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Long ago I had a college job doing data entry for a tiny long-distance carrier. We had hourly quotas, etc. and had to retype the information into several differ

Long ago I had a college job doing data entry for a tiny long-distance carrier. We had hourly quotas, etc. and had to retype the information into several different backend systems. One day I dug up a manual and discovered that there were a copy/paste commands available on the terminal we were using. I could get through my quota in 40 minutes. I showed this to my supervisor who told me “we’re paying you to type not to play around on computers”. For the rest of the summer I took a nice long coffee break every hour.

botverse 5y ago
The second part of that sentence, probably omitted by your boss “… play with computers. The same way we are charging our client for a highly unoptimised process where we charge by person/hour, don’t make it look like it can be done more efficiently or I’ll fire you”
devilbunny 5y ago
I was once a temp worker hired to transfer a bunch of records from an old, terminal-based mainframe into a newer Windows-based app for an insurance company. I spent about an hour doing so and then went and asked the supervisor if their IT department had an old copy of Windows 3.11 lying around (this was Win 98). 3.x had the "macro recorder" that would capture everything - including mouse movement. They did. I practiced highlighting all the fields, switching apps, and pasting the data. You could only play back at maybe 3x original speed. Then I started my macro running. I had estimated that I could have done it manually in about three days; the macro would do it in about 30 hours and not screw up any of the data along the way. Told the supervisor what I'd done and asked to be paid for two. She said yes and offered me a job on the spot; too bad I was starting med school in a month.
- tomhallett 5y ago
  In highschool math, we were learning LRAM, RRAM, and MRAM - where you estimate the "area under a curve" by making rectangles and then summing their area. A very interesting technique but very manual to calculate. I wrote a program from scratch on my TI-82 to calculate the answers and my math teacher said "You wrote the program yourself, so you can use it during the exams. You still have to show your work manually, but it sounds great to check your work." This was a pivotal moment in my path to becoming a software engineer. :)
rainandcoffee 5y ago
Ditto. During my college internship (1999), I worked the night shift for a certain very large OG domain name registrar. We had a nightly quota of about 200 domain names to take from being registered to the vanilla configuration. Since this was a Unix environment and I was actually learning shell scripting in college at the time, this was the perfect opportunity to script. I received permission from the greybeard running the servers to proceed with the caveat he vetted the code before making it executable. I went from taking almost 5-6 hours to doing my quota in mere minutes. My boss learned of this and told me to keep it a secret from the other techs. He then put me to work writing code to paginate reports and other things. On my last day at the job, I shared the code with everyone.
mk89 5y ago
you're lucky he/she didn't kick you out; go and justify "I need 12 people to do something that one person can do in 1 day, alone"

botverse 5y ago

The second part of that sentence, probably omitted by your boss “… play with computers. The same way we are charging our client for a highly unoptimised process where we charge by person/hour, don’t make it look like it can be done more efficiently or I’ll fire you”

devilbunny 5y ago

I was once a temp worker hired to transfer a bunch of records from an old, terminal-based mainframe into a newer Windows-based app for an insurance company. I spent about an hour doing so and then went and asked the supervisor if their IT department had an old copy of Windows 3.11 lying around (this was Win 98). 3.x had the "macro recorder" that would capture everything - including mouse movement. They did. I practiced highlighting all the fields, switching apps, and pasting the data. You could only play back at maybe 3x original speed. Then I started my macro running. I had estimated that I could have done it manually in about three days; the macro would do it in about 30 hours and not screw up any of the data along the way. Told the supervisor what I'd done and asked to be paid for two. She said yes and offered me a job on the spot; too bad I was starting med school in a month.

tomhallett 5y ago
In highschool math, we were learning LRAM, RRAM, and MRAM - where you estimate the "area under a curve" by making rectangles and then summing their area. A very interesting technique but very manual to calculate. I wrote a program from scratch on my TI-82 to calculate the answers and my math teacher said "You wrote the program yourself, so you can use it during the exams. You still have to show your work manually, but it sounds great to check your work." This was a pivotal moment in my path to becoming a software engineer. :)

rainandcoffee 5y ago

Ditto. During my college internship (1999), I worked the night shift for a certain very large OG domain name registrar. We had a nightly quota of about 200 domain names to take from being registered to the vanilla configuration. Since this was a Unix environment and I was actually learning shell scripting in college at the time, this was the perfect opportunity to script. I received permission from the greybeard running the servers to proceed with the caveat he vetted the code before making it executable. I went from taking almost 5-6 hours to doing my quota in mere minutes. My boss learned of this and told me to keep it a secret from the other techs. He then put me to work writing code to paginate reports and other things. On my last day at the job, I shared the code with everyone.

mk89 5y ago

you're lucky he/she didn't kick you out; go and justify "I need 12 people to do something that one person can do in 1 day, alone"