I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by 41b696ef1113 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #212

AeroNotix wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

2 jobs ago I had a management level position ("Head of Architecture") for a decent sized engineering multinational. 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 fe…

By far, my favorite accomplishment from last year was (effectively) automating a barcode lookup. The historical process took 5-10 minutes and was performed 5+ times per day. My half day of scripting now saves ~1HR of daily labor. Nearly a year after I created it, and one woman still stops me every time she sees me to thank me for improving her job.

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

#452

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:50 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #389

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping. It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day . I wrote a script to fill it out with t…

Interesting human relationship wise.

I've been severely struggling with non tech people. Landing mediocre positions in clerk jobs where everybody's is burned or bored out. Yet every attempt at improving the office life through code was met with fear or disdain. (And I never made it a personal gain only)

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

#453

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:55 AM UTC

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.)…

The public sector is often tumor like in its structure. It's pile of bad ideas requiring more bad ideas to manage the previous one problems. They're wildly incompetent in terms of productivity all across the chain and resort to petty solutions and hiring more people (with precarious contracts) to attempt at avoiding sinking.

I assume they only have 20 more years to live until the whole thing evaporates through the new generation automating it away.

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

#454

Post by cbozeman » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:55 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #389

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping. It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day . I wrote a script to fill it out with t…

This script is both hilarious and brilliant. I laughed out loud.

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

#455

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 5:03 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #300

A lot of people in this thread find the story unbelievable. Having done IT consulting for law firms, I absolutely believe this story. IT for law is 30 years behind in some cases. They still use Wordperfect because that's what all the templates are written in. Most lawyers have no clue about IT and are happy to pay people to keep things running. Most likely the law firm wouldn't even care if OP told them what they wer…

I thought I wad reading myself. I just left legal sector and wp12 is indeed a vestigial tail from 90s setups. That wouldn't be much of a problem but since every app and process designed since tried to migrate to newer word processor format, they also have a bunch of .odt documents, and higher-up have ms office licenses so .doc and .docx are also in the mix. I've seen people explaining to me that their 'job' was to realign borked bullet lists between format conversion because every employee only has one kind of word processor.

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

#456

Post by arwineap » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #429

noasaservice wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And from MANY years working in various businesses, this kind of massive labor-saving and process-saving activities are always wanted, never encouraged, and penalized by more work and no extra pay/bonuses. And frankly, I love solving business process issues like this. I think it's challenging, fun, and interesting work. But is it monetarily valued? Nope.

You sell the solution as a Windows app that includes a barcode scanner and a barcode on the receipt. You then have an application interface to an Access database or something.

And now you didn't automate your job, you sourced a vendor.

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

#457

Post by iancmceachern » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

hobs wrote: post #391

lrvick wrote: post #389

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping. It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day . I wrote a script to fill it out with t…

Haha I have a similar story but I was even earlier in my career just doing support and training things for a big call center and they just changed the policies to send an email to your boss every time you came in and left. At the time I was working a lot of unpaid overtime, and this rule was just spitting in my face - they were making sure I showed up and they were definitely not caring if you worked more. So I wrote…

Gotta always test everything

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

#458

Post by higeorge13 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #389

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping. It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day . I wrote a script to fill it out with t…

One of the best gists i have ever seen!

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

#459

Post by yourapostasy » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 6:15 AM UTC

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.

In the US with its dominant at-will, employer-favored asymmetric, antagonistic worker-business employment policy model, unless the employee is in a hot du jour skill (and trust me, this current local maxima programmers like us are enjoying will come crashing to an abrupt, sobering end) where they can with 100% certainty quit one day and pick up a new job in a couple weeks, or they observe from history they report to a leadership structure like yours that they can trust coming forward, the incentives are all aligned against sharing such productivity gains with the employer. At least until the employee has another job lined up.

This is because the leadership incentives are massively tilted in favor of taking big, quick wins off the table as soon as they appear, and the details are not transmitted up the reporting chain. Eliminating a position and maintaining its work output through automation is bonused far more than "just" the automation by itself. The numbers of the elimination show up on the books, but the skills, organizational knowledge, innovation, organizing, perseverance, and other attributes it took to bring the automation across the finish line do not show up as numbers or even slide decks with conceptual angles.

When faced with showing a 2X or greater cost savings plus a productivity boost, or a 0.10-1.00X valued productivity boost and re-positioning the employee to another role with a spin-up cost, the effect on bonuses is noticeable. When the leadership's tenure themselves is uncertain, is it any wonder why incentive choices fall where they do?

I come at this from the consulting side, and I see far more short-sighted incentivized leadership than leadership like you in my client accounts because of the prevailing incentive structures in my clients. This is interesting to me because one of my theses I'm observing for is going forward, the high-margin companies are going to be the ones that buck this trend. I suspect this is because those companies are tapping into what I believe is a growing successfully adaptive response to the technologically-driven complexity increasingly associated with high margins: you need high capital, low time preference, and high+deep trust. It used to be with sufficient capital and moderate trust at just leadership levels, you could power through nearly any business, but I'm seeing signs this model is increasingly mal-adaptive to economic structures with strong network effects affinities.

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

#460

Post by wobblybubble » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 7:39 AM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #445

wobblybubble wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As anyone who has read random fanfiction.net stories or middle school penmanship homework can attest, being able to write is not that same thing as being able to write well .

I’m probably just bad at it.