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

#471

Post by CRConrad » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:55 PM 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…

> people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else)

Eh... So unemployed people can't become programmers, or programmers unemployed?

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

#472

Post by jquast » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #387

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…

Nothing as dramatic as your story, but the reason I learned Perl back in 1999 or so was because I was a contractor for a contractor for a company that imported a CDs worth of XML into a database every week. The importer was written in Java, the import took around 3 days, and frequently broke because the XML didn't have escaped ampersands etc. I wrote some scripts that chunked the input, sanitized it, scripted loading…

File recovery is always possible. Unmount the partition (remount read-only if you have to), use a program like hexedit to open the raw disk partition and search for a unique series of text found in your script files, copy and paste the contents into new file, script restored!

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

#473

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #465

ncmncm wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is whether you are automating a "profit center" or a "cost center". Automate a profit center, and you free up people to do more profitable stuff. Automate a cost center, and they can lay everybody off and cut costs. The whole notion of "cost-" and "profit centers" is a terrible construction of modern management theory. But it is how almost all businesses work nowadays. Never work in a cost center depar…

It is simply an internal implementation of rent seeking. You can burn fossil fuels and cause damage through pollution and be applauded for being highly profitable. Meanwhile people building sustainable energy or at least reducing the damage caused by pollution will be considered a drag and harshly criticized. Ultimately the problem lies in the fact that we have built entire societies around the idea of exploiting ext…

This is spot on. The final conclusion is that we are in a cul-de-sac though, any kind of exit seems to be across capital expenditure barriers that are too high to surmount and if you succeed there will always be a competitor to your plan that does things the old way and that looks short term to be cheaper.

I think the big problem is that we do not show the full price at the outset, the 'sticker price' is usually only a fraction of the total cost and the payer of the sticker price has no idea of what the total cost eventually will be. If we could only make them aware of that it would already be a step in the right direction, and the remainder might be fixable by taxation.

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

#474

Post by MandieD » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

Riseed wrote: post #235

ironmagma wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time.

One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.

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

#475

Post by Msw242 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

forinti wrote: post #382

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…

How can someone who "manages" not see the value in your work? It seems some people have a religious view of work: it is valuable only if you are toiling and pushing yourself.

Yeah, you take a person like this, teach them about people management, and then move them one level higher to give them access to more problems to solve.

Hours of butt in seat doesn't necessarily correlate with value delivered.

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

#476

Post by kthejoker2 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:09 PM 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…

Thomas Edison's version

> The manager of the circuit realized that the night operators might be tempted to shirk their work, and so he required them to telegraph a signal to him every half hour in order that he might be sure they were awake and at their posts. Edison's signal was six.

> This was a wise regulation, but Edison did not appreciate the necessity for it. He found it a great bother to keep his eye on the clock and leave his reading or some experiment that he was working out in the quiet hours of night, to report that stupid "six" every thirty minutes.

> He wondered if he couldn't make a machine attached to the clock that would save him the trouble. After a good deal of thinking and experimenting, he fitted up an instrument that could telegraph "six" as well as he could.

> This was a great relief to him, and he felt free to do what he liked with his time without much fear of discovery. He even left the office and made expeditions about town.

> One night while he was away, the manager tried to call him up but could get no response. He thought this odd as Edison was more punctual with his signals than any other operator on the line.

> He waited, and tried again and again, with no better success, though the signals came with their accustomed regularity. He made an investigation, and the young inventor received a severe reprimand for his cleaver contrivance.

https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTe...

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

#477

Post by exikyut » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #452

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)

- I understand fear of change can be a symptom of anxiety, and I've certainly experienced this myself: I've repeatedly found myself wedged into awkward situations that aren't within my ballpark to un-awkward, and found that this can produce a "just keep going, just keep going" mentality that's negatively hypersensitive to any kind of change

- I can see clerk-type positions being heavily dunked in the "we are invisible to the ergonomic considerations of the software upgrade lifecycle" koolaid, and (perhaps not having a balanced/passively-positive general appreciation of software development in abstract) can only see introducing software from the standpoint of "yet another unsolicited burden of workload I have to add to my plate" as opposed to an empathetic load-bearing fulcrum.

I wonder if the distain is coming from simple insecurity, or a more complex broken sense of achievement/self-hazing, where having a given task be simplified or automated or otherwise made nicer is seen somehow "doing it wrong" (eg, the equivalent of writing garbage code to solve a problem as opposed to spending 2 weeks figuring out how to solve something "correctly" etc).

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

#478

Post by xtracto » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #243

xtracto wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tho…

wait did you use to work where I work? We fixed this, haha.

I don't think so, but it is a recurring issue I've seen at several B2B startups. It makes sense if you think about it. Being B2B, customers' AP departments request detailed usage billing. Someone creates a simple endpoint to produce a PDF, and eventually PDFs get too large to handle synchronously.

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

#479

Post by cestith » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

patrickk wrote: post #104

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.)…

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…

The right solution short-term for CYA reasons is probably to get this replaced by a real engineer on a time and materials contract from an IT consulting company. That doesn't mean replacing this employee, though. If I was the boss at this company and found this out, I'd make that person in charge of selecting the vendor, specifying the features, accepting delivery of the work, and then monitoring and troubleshooting any malfunctions.

More scope managing the rest of the office IT could be introduced to the position. They're not wasting money on getting things running smoother. That's clearly worthwhile to them. They're wasting time not making better use of the employee's time for which they're paid.

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

#480

Post by patrickk » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 5:02 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.

It’s difficult to disrupt companies or even whole industries that are stuffed with busy work, and had management completely uninterested in efficiency. Especially prevalent in some (non US, non Tech, high barriers to entry) work cultures that value jobs for the boys and value relationships over merit or efficiency.

I’ve seen countless processes that were locked in place to protect the status of prima Donnas in Legal or Finance, which must rubber stamp projects or infrastructure requests. So nothing gets done except what suits those inside the broken process.