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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

#311

Post by Xylakant »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #249
Xylakant wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I think in Germany it's the same It should be, but it’s not in most circumstances. (Industry is fighting it tooth and nail, all of a sudden unpaid overtime would be so much harder.)

>all of a sudden unpaid overtime would be so much harder Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation. Basically it's a fancy way to have you wave your right to paid overtime to what amounts to one of the most exploitative legal employment practices I've seen in Europe. And the strict…

> Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation.

That’s illegal in Germany, luckily. Some unpaid overtime can be included in the contract, but a contract must specify the maximum number of hours.

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

#312

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

robbedpeter wrote: post #110
vlunkr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern or something, this is not skilled work.

It's easy to overstate the technical difficulty of lots of basic IT work, especially if people are tech illiterate. There might be an element of deliberate fraud if this guy is spelling out the difficulty of the job as justifying his pay to management. I've seen very clever goldbricking similar to this, where management doesn't know enough to understand what good IT looks like, or how to value IT work.

This is basically why I do not automatically discount the story as fake. I have certainly been a part of groups that had a wide range of technical skills. It is an odd experience, but it forces you to think about your audience ( and document everything like you would for your parent ).

I do have an anecdote in a similar vein from a buddy, but he does sometimes tend to exaggerate sometimes so I won't mention it. I absolutely believe though there are companies are still run in a very traditional way for one reason or another.

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

#313

Post by fersho311 »

efsavage wrote: post #310

I once almost completely automated my job, and didn't hide it. The job was to load data files into the backend system. The problem was there there were almost as many formats (~80) as there were partners sending data (~120), not just in structure but in content (deltas, full replace, etc.). This job was burning people out every 6 months, and I was the hapless next victim who was just looking to break into a tech posi…

That’s a bit sad, the way you told the story sound like you didn’t make the place better even though you could have.

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

#314

Post by jcpham2 »

FWIW I read this awhile ago or some version of it but I have absolutely automated a job or an entire department’s job away with scripts.

Think debt collection and EDI file transfers daily to Equifax/Transunion and parsing the response files for skip tracing. People got paid to drag and drop files in an FTP client and my first inclination was to script it.

I’ve been wary of what I automate ever since.

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

#315

Post by bargle0 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #178
jerf wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-w…

“Number 22!”

“We don’t say that one anymore. You’re going to have to leave.”

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

#316

Post by repomies69 »

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 story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone.

Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time.

Anyway, can you pass the bong plz

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

#317

Post by AussieWog93 »

wobblybubble wrote: post #204
lordnacho wrote: post #96

People are focusing too much on whether the story is actually true. It sounds plausible to me, but the real story here is that a heck of a lot of processes would benefit from having a programmer look at them. Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.

> Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't. This is what I believe sometimes. Then I look at all the pitfalls of shell scripts and how the time investments on automation tasks just balloon… then not so much. :) But if people have a different experience with that then I don’t doubt it.

YMMV, but I'm 100% in agreement with GP about programming being the new literacy. I quit my old SWE job to run a bloody eBay store and am raking it in because I'm competing against people who can't program.

The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the problem but getting people with domain expertise literate enough to write some hacky Python scripts.

This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms of productivity.

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

#318

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

AeroNotix wrote: post #198
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…

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…

Yup. That reminds me of a time when a co-worker in another department (technical but not software) told me that the people she managed had to do a very tedious task extracting and cross-correlating data from files that my project produced. They were sometimes spending 4+ hours each day doing it.

It took me all of one lazy afternoon to build a utility to do the same work and present it in a nicely formatted report. Their workload on this task went down to about 5 minutes per day.

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

#319

Post by twox2 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #291
twox2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, just consider all the places where PDFs are still used instead of a more computer-appropriate format (fixed layout is generally not needed, sometimes even not for printing, and is sometimes even an hindrance, and (m)HTML can be used as a standalone file too...)

Most opportunities are definitely data-entry oriented. For example, making a report in a spreadsheet and then having to feed some of those fields into some kind of form in a web-based UI, or vice versa.

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

#320

Post by tsol »

K7PJP wrote: post #256
borvo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It’s anti-work, not anti-money.

I think the point is it's easy to be critical of work if you can make money without working. But for most people, doing menial work is a necessity in order to earn a living. If he has to deal with the consequences of not working I'd be inclined to take him more seriously, but fact of the matter is no one really wants to be homeless on principal
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