.

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

#262

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

gruez wrote: post #88
hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did as well. My company ran a 36 hour hackathon. By law, hours 8-12 were 1.5x time and hours 13+ were 2x time. It was basically an extra paycheck.

Your company ran a paid hackathon? Were you able to do whatever you want? Or was it a crunch to get a project launched?

Yep, paid hackathon, but participation was voluntary. There were a few limitations:

* It had to directly relate to the product.

* You could not use the time to work on some existing project.

* You had to be able to finish it by the end of the hackathon.

Hackathon projects were sometimes adopted by a permanent team, if there was a good fit.

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

#263

Post by VBprogrammer »

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.

I have a similar story-ish but without the cloak and dagger part.

I was employed as a temp working for a large custodial bank. On of the functions there was to confirm that the holdings we thought we had in various assets matched the holdings that issuer thought we had. They had a system which would automatically accept various spreadsheet from issuers and would flag up the discrepancies.

Our job was to identify why we had discrepancies. By far the most common discrepancy was trades which occured over the report period. I wrote an VBA macro in Excel which scraped the IBM 390 terminal emulator and would identify these and automatically and close the discrepancy in the system referencing the transaction IDs. Often it would automatically close more than half of the discrepancies with no manual intervention. Literally days of work each month.

I could easily see someone more ballsy coming up with something like than and keeping it to themselves. Add socially normalised work from home and it would be trivial to do nothing for several days which still appearing to be working faster than most people on the team.

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

#264

Post by tibbar »

As a company it can be really hard to assess whether your problems require permanent employees or whether a contractor could just come in and give you a button to click. Sometimes you actually know about the second option, but the process is so important that you want someone technical to monitor the results of clicking the button everyday. Because if the button stops working, or does the wrong thing and you don’t know, the results are disastrous. So his employer might actually prefer this arrangement to having him just give them the script and walk away.

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

#265

Post by radicalbyte »

twox2 wrote: post #222
zffr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of industries, despite being "tech", are still just using computers to "push paper". That means a true technical person can often automate these jobs. It's real and it does happen. The thing is... most people like that are not content doing that and then fucking around all day. I've been in this position. I've shared my automation with the team I was on and the manager I had, and I got a raise. I did this at mo…

Same here - my first real job involved putting reports together by collecting/combining data from various sources.

Spent the first month doing it be hand, second month I pulled an all-nighter and automated the easy 80%. The last 20% of automation involved switching from Excel to a website - that took a couple of years to make happen because I needed to convince people to make the change.

I spent the time I received improving my skills and automating other things, as well as helping colleges with work which did require manual intervention.

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

#266

Post by hinkley »

baby-yoda wrote: post #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 s…

We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution to this problem was to complain about every procedure we weren’t following exactly.

One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs. We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki pages into a different set of files.

By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was handled by a CI/CD job.

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

#267

Post by runevault »

macintux wrote: post #250
jacquesm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to make friends too.

Not the people whose jobs likely went away as a result, however.

It depends on the company. My day job can reduce required headcount for the work we handle. Some companies use that excuse to lower headcount, but in cases where valuable employees are involved they get moved to other jobs where their knowledge can add value while not doing the boring and repetitive tasks.

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

#268

Post by noasaservice »

kumarvvr wrote: post #101

I love these threads. 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.

Same.

I'm a systems engineer. I will always automate if it makes sense. And depending on how the environment is, I may or may not tell others about it.

I think of automation like a box of tools. On journeyman jobs, the tools are yours. You paid for them, and you have use of them as you see fit. I think of automation the same.

You're not buying my tools - you're buying my skills that bring my tools. You quit paying, you quit getting work. In no world do you get my tools.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

zffr wrote: post #191
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.

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…

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by samatman »

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.

It's funny you'd say this because this is a classic tale in the BOFH genre.

Scripting your way out of stuff to do is a time-honored IP pastime. The old tradition was to hit the boss key (F10 for you youngins), now with remote there's no need.

Post reply on HN