Am I a lazy for making a machine wash my dishes while I browse HN?
I agree with Laat, sounds like he should make it into a business/product.
Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#22If I were a member of management, and I found out that he was doing this, I would be furious. Not because he gamed the system and received the bonuses, but because he didn't share his innovation with the rest of the team and improve everyones' efficiency. If he had done that, I would recognize his talent and initiative and promote him, allowing him to do more rewarding, higher-level work.
He probably rightly senses that his boss wouldn't feel the way you hope you would. In fact I don't think most people would offer him a rational incentive at all. If he saves the company $1 million a year are you actually going to cut him a $200k+ bonus? I'd be very doubtful of anyone who says they would. Most people would give him $20k if they're especially generous and a pat on the head.
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Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#23Link to my comment on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_f...
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#24If I were a member of management, and I found out that he was doing this, I would be furious. Not because he gamed the system and received the bonuses, but because he didn't share his innovation with the rest of the team and improve everyones' efficiency. If he had done that, I would recognize his talent and initiative and promote him, allowing him to do more rewarding, higher-level work.
Unless you have nothing to offer him, which is often the case for many layers of management. In which case, he's screwed.
There are reasons people do not take initiative in certain very bureaucratic positions and organizations. Sometimes, it is not rewarded -- in fact, it is punished.
Any decision (e.g. whether to tell management) needs to be made with a good deal of contextual awareness.
I hate to sound like a party-pooper, but speaking from experience...
P.S. I'll add: He's already found the built-in reward. It sounds like it's a significant amount of bonus money, plus effectively a very light workload. What are they going to offer him that improves upon that? How high up in management would one need to go to find authority for such a decision/spend? How many layers of management do you think separate his data entry position from a manager with that authority?
P.P.S. OTOH, if they are not entirely brain dead (and who knows?), metrics will eventually cause them to investigate. So, enjoy it while it lasts, and maybe consider whether he can turn eventual exposure to his advantage. (And if metrics don't attract attention, that's a pretty good sign he is indeed dealing with a brain dead organization.)
/cynicism
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#25If I were a member of management, and I found out that he was doing this, I would be furious. Not because he gamed the system and received the bonuses, but because he didn't share his innovation with the rest of the team and improve everyones' efficiency. If he had done that, I would recognize his talent and initiative and promote him, allowing him to do more rewarding, higher-level work.
He probably rightly senses that his boss wouldn't feel the way you hope you would. In fact I don't think most people would offer him a rational incentive at all. If he saves the company $1 million a year are you actually going to cut him a $200k+ bonus? I'd be very doubtful of anyone who says they would. Most people would give him $20k if they're especially generous and a pat on the head.
Or he could simply be replacing himself with no reward.
Oh, you've automated it? Thanks. Bye.
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#26I have a friend that did this in a summer job about 12 or 13 years ago. Got some temp work doing data entry, did it for 2 days before realising it could be done better. He wrote something in VB and did 15x more than everyone else over the course of a day.
They (obviously) thought something was wrong so examined what he'd done. When he explained about the program, they told him if he left the temp firm he was employed through and knocked on their door in the morning, they'd give him a job and pay him £2 more an hour. This he (naively) did, and with him came his software.
They fired 10 of the other temps the day he 'started' and kept his piece of software when he went back to university after the summer. In this case, the scumbag was most definitely the employer. When he told me the story I wept into my pint glass at what could have been.
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#27If I were a member of management, and I found out that he was doing this, I would be furious. Not because he gamed the system and received the bonuses, but because he didn't share his innovation with the rest of the team and improve everyones' efficiency. If he had done that, I would recognize his talent and initiative and promote him, allowing him to do more rewarding, higher-level work.
I thought the same thing at first, but then I read how he's got this whole thing tied together.
>We download PDF batches, not paper...
>I wrote the script from scratch. It is a combination of reading the screen for data, a screen font reader, mouse automation/keyboard automation.
>It's part C++ and part "Game Maker", I did it for prototyping but got lazy and never rewrote it.
>Plus the script is pretty frustrating to setup in the morning, so they would get frustrated figuring it out. :P (requires a certain monitor arrangement at certain resolutions, windows in the right place, etc.
Management would be furious if it was a simple script that you just hit "Go" and it does everything, but it sounds like it's finicky enough that management would be too confused to be angry.
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#28Automating work is not evil. It is the reason we are not all subsistence farmers.
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#29You don't have to Flowers for Algernon your own productivity just because other folks working in the same firm, in the same industry, in the same country, whatever haven't caught on that computers are eating the world yet. There's nothing unethical about earning the lion's share of the bonus pool assuming the human-assisted script is, indeed, an acceptable substitute for elbow grease. (There are plausible reasons why…
The mindset you speak of, using words like "client" and "contact the decision maker", is associated with people who are used to having a great deal more power and influence than somebody hired to be a data entry grunt. The mindset may be useful for climbing out of the data entry grunt "class", but probably not for "fixing" his existing employer's practices. Someone on that level in a company of any substantial size i…
Part of leveling up from peon to not-quite-sure-but-definitely-not-peon was learning how to talk the part.
(Funny sidenote: About ten years to the day ago, I put in a proposal at a particular megacorp to script up something rather than spending $15,000 having the seasonal data entry clerks give themselves carpal tunnel syndrome doing it manually. It was not accepted, and my hands hurt like the dickens for most of the summer.)
Re: Redditor: Am I a scumbag for automating my manual work and making more money?
#30This trend is not going away, it's only going to increase. The ones with technical knowledge will continue to disproportionately receive money over those who don't.
I think this person would really enjoy reading Race Against the Machine, written by two MIT researchers and economists. I have a guest post going up tomorrow on VentureBeat about this, but it's interesting to see people call him a scumbag because he has a technological edge on them.
This is a pretty good example of people working against the machine instead of with it. Those people will probably soon be out of jobs, but there's nothing to stop them from learning a scripting language that would make them more productive in their work. They now know there's a script that can cause them to increase their productivity. The bonus pool is still up for grabs if they spent a few weekends trying to learn Ruby or Python.