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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

#231

Post by analog31 »

laurent123456 wrote: post #52
nlh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I had this exact same thought. The red flags for me were their use of “clock in” and “shift”. Those are not concepts generally in play for IT staff at law firms.

$90K just to move some files from one folder to another seems high too. Either the job involves more than what's he saying, or it's simply fake.

Going along with the original story, I could go either way on this. On the one hand, paying someone $40k to do it, probably involves more supervision and turnover, and a chance of someone making a mistake. And then you get to tell your million dollar client: "We lost our case because our semi-skilled clerk misplaced a file and we have no IT department."

On the other hand, what would you pay an outside developer to automate the process and guarantee accuracy, maintenance, and uptime? Could you even do this with no GUI, no dashboard, no management fanfare, and no brainstorming of unnecessary features?

$90k may be somewhere in between.

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

#232

Post by tharne »

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…

My guess is that a great many of these stories are true. I've seen more than one instance at large companies where a job either was, or easily could be, mostly replaced by a series of Excel Macros.

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

#234

Post by xtracto »

jerf wrote: post #148
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.

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…

> 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.

This reminded me of an issue we had at a previous startup that was growing really fast. There was a process that "created PDF invoices", which was coded by calling a (sync) API, which generated it on the fly.

The problem changed, once those PDF invoices became 100MB large, with hundreds of pages (required by business case). It's a completely different beast that the "MVP" developers did not thought about (as it is expected). Now you either code and maintain an async service which uploads to S3, along with the full lifecycle, or just buy a service to do it for you.

Scale definitely matters, and all systems change once you consider large scale data and workloads.

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

#235

Post by Riseed »

ironmagma wrote: post #118
patrickk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber: > duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive; In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law f…

Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload). A similar thing could be said of bloated code.

> you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload

True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full workload that's made up of fractional workloads.

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

#236

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

A friend of mine was an HR reporting analyst who can also code. He automated his internship and we spent days gaming (I worked for a startup that had a lot of meetings with limited real work).

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

#237

Post by borvo »

onemoresoop wrote: post #132
readams wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs. Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted highly.

There's a guy named Josh Fluke on YouTube who may qualify as antiwork to you. I find him very very reasonable and a bit dangerous for pulling off the wool over the young generation's eyes. I mean dangerous for the corporate and the myths corporations have built to lure and abuse workers.

No post body was provided.

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

#238

Post by Melatonic »

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.)…

If the law firm is making significant profit and this employee is not doing anything additionally shady does it really matter? He provides value to the company regardless of whether or not he is actively working - and if one of his automations fail then he is the one who has to fix it. There are lots of jobs where we pay people for things that do not require a constant work output - think about Firemen for example.

A forward thinking business would promote this guy and then involve him in other aspects of their work to try and optimize and automate wherever they can. The better small / medium size businesses recognize this and realize that IT can be thought of not just as a cost center but also a path to innovation.

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

#239

Post by rustyboy »

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.

I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success.

Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.

We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.

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

#240

Post by The-Bus »

vsareto wrote: post #174
mikkelam wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another take: Antiwork is a much needed uprising in america for low paid workers to finally stand together and stop dealing with an unfair system. Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is stopped

They're plainly against any work at all right now. If they shift towards better working conditions and pay, then great.

Those complaints have been raised for the last two decades and weren't heard.
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