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

#401

Post by barry-cotter » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:43 PM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #281

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…

20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of my teams that were basically just template generators. Another table, write code with all the new columns and types. Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now but I'm sure there are still a lot of jobs everywhere…

> Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now

This seems unlikely. There are lots of companies with 50 employees with no programmers, hobbyist or pro, on staff. That's why taking a business' excel spreadsheet nightmare and turning it into a program is a viable consultancy.

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

#402

Post by spikej » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:50 PM UTC

patrickk wrote: post #126

oneoff786 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for sikuli. Very nice little tool that makes it very easy to do something that would otherwise require a lot of specific knowledge

AutoHotKey and Pulover's Macro Creator[1] (which spits out AHK scrips from mouse and keyboard input) can do a similar job in a windows environment, and can trivially click on UI elements on the screen via PixelSearch. It runs lightning fast too, and is simple to learn. I've used it to automate simple web games for shits and giggles. [1] https://www.macrocreator.com/screenshots/

This is basically why I read comments more than articles: to learn more about these kinds of tools :)

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

#403

Post by noasaservice » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:50 PM UTC

idworks1 wrote: post #393

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 dispu…

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.

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

#404

Post by taberiand » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:54 PM UTC

brokenmachine wrote: post #386

taberiand wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just once I would like to read one of these stories where the conclusion is "and the company rewarded me with a large bonus and a paid two weeks of leave, and when I came back they had lined up some training and a project plan for me to stabilise what I had built and automate as much of the drudgery as possible"

And after the program was stabilised and automated, I was fired.

Hopefully more like, after the program was stabilised and automated I leveraged my new skills and left for more money elsewhere and on good terms with my company.

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

#405

Post by sjg007 » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #394

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’?”

Jesus cause he was clearly crucified.

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

#406

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #395

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.

Examples where computers are actually made to save routine manual labor seem to be few and far between. Mostly, computers of today are a form of nuisance (as described in this sad blog post[0]). These stories could have happened in the 1980s, and be just as impactful. You would think we're long past this, but it's AD 2022 and whole industries seem to only start noticing that automation exists, is possible, and is relevant to them.

I think that in many regards, automation is more or less fully used only in the IT industry itself, and maybe a couple more where computers actually are front and center. A lot of others, after having bitter experience with computers, seem more skeptical, maybe justly so.

Startups like you say seem to crop up now and then, but it seems to me that while you could have some dolce vita as an individual, this approach won't make a company rich.

[0] https://tonsky.me/blog/tech-sucks/

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

#407

Post by bcrosby95 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #281

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…

20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of my teams that were basically just template generators. Another table, write code with all the new columns and types. Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now but I'm sure there are still a lot of jobs everywhere…

Having a dividing line between the worker and the programmer is where the problem lies. There's tons of jobs where it makes sense to have the worker write a script to automate, which would make no sense for me to come in and automate for them.

This is why I think some basic forms of programming should be standard. You don't need to be a specialist to get a lot out of it.

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

#408

Post by geomark » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:13 AM UTC

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…

I was a manager in a nearly identical situation. I had 5 engineers working for me at a remote office. The "curve" had not been used in past years. Now they insisted on applying it. Since 4 out of 5 had substantially exceeded their goals it would have been a lie to state that any of them had not met expectations. So I told my boss no, I'm not doing it. You can take whatever raise you planned for me and spread it across my direct reports (unstated was that I would almost certainly quit as a result). Or you can fire me for insubordination. He ran that back up the chain of command. Apparently I wasn't the only middle manager who refused to do it, as senior management ended up rescinding the order.

Moral of the story: If you are a middle manager then grow a backbone.

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

#409

Post by holoduke » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:15 AM UTC

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…

You could asked for six figures to get it fixed if it's really making such an impact.

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

#410

Post by apocolyps6 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:18 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #344

TriNetra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced su…

> So, yes it's possible IMO, All of these highly-upvoted Reddit stories have the same few things in common: 1) They're vague enough to be possible. If it's too outlandish, people will call it out. 2) Verifiable or falsifiable specifics are conveniently omitted. This is easy to justify due to the anonymity. 3) They have an element of good guy versus bad guy, where the reader can empathize with the person telling the s…

You find it suspicious that most of the stories that become popular are appealing as stories and are the sort of stories people tend to tell? Is it also suspicious that they are all in English?

I'm sure some of them are fake, but so what? Let people have their plausible mundane lies. Sometimes my girlfriend lies about her name to the Starbucks barista and she hasn't been called out for it yet.