5 ms·

My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per we

My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade. So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long. No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.

strathmeyer 7y ago
I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need. The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    I'll be blunt: That is moronic. If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it. 1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve. 2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work. If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently. But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      I believe you’re confusing “nothing to do” with what the OP task was: “making upper case letters mixed case”. It needs to be done right? This work is analogous to what is done every day in every office in every country. Believe it or not, most of what people do is this type of work (again, my opinion). If there’s not other pressing needs, and there’s a business need for the work, and you have a sure fire way of solving your problem, then take the path of least resistance and keep your staff from being idle.
      - Jtsummers 7y ago
        Having people do that manually is garbage work. It can be done with a quick script by any competent programmer or system administrator. Having people sit down and do that for hours, days, or weeks, is a sure-fire way to kill any interest they have in contributing meaningfully to the business. They will hate you, themselves, the company, and either seek out a new job (best case) or remain and occupy space continuing to do garbage work. If your staff is idle, give them meaningful work, training, or the day off. All of those are better than giving them garbage work.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Why not just let them go home and pay them for what you're really paying them for: being available when needed.
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      if you start sending staff home then your management will question whether or not you need them, and you might not be able to keep the head count. Then a few days or weeks later some difficult work comes by and you’re understaffed and overworking the people you were able to keep. Besides, the lower case letters still need to be upper case. Don’t you know that most “work” being done around the world isn’t much different?
    - foogazi 7y ago
      Nothing worse than the boss showing up and asking “where is everybody?” That’s how Friday WFH got cancelled at my previous job
  - z92 7y ago
    Matches my experience very much.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    There's mechanistic work that this was true for. With the Advent of Fiverr and Upwork you no longer need to do this unless you have some sort of sensitivity on the data (it's personal, or health, or something secret). These companies are the cloud computing of drudge work. You can burst capacity in half an hour.
  - Zelphyr 7y ago
    I had this happen to me. I was hired as a contractor for a big company and was shown to a cubicle I was to share with another developer. Only, I had nothing to do. I was told what I'd be doing when I interviewed but that project got put on hold by the time I started. After about a week of not being assigned anything I started to kind-of freak out. My cube-mate assured me that everything was fine and he explained that the department head was given the OK to hire someone and he took advantage of that opportunity so that he had me available when he needed me. I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Every time I read stories like this I can’t help but mourn the loss of real opportunity for them. Instead, they should have asked to WFH a few days a week and been VERY productive on those days. Then ask “hey, do you mind if I do this job remotely?” and always be just a little more productive than the others.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  That's exactly how I would have played it. Another dream scenario would be to one day be some 'forgotten employee' of a giant company. You know, maybe your project got cancelled, your colleagues were moved elsewhere and you just never got re-assigned and didn't bother to ask. Still receiving your checks, still showing up to the office, but just kind of fart around and do whatever you feel like. Hell, maybe you could even give yourself a few days of remote work a week! Aaaah yes, that's the life I tell you!
- colechristensen 7y ago
  What you should mourn is the healthcare costs being passed on to the patients to pay these people. Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.
  - aabeshou 7y ago
    as if the reduced inefficiencies would actually go to reducing costs rather than further padding executives pockets
    - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
      They absolutely would have to pass along a lot of the cost savings to patients, otherwise they would lose those patients to other companies. But I can appreciate that your pet preferences prohibit you from believing this is so.
      - aabeshou 7y ago
mailslot 7y ago
Ah. Reminds me of a place I worked. The software build would take seven hours, and my coworker would play ping pong for the rest of the day. When I sped it up to five minutes, I’ve never seen someone become so pissed off.
- arrow7000 7y ago
  What was making the build take so long in the first place?
jbob2000 7y ago
We have an entire 15 person team at my company who's job it is to copy the source control commit logs and paste them in a word document. This document is then kept on a server for a few years, after which it is deleted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thewarrior 7y ago
  You’ve got to be kidding right ? Why not just replace it with a cron job that queries git or something ?
  - jbob2000 7y ago
    I am not kidding. We don’t even need to replace them, the commit logs are there for exactly this purpose. They can just disappear and nothing would change! They’re a legacy team, I am sure their time is up soon. What enterprise companies do is gather all the people they want to lay-off and then do it in one shot whenever they need to bump their stock price.
coldtea 7y ago
>No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". And they were right. His program, put in production, would indeed take away their jobs. Now in a perfect society (and in neoliberal make-believe), they'd find a more meaningful job to do. In reality, they'd probably just be tossed aside, fired, and left in the dustbins of history (with cushioned younger people that think they have it made laughing at them for not being able to "adapt" -- the same kind of people that get angry and call it "hate speech" when they're themselves fired and are told "learn to code").
- seibelj 7y ago
  If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. If we were going to do that, we should just pay people for nothing, which is what digging holes and refilling them is. They would be better off, and so would the company and society at large, if they were put into a new role (at the existing company or a new one) that actually provided value.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs. The reason it helps is, as I see it: 1) Productivity/automation is well up... 2) More people than required are available to work 3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern 4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period. 5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults 6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients) 7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max

strathmeyer 7y ago

I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need. The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.
- Jtsummers 7y ago
  I'll be blunt: That is moronic. If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it. 1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve. 2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work. If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently. But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    I believe you’re confusing “nothing to do” with what the OP task was: “making upper case letters mixed case”. It needs to be done right? This work is analogous to what is done every day in every office in every country. Believe it or not, most of what people do is this type of work (again, my opinion). If there’s not other pressing needs, and there’s a business need for the work, and you have a sure fire way of solving your problem, then take the path of least resistance and keep your staff from being idle.
    - Jtsummers 7y ago
      Having people do that manually is garbage work. It can be done with a quick script by any competent programmer or system administrator. Having people sit down and do that for hours, days, or weeks, is a sure-fire way to kill any interest they have in contributing meaningfully to the business. They will hate you, themselves, the company, and either seek out a new job (best case) or remain and occupy space continuing to do garbage work. If your staff is idle, give them meaningful work, training, or the day off. All of those are better than giving them garbage work.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Why not just let them go home and pay them for what you're really paying them for: being available when needed.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    if you start sending staff home then your management will question whether or not you need them, and you might not be able to keep the head count. Then a few days or weeks later some difficult work comes by and you’re understaffed and overworking the people you were able to keep. Besides, the lower case letters still need to be upper case. Don’t you know that most “work” being done around the world isn’t much different?
  - foogazi 7y ago
    Nothing worse than the boss showing up and asking “where is everybody?” That’s how Friday WFH got cancelled at my previous job
- z92 7y ago
  Matches my experience very much.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  There's mechanistic work that this was true for. With the Advent of Fiverr and Upwork you no longer need to do this unless you have some sort of sensitivity on the data (it's personal, or health, or something secret). These companies are the cloud computing of drudge work. You can burst capacity in half an hour.
- Zelphyr 7y ago
  I had this happen to me. I was hired as a contractor for a big company and was shown to a cubicle I was to share with another developer. Only, I had nothing to do. I was told what I'd be doing when I interviewed but that project got put on hold by the time I started. After about a week of not being assigned anything I started to kind-of freak out. My cube-mate assured me that everything was fine and he explained that the department head was given the OK to hire someone and he took advantage of that opportunity so that he had me available when he needed me. I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Every time I read stories like this I can’t help but mourn the loss of real opportunity for them. Instead, they should have asked to WFH a few days a week and been VERY productive on those days. Then ask “hey, do you mind if I do this job remotely?” and always be just a little more productive than the others.

Joe-Z 7y ago
That's exactly how I would have played it. Another dream scenario would be to one day be some 'forgotten employee' of a giant company. You know, maybe your project got cancelled, your colleagues were moved elsewhere and you just never got re-assigned and didn't bother to ask. Still receiving your checks, still showing up to the office, but just kind of fart around and do whatever you feel like. Hell, maybe you could even give yourself a few days of remote work a week! Aaaah yes, that's the life I tell you!
colechristensen 7y ago
What you should mourn is the healthcare costs being passed on to the patients to pay these people. Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.
- aabeshou 7y ago
  as if the reduced inefficiencies would actually go to reducing costs rather than further padding executives pockets
  - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    They absolutely would have to pass along a lot of the cost savings to patients, otherwise they would lose those patients to other companies. But I can appreciate that your pet preferences prohibit you from believing this is so.
    - aabeshou 7y ago

mailslot 7y ago

Ah. Reminds me of a place I worked. The software build would take seven hours, and my coworker would play ping pong for the rest of the day. When I sped it up to five minutes, I’ve never seen someone become so pissed off.

arrow7000 7y ago
What was making the build take so long in the first place?

jbob2000 7y ago

We have an entire 15 person team at my company who's job it is to copy the source control commit logs and paste them in a word document. This document is then kept on a server for a few years, after which it is deleted.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thewarrior 7y ago
You’ve got to be kidding right ? Why not just replace it with a cron job that queries git or something ?
- jbob2000 7y ago
  I am not kidding. We don’t even need to replace them, the commit logs are there for exactly this purpose. They can just disappear and nothing would change! They’re a legacy team, I am sure their time is up soon. What enterprise companies do is gather all the people they want to lay-off and then do it in one shot whenever they need to bump their stock price.

coldtea 7y ago

>No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". And they were right. His program, put in production, would indeed take away their jobs. Now in a perfect society (and in neoliberal make-believe), they'd find a more meaningful job to do. In reality, they'd probably just be tossed aside, fired, and left in the dustbins of history (with cushioned younger people that think they have it made laughing at them for not being able to "adapt" -- the same kind of people that get angry and call it "hate speech" when they're themselves fired and are told "learn to code").

seibelj 7y ago
If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. If we were going to do that, we should just pay people for nothing, which is what digging holes and refilling them is. They would be better off, and so would the company and society at large, if they were put into a new role (at the existing company or a new one) that actually provided value.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs. The reason it helps is, as I see it: 1) Productivity/automation is well up... 2) More people than required are available to work 3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern 4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period. 5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults 6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients) 7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max