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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

#391

Post by hobs »

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 a script to send an email at the time of my entrance and departure - whatever, I set it up to run and left for the day.

Weellll, it turns out I didn't understand the configuration for the OSX version of cron (and my shitty bash script) that well and when I walked into work the next day, my boss was waiting for me.

"Did you automate sending me your in and out email?" "Yes... why?" "I have a hundred thousand emails in my inbox and every time I delete as many as I can I just get... more. You have to stop it, you dont have to send me emails anymore, but you have to stop it."

So I went in and disabled my script and helped him delete the several hundred thousand emails I had sent him.

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

#392

Post by AshamedCaptain »

hyprmynd wrote: post #303
vlunkr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harm done is that impressionable young people on /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.

What a terrible dream, especially since most games are just jobs now.

You can always play old games over and over again...

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

#393

Post by idworks1 »

When customers picked up their orders from our warehouse, they signed the A4 sized receipt. We made a copy using a photocopier, and kept our copy in a box. Then the following month, we moved the box into a pallet. When the pallet was full of these boxes, we shrink-wrapped it and fork-lifted it into a shelf in the warehouse. After a few years, they had pallets after pallets of receipts.

Customers often called to dispute charges on their credit card, this was an expensive furniture store warehouse. So we would have to dig up those pallets with the fork lift and look for a single signed copy of the receipt to defend the charge. Sometimes, it took days to find. Other times, we never found the copies.

When I took over the warehouse, I installed photoshop on the main computer. IT gave me hell for it. Then I set up a batch job to scan those receipts into 3 parts: Full page, order number section, signature section. I used a .bat file to launch the OCR app that came with the printer and rename the files to include the order number. Now all I had to do at the end of the day, was stack the hundreds of receipt into the printer and watch the computers do my job.

When a customer complained, all I had to do was enter the order number in a dynamic excel sheet and the copy of the receipt was loaded. It took seconds. Everyone in the warehouse called me lazy. But they were happy to continue using my system. Although, the printer/scanner mysteriously broke after I left and they were forced to go back to the manual way.

And that was my first real world programming experience.

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

#394

Post by mikestew »

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #330
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…

re: the performance review: don't know about your work place, but the first quarterly review I got at [insert name of large known company], my manger sat me down and explained she is budgeted a certain amount of bonus points for her 5 team members, and required to "grade on a curve". Hence, 1 team member will be "above average", 3 will be "average", and one "below average" every quarter. And for fairness, she rotates…

Welcome to Microsoft 15-20 years ago. Or any company that uses stack ranking or a euphemism for same. As it was explained to me, “Jesus, John the Baptist, and the apostle Paul go in for their reviews. Who gets the ‘below average’?”

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

#395

Post by dom96 »

Isn’t this a prime opportunity for disruption? These kinds of stories seem to crop up now and then. Is it inevitable that a startup will offer a service for creating custom solution for such repetitive manual tasks at a fraction of the price? $90k per annum leaves a lot of margin.

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

#396

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

I helped automate data entry once into a horrible piece of shit system.

It was a web UI that was slow to load, slow to work with, and its speed varied between "slow" and "fuck you, I'm going home".

Not only was it slow, it was also unforgiving of mistakes. It did on-the-fly validation, but you had to maintain the order you filled the fields. A mistake in the middle noticed too late? Tough shit. You start over. Or you do nothing wrong, but when you submit your form, the system says that it's overloaded, which means you have to wait a bit and start over. It probably meant that the number of concurrent users just went up from 1.

In other words, all hallmarks of a raw prototype implemented by an intern who saw an ASP.NET tutorial the day before that went into production.

There were several big ass spreadsheets to retype data from, and a deadline.

So I thought, kinks can be ironed out and quirks can be worked around with some Python and Selenium. These two rarely complain when put to work, and they have a lot of patience.

So I spent almost a whole day helping my friend in need. The deadline was saved.

But it didn't give me any satisfaction. It was a thankless piece of work I was happy to lose after it was no longer needed. My friend was grateful, their higher-ups took it for granted. I felt nothing but burned out in the end. All I got was a heavily editorialized story on TheDailyWTF. I should probably make a tshirt, or something.

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

#397

Post by brodouevencode »

giantg2 wrote: post #288
noasaservice wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using "cynical" in looking at the job market when compared to potential abuses is a very boomerish thing. Us millenials and zoomers see how this society is played out. You work hard for a company - you get more work for same pay. They demand 2 weeks notice but have no issue in hauling your ass out with no severance on a term. Managers promise increases and you get 2% , or 1/3 of inflation. Companies' recruiters targe…

I'm not anti-work. I'm just anti-work for exploitive jerks. I have no problem working hard for myself (projects, chores, improvements, etc). I think we both just realize that the rewards are simply not commensurate with effort in most cases. Executive and management pay goes up, yet they are just overhead, not production. So essentially they have to take advantage of the value produced by their worker for themselves.…

> in most cases

The devil is in the details - I'd agree to that.

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

#398

Post by brodouevencode »

noasaservice wrote: post #277
brodouevencode wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using "cynical" in looking at the job market when compared to potential abuses is a very boomerish thing. Us millenials and zoomers see how this society is played out. You work hard for a company - you get more work for same pay. They demand 2 weeks notice but have no issue in hauling your ass out with no severance on a term. Managers promise increases and you get 2% , or 1/3 of inflation. Companies' recruiters targe…

Im not so sure putting this in generational terms is going to get you anywhere.

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

#399

Post by geocrasher »

trilinearnz wrote: post #338
geocrasher wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched a similar thing happen once. A greybeard was brought in to whip things into shape. He did so. Automated everything and made 100+ linux boxes run like a top. New owners came in, and they weren't the nice kind. He got stressed out and had a heart attack and was gone for several weeks. Things hummed along while he was gone, and his perceived value went down because things "ran just fine without him", ignoring…

That's a very sad story. I hope he's doing well now, if he's still around.

We keep in touch now and then. He's been gainfully employed at the same place for the last 14 years or so so he's doing well :)

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

#400

Post by CTmystery »

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…

I'm somewhat sorry to say this, but don't you see the irony in tricking your non-technical manager into not improving your life at all? A competent manager can _make your life better_. If you are working 80 hour work weeks and sleeping under a desk, wouldn't it make sense to do some backlog prioritizing to get you under a sustainable workload?
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