33 ms·

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

• geraldwhen 5y ago
  I’ve done this twice, but I was open about it. Once someone was fired, and the second time I was moved into a better dev position than where I was at. In the end it worked out, but people did get fired or not replaced.
• wombat-man 5y ago
  This is like the dream. I feel like I would spend the time learning an instrument, or maybe do online learnings to maybe get another job I actually enjoyed doing. Can't even hate and hope things work out for that guy.
  • padobson 5y ago
    This is like the dream. If eight hours a day of free time is the only thing separating you from your dream, then there must be SOME way to adjust the math of your life to get that for at least a period long enough to learn the instrument or train for a new job or both. Reducing your monthly expenses by 1/12 means you could take a full month off and get a jump start on the training you want. You could also add overtime or a part time job and increase your income by 1/12 and then take two months off. Think of it like buying your freedom.
    • antihero 5y ago
      Eight hours of free-time AND eight hours extra mental energy.
      • wombat-man 5y ago
        yeah it's not just the time. I am kinda tired at the end of the day. Certainly too tired to whole heartedly take on a non-trival side project. I need 'non productive' activities like meeting up with friends or some kind of recreation.
    • Auracle 5y ago
      That math gets a lot harder when you have a family.
    • wombat-man 5y ago
      I'm in a good place now. But if I were getting paid essentially for free, I might just take on another job. But given his current job is $90k, I'd maybe start thinking about shooting for a higher paying remote gig. Instrument mastery is a much longer process as far as I can tell. Takes years.
    • wobblybubble 5y ago
      “The only thing”—only half of all weekdays if one follows the in-bed-for-eight hours recommendation. And you of course have to eat and groom yourself outside of those hours. I’m not saying that you are wrong. But it seems weird to dismiss a whopping 40 hours a week as a seemingly small thing.
  • andrewcarter 5y ago
    I learned to play the fiddle the past two years working from home during Xcode's abysmal compile times. Sadly my new M1 max whatever has solved that problem, ha!
    • my_usernam3 5y ago
      Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/ Truth be told I'm a sucker for an enterprise software position with long compile time.
  • jstx1 5y ago
    In my experience it gets boring very quickly. In my case I hadn't automated anything, the company was just bad at utilizing their staff and they were happy to keep me on the payroll doing next to nothing. It resulted in my worrying about skills deteriorating and being more depressed than usual.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  As someone who definitely agrees that people shouldn't have to work in poor conditions, I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated. Does anyone else get that feeling?
  • ngngngng 5y ago
    I don't think so. Humans are pretty good at keeping in sync with one another. This story and most on antiwork are likely fake and people are just keeping in sync to play reddits upvote game.
  • gruez 5y ago
    >I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated. What sounds off to you? It seems pretty straightforward how the "fake posts" can arise out of uncoordinated behavior. Antiwork discusses various grievances that reddit's demographics has (capitalism, under/un-employment, poor working conditions). Readers are more likely to engage with topics that they're passionate about, so the subreddit becomes a great place to farm karma/upvotes, and content creators happily oblige.
  • nthot 5y ago
    I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor. The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States. I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/?sh=6c359c884c92 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
    • fartcannon 5y ago
• lordnacho 5y ago
  People are focusing too much on whether the story is actually true. It sounds plausible to me, but the real story here is that a heck of a lot of processes would benefit from having a programmer look at them. Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.
  • geocrasher 5y ago
    When I was in high school (early 90's) I was a TA in drivers ed for a period. I also took the class the period before it. My job? Enter grades into the computer and run it for the teacher so he didn't have to. When I asked him about what grades to put in for myself he said "Just give yourself A's". So I did. Also aced the DMV written and drivers test 100%. But that's besides the point. I had the knowledge, so I didn't have to work the same as other kids. Been that way ever since!
  • wobblybubble 5y ago
    > Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't. This is what I believe sometimes. Then I look at all the pitfalls of shell scripts and how the time investments on automation tasks just balloon… then not so much. :) But if people have a different experience with that then I don’t doubt it.
    • rustyboy 5y ago
      I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success. Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah. We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.
      • smw 5y ago
        And here's the promise of 'serverless' function as a service type stuff. Pay a few cents a second, have security/ha etc.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Reminiscent of the best of 'Max Klein' aka Mark Essien. So likely fiction.
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  These are fun to read. I laughed at the one where the guy shared a photo of his bong and TV setup at home. One of his major innovations was creating appropriately-named folders for his work. And seriously, a lot of businesses don't know how to get _that_ organized. They are good at other stuff. Also noteworthy IMO are the jobs you don't need to automate--just bring yourself, do your normal thing with baseline effort for a couple weeks max, and suddenly you're two months ahead and C-levels are 1) telling you essentially "stop working so hard" and also 2) "we think you are a partnership candidate if you can do this for 10 more years."
  • brimble 5y ago
    As far as I can tell from listening to stories from friends who aren't in tech circles, sorta halfway knowing how to use a computer still makes you a wizard in most non-tech offices. And the newer generations are only barely better than the old ones, on average, so that's not putting an end to that state of things. I'm talking, like, you understand how external drives are represented, know how to cut & paste files & kinda know what a filesystem is and how it's laid out (not what a FAT table is or anything like that, I mean just how folders and links/shortcuts practically work and such). If you can do more than basic arithmetic in Excel, you're basically god. If you can write batch scripts (like this person, assuming it's true) or a little glue-code python, that's beyond what the others around you could even imagine. I'm not sure whether this is a UX failure or there's just too much necessary complexity to make things better. To some degree I think the basic metaphors we use for representing computer concepts and UI to ordinary users are badly underdeveloped, or in some way misguided. Certainly I think the "iOS is dumbing things down and making people unable to compute!" folks have things exactly backwards.
    • themodelplumber 5y ago
      Yeah, that's really the direction to look in--the people themselves, what they're expressing in their way of work, and how they perceive their value. I used to do some psychometric testing for work and was mentored about "tech people" in terms of their/our psychology. When most people sort themselves by interest, they indicate a preference against technology, which can also be described as "novel organizations of things." But they also indicate against tech by indicating pro-other-stuff interests. So you can still find lots of offices full of non-tech people where people are organized, but using yesteryear's tech, i.e. yesterday's organizations of things. Plus they are using their other strengths. From a tech POV though, that inclusive view of others' strengths is sometimes overlooked, and it's an unfortunate truth that the tech-wise are somewhat naturally blinded to others' preferred leverage points in doing business. For example, the ability to give responsive, personal customer service. That service may involve some tech people, but the person giving the service may be at a significant advantage if they don't have a tech background, and have some improvisational or emotional-spectrum talent, or other reasonable problem-solving tools where tech would otherwise fill the skill gap. I always thought it was interesting stuff...
• neom 5y ago
  "For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. " Not a win for the COO/GM/CFO/FP&A/whatever who is tasked with finding efficiencies in the business and doing optimization. By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business.
  • jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
    Shouldn't whoever is tasked with finding such inefficiencies realize that a simple script could be written to replace the process of manually transferring files to and from cloud storage?
    • neom 5y ago
      That is not how teams work. I recommend this book to learn more on how teams work: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Teams-Creating-High-Performance-Organization/dp/1633691063 https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Teams-Creating-High-Performanc...
      • tamiral 5y ago
        I have this book and haven't read it yet... but will start it! thanks for the reminder.
        • neom 5y ago
          Extremely boring, but I recommend persisting to the end.
      • jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
        People are unable to realize a script can be written because that's "not how teams work"? I'm very confused at what you're trying to say.
• null_object 5y ago
  I think most of us are feeling some schadenfreude because the poster is ripping-off a law-firm - but the disappointment for me is that (for the most part) (s)he seems to be treating it as an 8-hour day where (s)he simply skips work - which I would definitely find totally soul-destroying. I saw in the follow-up comments that there are is some "passion project" that's being worked on, but apparently it wasn't 'relevant' enough to mention it in the original post, and came under the miscellaneous "computer games or do whatever"
  • darkwizard42 5y ago
    Which is why, like most things posted on that subreddit (and online communities in general) should be approached with a bunch of skepticism. The post reeks of "yeah, that happened" vibes.
    • theturtletalks 5y ago
      I really do think it happened. Just look at the explosion of no-code tools that handle this sort of tedious work for small businesses. The caveat is that once the owner figures out they can automate this person's work, that person will be out of a job.
  • wobblybubble 5y ago
    Why does there need to be passion project? He could study philosophy or do whatever that one can do in an office by oneself.
    • lemmiwinks 5y ago
      Why woudn't studying philosophy not a passion project?
      • wobblybubble 5y ago
        It could be. But this is Hacker News so it often means something hacker-related.
• binarytox1n 5y ago
  Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma farmers and therefore more fiction. It's an entertaining read, but not likely true.
  • pavel_lishin 5y ago
    I also got r/thathappened vibes, but I choose to believe. Anyone who's worked for more than a few places can name a business that's held together with rubberbands and excel spreadsheets, especially small businesses. This is an entirely believable story.
  • nlh 5y ago
    Funny, I had this exact same thought. The red flags for me were their use of “clock in” and “shift”. Those are not concepts generally in play for IT staff at law firms.
    • fesoliveira 5y ago
      FWIW he mentions that there is no IT department in the firm, and that he works under administration.
      • DennisP 5y ago
        And he's working from home, so "clock in" basically means logging in.
      • rhino369 5y ago
        This is the actual red flag. A mid-size firm simply couldn't function without IT. They could outsource it to a contractor, but, in that case, they'd never then hire someone for 90k to do one small IT task. If there is any true to this, he's probably on the books as an "Litigation Support Tech" and his job probably involves (or is supposed to involve) more than he's describing--like interfacing with vendors who do the actual data/document processing.
• lolc 5y ago
  It looks like this is a case where everybody is happy. A process that was plagued by manual errors now runs smoothly. And there is an admin around to jump in should it break. While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well. On the other hand, I don't think I could work like that. I always look for ways to improve life, and that includes the life of my customers. Not letting them know that the thing is automated keeps them in the belief that it requires manual action, and that to me is a lie by omission. Likely there are other low-hangig fruit to automate, once you're in the mindset. Another consideration is when the script does something dumb a human wouldn't have done. Is the operator liable for that? Because after all it was not considered part of the job to automate it? Of course, the likelihood of human mistakes weighs more in all likelihood. But when the firm argues (they're lawyers right?) that the mistakes wouldn't have happened if the employee followed protocol, there may be some ugly liability.
  • leetcrew 5y ago
    > While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well. if they knew, they might be tempted to fire the person and keep the script. OP talks a big game about how it's running on their own hardware, but the company has a legal claim if it was developed during the workday. not smart to play legal games with a law firm.
    • Kon-Peki 5y ago
      Maybe, but unlikely. They want someone to be available to fix/update and perhaps do other things too. Part of your salary as support staff is being there when they need you.
      • Hamuko 5y ago
        Yeah, if this is something that is integral to their work, they'd still need to pay someone to be able to respond within X amount of minutes in case something goes tits up even if they got the script in their hands. They could probably do that for less than 90k/year, but it's still gonna cost them.
• howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  Love the poster's ingenuity and hate his attitude, and the antiwork subreeddit. Attitude: $90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for this person's retirement, particularly if they encounter major expenses. He should be spending his new free time either developing a side-hustle, a business, or delivering additional value for his employer for which he must insist on additional compensation. I used to be well aware of evidence & case management systems and this person is one decision away from existing software making his perceived job less relevant. Antiwork: I entered the workforce during a deep recession, and I was a recruiter for infoTech during another recession. I've traveled extensively overseas for work. It will be an employers market eventually, perhaps soon, and the antiwork crowd is going to meet reality head-on when it happens. Nothing wrong with ditching bad employers & developing side-hustles. There is something wrong with demonizing work. Part (by no means all) of the growth one sees abroad is due to acceptance and often positive attitudes about work, with less emphasis on "fairness". Life isn't even close to fair and some societies and people understand how to work with that better than others do. Let the downvoting and flaming begin (sadly).
  • Miner49er 5y ago
    HN really lives in a some sort of wealthy bubble. $90k is plenty of money to save for retirement in most of the country. If it's not, then the majority of people in the US will never be able to retire.
    • pseudo0 5y ago
      Yeah, for reference the median household income in the US is under $70k. Of course cost of living depends a lot on the locality, but 90k as a single person goes pretty far anywhere other than the Bay Area, NYC, or a few other expensive hubs.
    • pietrovismara 5y ago
      OP doesn't realize that 87% of the US population (being one of the richest in the world) makes less than $90k. That means that by his view 9 persons out of 10 won't be able to retire. Which I actually believe is true. The irony of admitting this while at the same time praising this system with statements like >Part (by no means all) of the growth one sees abroad is due to acceptance and often positive attitudes about work, with less emphasis on "fairness". What kind of growth are we seeing? Why should we have a positive attitude about work, when it's just a mean of transfering wealth upwards?
• Ajedi32 5y ago
  Previous discussion about a similar situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
• _bfhp 5y ago
  I once saw a presentation from a man who build entire products this way. He automates hiring contractor devs based on their review scores, sends them to a huge Trello board that they use to self-onboard and then take on tasks, and automatically tracks of their progress by Trello cards completed and amount of code written. He said he just spends 10 minutes a day firing contractors that aren't doing good enough, and maybe adding a new card to Trello now and then. This presentation was almost a decade ago so this automation might be a full product of its own by now. No saying if his product was any good or still exists, though
• kevingadd 5y ago
  Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated me, I got transferred to what was effectively a punishment team - officially I was hired as a game designer and then officially moved to the programming department, but then I was moved onto "cinematics", which meant setting up shots, camera transitions, and dialogue timing. Naturally I had zero qualifications to do this. Another person moved onto the punishment team was a QA tester that a lead had actively tried to block hiring. The supposed justification for this was that cinematics were behind schedule (this did seem to be true, at least). Anyway, within a couple weeks me and the QA tester (who also knew how to code) had written a set of tools to make our work 3-4x faster and improve quality, so the three of us got our work done in a couple hours a day and spent the rest of it doing whatever we wanted - watching tv, working on side projects, reading programming books, etc. To me the best part was that if I hadn't automated this the rest of the project would have fallen behind, because at that point the entire design department relied on my unauthorized side project (a comprehensive set of authoring and debugging tools for the design team) and I spent some of my spare time maintaining it. Game dev is wild.
• Shamii 5y ago
  Sounds very very boring to me. I have no clue who would pay someone 90$ for copy and pasting files from left to right. But if this is true I still don't envy him. When his gig is up he has nothing to show and is stuck were he was when taking that job. Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed or not making a real difference.
  • zero102 5y ago
    I was for a few years in college a data entry clerk making $12.50/hr. It was effectively copy/pasting with some extra clicks and being a computer science student at the time I wrote an excel connector that did ~80% of my job. It only required me to intervene on especially hard data entry stuff (lots of math or formulas). There really was no benefit to tell anyone I did this. Not because I wanted to be lazy but it would just mean more data entry and not what I wanted to do (automating other people's stuff). There's loads of these BS jobs out there especially when numpty salesmen are involved. It was relatively soul crushing because it didn't really afford me any extra time to do school work (cube farm yay) but I was able to basically zone out and make money, or stash some homework problems and work them while appearing to stare intently at the screen. I don't harbor any ill will towards them though unlike most of these /r/antiwork losers. They were friendly to me and it was just the culture there that "if it isn't done manually then we dont need a person to do it". I ended up getting a couple raises and only left when I got my first real SWE job. I got in touch with them recently and there are still some scripts running some important IT processes I wrote many, many years ago running today.
    • lizknope 5y ago
      I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could do it in a minute (it was a slow machine) Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a "file upload" feature and I figured out the format. I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data to the format the mainframe needed. I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's info in the daily Lotus 123 update files. All of this should have been done in a database but I had just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about computers in the first place. Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software companies the next summer.
• brodouevencode 5y ago
  Great engineers try to automate their way out of a job. It would seem like their employer would reward them for using a little ingenuity. Why wouldn't he just come clean about it?
  • delecti 5y ago
    Because he doesn't care about the job being done, but only about getting paid for the results. It's like admitting someone already owns a goose that lays golden eggs when you can instead sell them the eggs.
  • MSFT_Edging 5y ago
    If his employer learned they didn't need to pay him for 40 hours a week, why would they maintain his employment?
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Why would he be rewarded? They would likely try to save that $90k by replacing him, or give him a lot more work with very little increase in comp. If there's anything I've learned in 10 years, you keep your mouth shut when things are easy because if you speak up they screw you with more work and the same (or nearly so) pay.
    • brodouevencode 5y ago
      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.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        My company will give you more work. Just no raise or promotion to go with it. I honestly don't see most companies giving raises with additional work.
• reaperducer 5y ago
  I automated the most time-consuming tasks of my job about a year after I joined the company. Instead of sitting back and gloating about it on social media, I used the extra time to take on additional projects and to help other departments in order to increase my value to the company. When the COVID cuts came, I was labeled "essential" staff. So while the rest of my department was downsized from over 50 people to fewer than 10, I was able to keep my job. I'm glad I took the high road.
  • gumbotron 5y ago
• keiferski 5y ago
  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.) On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.
  • eterevsky 5y ago
    He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the same thing.
    • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
      I hope he read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
      • hogrider 5y ago
        This one is the text book definition of fall guy as a service. Anything goew wrong, it's his head, that's why the pay him.
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and understand the situation?
      • bonoboTP 5y ago
        This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would employees agree to their salary if they fully understood how much of the value they create is pocketed at various other levels of the org?
      • 5y ago
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I helped someone do this for their accounting job once since I saw them working with obscure data re-entry moving from old DOS systems to SAP. They had a ton of material to manually move over and it seemed painful ergonomically. I used Sikuli from MIT to deal with the randomly changing window locations. Management got mad at them for completing the task so quickly (it took a week instead of a few months) since it fell on management to deal with what to do with the data entries next, and they didn’t like a huge stack of work looming. Ha
  • oneoff786 5y ago
    +1 for sikuli. Very nice little tool that makes it very easy to do something that would otherwise require a lot of specific knowledge
    • patrickk 5y ago
      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/ https://www.macrocreator.com/screenshots/
      • Veen 5y ago
        Keyboard Maestro can do similar on the Mac with the "Find Image on Screen" and "Click on Found Image" actions. You can do some fairly sophisticated GUI automations with its image, OCR, button clicking, JavaScript, and menu actions.
      • jodrellblank 5y ago
        A cross-platform fork of Sikuli is at http://www.sikulix.com/ http://www.sikulix.com/ using Java, Python and OpenCV for automation. PyAutoGui is another nice option - https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - cross platform Python module for keyboard and mouse automation with some support for taking and analysing screenshots.
• bena 5y ago
  To those saying this can't be true, while it may be exaggerated, I can believe the core of it. My first job was for a doctor who fancied himself a programmer. He was a reseller of customizable medical software. The customizations were essentially really simple config files. The most complex thing was a half-baked pseudo HTML document language. My job was "programmer". I was supposed to help customize and maintain the system. This took absolutely no time at all. I filled my time with skunkworks, busy work, education, and job searching. I think when I left they eventually had to decommission the patient web portal that I wrote and some other bits. Because they had no one to update and maintain them. So when the parent company would change the structure of the database, they couldn't reflect those changes in what I made. One week, I probably spent way more time making a SVG/CSS eyeball follow a mouse cursor than doing anything remotely related to my job.
• CountDrewku 5y ago
  Ugh that subreddit is just a cesspool. Most of the stories are fake and it attracts the bottom feeders of society. People need work to feel fulfilled. I get that a corporate job may not meet that demand but this idea that you can just eschew any work and be mentally ok isn't true.
  • ravedave5 5y ago
    "People need work to feel fulfilled." I never thought I'd see Stockholm syndrome in the wild.
    • lezojeda 5y ago
      Are you kidnapped or held against your will by your employer?
      • ravedave5 5y ago
        Are you able to keep a shelter over your head and food in your belly without work?
        • CountDrewku 5y ago
          Huh? Are you expecting others to take care of your needs while you do nothing? At what time in history has this ever been an option. You would be dead in a ditch with this attitude for most of our history. Maybe you need to go out into the woods and survive without help to force an attitude change. You have a skewed since of reality egged on by a society that's let you survive off of doing basically nothing and yet you still complain. The problem here is that you believe all of the stuff to keep you alive just magically appears without anyone doing any work.
          • CRConrad 5y ago
            Way to evade the question.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  I didn't automate my job, I just did a good enough job that things stopped breaking, and I had less and less to every day. Eventually I'd just show up, make rounds, wait for things to break, make rounds again after lunch, wait until quitting time. I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change. So, in the end I was being paid to show up, mostly. I lived in constant fear of getting fired, and in the end the job was outsourced out of existence. Good on them, bad for me. That job slowly crushed my soul. I haven't recovered, a decade later.
  • dansiemens 5y ago
    > I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die. They don’t really understand the technology that their jobs are bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-go.
    • thatguy0900 5y ago
      Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers will not thank them for making their job easier with better tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was, let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.
    • mediaman 5y ago
      Agreed - accountants are a unique breed. They do a fair amount of basic numeric analysis and rote work that is of the sort that is beneficial to automation. But they're often very averse to technology, often stop learning any new tools early on in their career, and tend to stick to the methods they learned as juniors, even many years later. That's a broad brush, and is certainly unfair to and untrue of some accountants. Some are Excel gods and can VBA it up with the best of them, and would have been productive software engineers in another life. But it's surprisingly true for much of the profession.
• disambiguation 5y ago
  hot take: this is basically UBI in practice. "different people have different opinions" but it's funny to see the cognitive dissonance. Lots of hate ITT for anti-work, yet HN is usually a hotbed for pro UBI sentiment.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    How is it UBI in practice? It is not uniform, and the guy makes $92k which in most areas is well above what a person would require basic income.
    • disambiguation 5y ago
      Just in the sense that a job was displaced by automation, so the worker is collecting a check from someone wealthy that benefits from said automation.
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  I love these threads. As a rule, I always do the work assigned to me just a bit shy of the target. And, I always automate my work. And I never say a word of it to anyone. I work in an engineering firm and most of my colleagues are clueless about programming. Am I cheating? Perhaps. Do I feel guilty? Absolutely not.
  • noasaservice 5y ago
    Same. I'm a systems engineer. I will always automate if it makes sense. And depending on how the environment is, I may or may not tell others about it. I think of automation like a box of tools. On journeyman jobs, the tools are yours. You paid for them, and you have use of them as you see fit. I think of automation the same. You're not buying my tools - you're buying my skills that bring my tools. You quit paying, you quit getting work. In no world do you get my tools.
• mihcsab 5y ago
  tbh, something similar happened to me too. I took over a sysadmin job, multiple servers. They had a lot of problems in the backend, because of bad configs, sometimes they spent days resolving the same issues on multiple servers, without trying to fix the root causes. I just took the time and went through the configs and corrected them. Also made some simple scripts that do the same thing that they did manually. No one knows how much is changed in the background, so they don't bother me with how much I actually work with the administration, they just know they used to spend hours with problems before, now nothing really comes up, maybe one problem every two months. Now my job with them is just generating monthly health reports, spending five minutes looking through the logs, making the invoices and being available when something doesn't work. So yeah I can believe the poster. Some firms never thought about automatization, maybe they don't even know how much is possible, so they are happy to pay the same amount if everything just works, without bothering you about actual time spent with it. Maybe it even works better, than it used to when the other dude did it manually as a full time job.
• nemothekid 5y ago
  You aren’t being paid to copy and paste files, you are paid so the company can retain your skills in the event anything goes wrong. If the evidence was gone, corrupted or needed to be changed , they have someone on staff who can quickly remedy that. Isn’t that the point of a high skill job? You get paid for knowing which screw to tighten, you don’t get paid for tightening screws.
  • raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    Assuming the story is true, they're preying on ignorance. You're describing normal employment and service contracting. The law firm has a huge misconception about the complexity of the task and the human labor required for normal and exceptional operations. Even the spreadsheet sanity checking could probably be automated. This is a few thousand dollars of consultant time to setup, and maybe a few thousand/year to maintain.
  • rcthompson 5y ago
    I think it's actually a bit more subtle than that. The post says the law firm "wanted [them] to be the only person with admin access to the Cloud, everyone else would be limited to view only". I wonder if their job is, more than anything else, to be the person who is legally on the hook if anything goes wrong, because they're the only one with write access.
• tpoacher 5y ago
  Hahah, I love that top comment though: > Think of your wages as a subscription service to your automation program lol. Big companies love subscription services, right? spot on, hahah
• fcb92019 5y ago
• fcb92019 5y ago
• smm11 5y ago
  I worked at a Big Important Place, and two or three times a day I'd shut down an online transaction system, back up a file, move a new file into place, then bring the online transaction system back up. Took maybe two minutes. On any given day, I'd do literally five minutes of work, maybe eight. I didn't need to check any logs at the end of the day. That wasn't my job.
  • D-Coder 5y ago
    Sounds like that could have been automated down to one command. And then put into cron.
• runjake 5y ago
  A lot of commenters are calling this fake. Maybe it is. But I don't think it is. I know too many people who've done this during the pandemic, by reading through Automate The Boring Stuff with Python[1] or one[2] of a number[3] of PowerShell books and automate some/all parts of their jobs. 1. https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ 2. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-cookbook-4th/9781098101596/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-cookbook-4th... 3. https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunches/dp/1617294160/ https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunche...
• y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
  Except you just told the whole world and just like the fools that are bragging about their "overwork" on reddit, they're doing so against their own interests. These kinds of things end up on the front page of the BBC under the "work life" section which your boss may inevitably see, then get a wild idea that his/her employees must be doing the same, and start a crusade to end it. Pro tip: if something is meant to be kept a secret, don't spread it online. This goes for job automation, multiple jobs, favorite camping spots, etc.
• _pmf_ 5y ago
  > For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off Laughed out loud at this.
• sebringj 5y ago
  If this is true or not, I had a situation in my past where I was developing an ecommerce API as a business that had both web and backend. Basically, it made integrations take a day instead of 3-4 months. I hired some offshore developers to use my API to setup for new clients, effectively making a killing as I could still charge quite a lot for this specific integration and yet undercut all the competition. Long story short, my API code was stolen from under me by the offshore people I hired and I subsequently was made obsolete in my business model. I did not know how to prove this or go forward with litigation. Anyways, that's in my past but kind of a reverse way of screwing yourself.
  • verall 5y ago
    I'm sorry that happened as I'm sure the API took a solid amount of work, but you've got to admit that's hilarious.
    • sebringj 5y ago
      The full story is actually a lot worse but yah it is pretty dumb.
  • sumedh 5y ago
    > code was stolen from under me by the offshore people I hired and I subsequently was made obsolete in my business model. I dont get it, did the offshore guys contact your clients directly and got their business?
    • sebringj 5y ago
      I suspect one of them I let go for subcontracting his work contacted one of my competitors. The timing seems suspect.
• manishsharan 5y ago
  I work in enterprise architecture and the most annoying part of my job is telling dev teams to comply with policies and best practices, which are fully documented and yet ignored. I would love to have AI solution that could review a uml or a design document or a terraform script and write out responses.
• ecf 5y ago
  And people wonder why a lot of those in the IT field have a hard time being respected.
• cityofdelusion 5y ago
  I had a prior job out of college where I automated the vast majority of the technical position I was in. It was a combination sys admin and data validation role for the government -- not really my interest, but it was after the economy melted down and finding a proper programming job was tough. Over the span of about a year, I had a set of scripts, batch jobs, and other forms of OS/database level automation that made most of the manual tasks we had obsolete. Unlike the original article though, I went to my manager and bragged about it. My manager was ecstatic and had me deploy the same set of scripts to the entire team. I would now be in charge of coding it full-time and got to implement things like authentication, a UI, reports, a dashboard, and so on. I eventually left that job because I was desiring a more proper engineering role, but it was a good case of win-win for full-blown automation. It didn't replace any humans (though it certainly could have), but instead our management had use it to enhance the existing humans and have them scale.
• paganel 5y ago
  I did a similar thing almost 20 years ago, I had to manually verify that the image files from one network drive were the same as the image files from a different location (some internal web-page, I think, I had file access to them, too). That was taking me about one hour each working day, in fact each working night/morning, as this was a night job and I had to do that at the end of the shift (6-7AM). I had started learning some PHP but very quickly realised (by reading on the web) that Python was way better for this job. With the help with the Python docs page, the Python mailing list (very friendly back then with newbies, maybe still is, haven't been there for a long time), of tkinter (excellent library!) and of py2exe I was able to write a quick script on my Mandrake distro at home, turn that script into an .exe, copy it to a floppy disk and use it at work. Just like that, an ~1 hour job turned into a maximum 2-minute job, the time it took me to open the tkinter-based "program" and press a button or two. One or two years later I was getting my first job as a computer programmer, writing Python, thanks in part to that realisation of "I can make this thing way faster and easier by using Python".
• baby-yoda 5y ago
  at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company) one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system, format it in a specific way, save it to a shared drive and email to a few different people. it was really repetitive, fairly simplistic and the report from the ERP was very consistent. after about 2 weeks of doing this every day i thought there had to be a way to automate it, so I did. i set the ERP report to be emailed to me, set an email rule to save attachment to desktop with a naming convention (from the specific sender), then my excel macro would identify the current date's file and run roughly 30 min after the report's usual sending time and format it as required, then send to an email list. this was supposed to be the first hour to hour and a half of my day. once i was confident it worked, i let it rip and enjoyed hour and a half breakfast every morning, or roamed the office talking to other interns, etc. a couple months later i mentioned to my manager that maybe automate it and save some time but they had no interest and brushed my comment off. so i kept enjoying my breakfast and free time for the rest of my time there. my "automation" wasn't complicated at all, just took some creative thinking and a bunch of attempts to get it right. sometimes people either a) simply dont want to believe things can be automated because it "devalues" what they do or have done in the past, or b) are happy having tasks like this assigned to underlings so they "know" and can easily explain what that person is doing at any given time.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution to this problem was to complain about every procedure we weren’t following exactly. One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs. We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki pages into a different set of files. By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was handled by a CI/CD job.
• webmaven 5y ago
  I think stories like this are read more widely than a lot of folks in forums such as HN suppose (often forwarded via email), and provide additional motivation for workplace surveillance solutions. After all, if a manager can identify when tasks are being automated away by an idle employee, they've also identified a task that can be done manually by a cheaper employee. The alternative is getting rid of the position entirely and keeping the automation, but then the manager has to take responsibility for pushing the button.
• dccoolgai 5y ago
  Some of these firms literally give their associate attorneys $400K bonuses (on top of a 200-300K salary). I wouldn't feel bad about it.
  • heartbreak 5y ago
    You’ve inflated biglaw bonuses for >= 8th year associates by 10x. They’re high, but they’re not that high.
    • dccoolgai 5y ago
      https://abovethelaw.com/2021/12/litigation-wows-with-bonuses-that-average-way-above-biglaw/ https://abovethelaw.com/2021/12/litigation-wows-with-bonuses... > And even junior associates are taking home more money than the Biglaw standard. But the eye-popping top bonus is an impressive $400,000.
      • heartbreak 5y ago
        Yeah that isn't even remotely close to market, which is why ATL was writing about it. Kellogg Hansen pays significantly over market salaries, too. Turns out I was wrong about 8th years, though. This is the scale most biglaw firms adopted this year (https://abovethelaw.com/2021/12/davis-polk-bonuses-21/ https://abovethelaw.com/2021/12/davis-polk-bonuses-21/). We just got memos about $10-20k raises, too, and it looks like Milbank kicked that off yesterday. Still no $400k bonuses unless you're at Wachtell or Kellogg.
• steve76 5y ago
  [dead]
• froaway4job 5y ago
  Wow. I need to step my game up... I've been working 4 jobs SWE roles remotely (3 full time, 1 part time) for several years now. I have to admit that the most challenging aspect of working multiple jobs is finding the right balance of working hard enough at each job just to get by. Automating a lot of the busy work sounds challenging for more hands on technical roles. I may need to take some pay cuts to find easier roles that I can automate. If anyone has any tips on how to automate parts of their engineering work I'm all ears!
  • throwaway1492 5y ago
    I've done this as well, multiple swe jobs, I also did not find ways to automate. Just trying to get a little something done every day to report in the stand ups is what I did. Most teams are so low performing it was easy. Every so often a new manager would come along and make my life hell then I'd have to move on.
• thrownaway564 5y ago
  Easier way - attend all the "allyship" and DEI meetings instead of doing your job. If confronted say "challenging white supremacy is everyones job!" and insist they should "do the work" Join Zoom. Use a heart or snaps emoji in the first five minutes. Turn off camera. Leetcode.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  I know friends who work at (Big Tech Company) who literally make $500k/year on paper and they don’t do anything.
• honkycat 5y ago
  I'm always shocked by the lack of ambition from my friends who land "low-effort" office jobs where they aren't doing much. Personally, I would: 1. Work on personal projects to build skills for something I actually care about 2. Study until I get a new non-boring job. I would lose my mind if I had to do nothing but play video games all day. I struggle to fill the hours AFTER work! I can't imagine doing nothing.
  • draw_down 5y ago
• dkarl 5y ago
  I feel like this is something that has been a common occurrence since personal computers started entering the workplace, but people who accomplish it usually follow up by expanding the scope of their job. Personally, I know someone who has "automated her work" using Excel at several jobs, to the point that she spent a few days per month doing the entire job of the person she replaced. These were jobs that anyone could have automated any time in the previous 10-15 years, and were automated at other companies she worked at, but at several companies she was the first to do it. In software development, I "automated my job" many times in the old days in the sense that I was given a task that I was expected to do in a brute-force manner over several weeks, but I solved it by spending a few days cleaning and structuring the data and then writing a script. Now people are less and less surprised by the ability to solve problems with programming, so instead of handing out tasks like that, they are more likely to ask a product manager to design a new capability for internal tooling. I haven't personally encountered somebody who used automation to coast in a job. The intersection between people who can achieve this technically and the people who can achieve it socially is probably pretty small. (If I automated my job, I would have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about it. My Excel friend is a squeaky-clean go-getter and would not be able to resist taking on extra work.) I understand the choice, though.
• yosito 5y ago
  If you have the ability to automate your job, you could probably sell the automation itself for 4-5x the amount you get paid to manually do the job.
• trembonator 5y ago
• jakub_g 5y ago
  If the story is true, the most impressive part is that he managed to write it as .bat!
• tibbar 5y ago
  As a company it can be really hard to assess whether your problems require permanent employees or whether a contractor could just come in and give you a button to click. Sometimes you actually know about the second option, but the process is so important that you want someone technical to monitor the results of clicking the button everyday. Because if the button stops working, or does the wrong thing and you don’t know, the results are disastrous. So his employer might actually prefer this arrangement to having him just give them the script and walk away.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  Assuming for the moment that this is a true story, IMO if the person is "clocking in" and getting paid by the hour, then this is dishonest and perhaps criminal. If the person is paid a salary then it's fine. Salaried employees are paid to get a job done, not for their time.
• eckesicle 5y ago
  My sister got a 9 month gig with the local municipality to copy-paste cells from a folder of 1000s of source excel sheets (with some transformations) into a master Excel sheet. They paid her per entry and she was supposed to do 200 entries per day. By the end of the first week she'd automated the entire thing with a script that did just that. So she ran that script every morning for nine months and spent most of the days biking, hiking, and swimming.
• mkl95 5y ago
  For 5 months, I had a gig that involved upgrading a large CRM app. After a few weeks of yak shaving and planning, I had automated most of my tasks. It was a 6 month contract, but by the 3rd month it was basically finished. A few weeks after that, I was bored out of my mind. One day my manager called me out about "not working enough hours". 2 weeks later I was making more money at a more stable job.
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  I once got a contract, early in my career, migrating marketing landing pages to a new format in which the contents of the pages (anything inside of the <body> tag) were moved into `marketing_page_name.tmpl` files in a directory. From there they'd be pulled into a shell, and all kinds of tracking and link magic could happen from there. A few things like anchors needed new template variables instead of hard-coded links. I realized I could automate this after the third or fourth page. There were hundreds of them, so I did a quick calculation: How long will it take to automate this? How long will it take to do it by hand? You know, the one we always do, then ignore because we want to automate stuff anyways. In this case the automation made sense. I was paid per hour so I only stood to lose money. I realized automating it and lying about how long it's taking would be immoral. I needed the money (I think this was my second job, ever, before ever getting a full time job. Maybe year 2005!). So what, do I just do it by hand and struggle through the monotony? No, that would be dishonest in a sense, too. I talked to the people who contracted me and explained the options, showed them a sample of how well the automation worked, talked it through. They were really happy. They gained trust in me and my abilities. After I completed the project, they wanted to hire me for full time work. They gave me great references for years. I couldn't handle automating my job away and slacking off. I love learning. I love doing my best work for people, providing real value. The cool thing to me about my job is that I can offer more and more value over time at a scale I couldn't in any other job my brain could navigate. So all that is to say: this guy's story sounds awful to me. Let me automate it, then if I'm redundant, I'll go find something else interesting to do. I'm sure as hell not going to sit around playing counterstrike. Not to say this person is bad or wrong or whatever. It just sounds like misery to me. The key difference might be that I enjoy my work and this guy doesn't, really.
  • genmud 5y ago
    Hey everyone, look at this guy! With his moral compass and stuff. Ain't never gonna get your own space rocket with that attitude. All jokes aside, being trustworthy/ethical pays dividends over the course of peoples lifetime and will often times reward you in surprising ways.
    • steve_adams_86 5y ago
• jedberg 5y ago
  A lot of people in this thread find the story unbelievable. Having done IT consulting for law firms, I absolutely believe this story. IT for law is 30 years behind in some cases. They still use Wordperfect because that's what all the templates are written in. Most lawyers have no clue about IT and are happy to pay people to keep things running. Most likely the law firm wouldn't even care if OP told them what they were doing as long as it worked. Also, I know someone who was in a similar situation. He was a VAX admin in the 90s, when that tech was already 20 years old. He worked for a trading firm and all of their software was built on VAX. They made $1M a day from their software, as long as the machine was up during trading hours. His only job was to sit at the terminal one hour before trading hours until trading closed for the day, and make sure the machine is running, and perform maintenance after the trading day ended. He got what in today's dollars would be about $500K a year to basically just sit there and teach himself modern programming languages while he waited for trading to end. His boss was well aware of this, and straight up told him, as long as that machine is running during trading hours, the money we pay you is more than worth it. It was literally 1/2 a day's profits.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    I thought I wad reading myself. I just left legal sector and wp12 is indeed a vestigial tail from 90s setups. That wouldn't be much of a problem but since every app and process designed since tried to migrate to newer word processor format, they also have a bunch of .odt documents, and higher-up have ms office licenses so .doc and .docx are also in the mix. I've seen people explaining to me that their 'job' was to realign borked bullet lists between format conversion because every employee only has one kind of word processor.
• efsavage 5y ago
  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 position. I started scripting and automating parts of it, which eventually got pieced together to be completely hands off unless a new partner came on board or there was some new error. Since some of these steps used keyboard macros on VT100 terminals, I couldn't even use my computer while it was running, so I requested another, with the explicit intent that I could use it to surf the web while my main computer was doing it's thing. Data load lag times went from weeks, to days, to hours. When it came time for performance review, I was told I had "completely redefined the position". I would therefore be assessed against the new definition, and was therefore deemed average, and got a 3% cost of living raise (pro-rated to 2% since I'd only been there 8 months) with no merit increase. A few weeks later, my manager was somehow surprised to the point of tears that I had a new job elsewhere. A few months later, I got a call from my ex-manager, asking if I had any backups of the programs I wrote (this was long before the days of offsite source control). I said no, I had no need for them and that would probably be illegal. My replacement had somehow lost everything, and was now trying to keep up the old burnout way and they were weeks behind.
  • fersho311 5y ago
    That’s a bit sad, the way you told the story sound like you didn’t make the place better even though you could have.
    • rackjack 5y ago
      Not really his problem.
    • Tushon 5y ago
      How is that your conclusion? OP had a number of things that were improved in-scope of his role, specifically cited this was before offsite version control, and that his replacement somehow deleted things.
• jcpham2 5y ago
  FWIW I read this awhile ago or some version of it but I have absolutely automated a job or an entire department’s job away with scripts. Think debt collection and EDI file transfers daily to Equifax/Transunion and parsing the response files for skip tracing. People got paid to drag and drop files in an FTP client and my first inclination was to script it. I’ve been wary of what I automate ever since.
• allenu 5y ago
  At some point in my 20-year career, I've realized there isn't a tight coupling of the work you do when it comes to effort, time, and overall impact and the pay that you receive. I've been on both ends where I worked extra hard and didn't get anything out of it, and I've done barely anything and got paid and management was happy. There's a kind of cognitive dissonance you encounter if you have this notion of "fairness" when it comes to work done and reward earned. It feels like you're cheating someone if you don't do enough work, but then you can do a whole bunch of work and it becomes meaningless if someone up in the management chain decides on a whim that your project isn't essential. This story does sound truthful to me because there are so many things we pay for because we don't know what goes into it and we're happy to be ignorant of what goes into it, so long as it gets done. You're paying for the security of knowing the job will be done. As others have said in the posts here, I also would feel unfulfilled doing something like this because there's still an inherent need many of us have to do something productive regularly.
• uberdru 5y ago
  Look at it this way. The script that you wrote is worth $90K/year to this firm.
• mlindner 5y ago
  /r/antiwork is a horrible cess pool of bad articles that makes you feel worse about yourself. Highly advise against the click.
• comprev 5y ago
  I have automated a "release engineer" out of a job. Yea, the irony is strong.
• pcurve 5y ago
  $90k/year he/she is getting paid is so little money to a law firm that they wouldn't care anyway if they found out.
• genmud 5y ago
  Story time: I once had a coworker who told me the story of someone who fell through the cracks and quite literally get lost in the bureaucracy of a fortune 50 company. To set the stage, my coworker was an investigator who primarily focused on physical security, legal and HR investigations. We worked at a very large company (around 140,000 employees) and during the 90s/early 2000s one of the primary ways they grew was through mergers and acquisitions. Well, during this time period the company went through an acquisition spree, purchasing hundreds, maybe even thousands of smaller companies in very high margin, specialty products. They would then optimize their costs (read: layoff a good portion of their workforce like R&D, HR, finance, IT) and basically let the product run the course and then sell it off for about 60-80% of what it paid for it once it no longer was profitable. As you can imagine this could make things a bit chaotic at times, where people were coming and going all the time, with constant org-changes and layoffs happening all the time. Meet Tom. Tom was came to work at this company in the late 80s after his small company was acquired by the large company. Tom had been working at the company ever since and when he hit his 20 years at the company, he opted to retire with a full pension. He did what every good employee does, notified his manager and let him know that at the end of the month he would be retiring. The Executive VP whom Tom reported to, who had just started about 6 months earlier asked his admin "who the fuck is this guy, I don't know any Tom that works for me". The admin replied, actually he does report to you and he has been here for a very long time. The EVP was confused and asked what he did, which nobody could really answer. So he reached out to HR and was like "hey, I have no idea who this is or what they do, can you look into this?". Tom had a very inflated title when his old company had gotten acquired. Something to the effect of "Senior VP, Engineering" but his role was effectively customer support, providing customer support for some legacy industrial systems that the company had manufactured and deployed in the 70s/80s. Right after the acquisition his immediate boss (the acquired companies old CEO) quit, which kicked off a bit of a perfect storm. After his boss left Tom was told that he would report to one of the executives, lets call him John, of the large company, while they figured things out and that he should coordinate with some of the other customer support people to align the way the work with their customers. A few weeks later, John was then promoted to run one of the other divisions of the company as part of the yearly promotion/review cycle. Before John had moved on though, he had written the performance review for Tom which consisted of your doing a great job, keep working with the support team and going forward, they will have a better feel for your performance and manage your workload. When Tom tried to meet with his new boss, the new boss cancelled several meetings and then said "Just keep doing what your doing, only let me know if we have issues". As the company bought and sold companies like playing cards, a culture of keeping your head low while looking busy took hold of the company and nobody wanted to be the sqeaky wheel about anything. Tom had a set of tasks and reports that he was responsible for and he worked diligently on those tasks. Since there weren't any issues that he couldn't take care of, he never needed to meet with his direct manager. Other people in the company saw his title and who he reported to and generally thought he was some sort of bigwig and avoided talking to him for fear of getting on an executives radar. Each year, his boss would rate him as meets expectations and his admin assistant would ask the customer support people how he was doing, which would always respond with "no issues". However, about 2-3 years after Toms old company was bought, they stopped selling the product and put the things Tom supported went into a maintenance only status. Weeks, months, years and then decades went by and every week Tom would sit in his office, waiting for support phone calls and deliver his report on Friday. From the investigation, they had found that over the last 10 years that Tom was employed at the company there were only 2 customers who paid for support. 2 years before Tom retired, one of the customers didn't renew support and when they reached out to the other customer they responded "we have no idea what this is for, we just pay the invoices when we get them". They estimated over the last 10-15 years at the company, that Tom worked approximately 20-30 minutes/week but had otherwise followed all company policies and procedures.
• nicklaf 5y ago
  This story reminds me of a junior developer named Mac [0]: Once upon a time, long ago, there was a company of Lisp programmers. It was so long ago, in fact, that Lisp had no macros. Anything that couldn't be defined with a function or done with a special operator had to be written in full every time, which was rather a drag. Unfortunately, the programmers in this company--though brilliant--were also quite lazy. Often in the middle of their programs--when the tedium of writing a bunch of code got to be too much--they would instead write a note describing the code they needed to write at that place in the program. Even more unfortunately, because they were lazy, the programmers also hated to go back and actually write the code described by the notes. Soon the company had a big stack of programs that nobody could run because they were full of notes about code that still needed to be written. In desperation, the big bosses hired a junior programmer, Mac, whose job was to find the notes, write the required code, and insert it into the program in place of the notes. Mac never ran the programs--they weren't done yet, of course, so he couldn't. But even if they had been completed, Mac wouldn't have known what inputs to feed them. So he just wrote his code based on the contents of the notes and sent it back to the original programmer. With Mac's help, all the programs were soon completed, and the company made a ton of money selling them--so much money that the company could double the size of its programming staff. But for some reason no one thought to hire anyone to help Mac; soon he was single- handedly assisting several dozen programmers. To avoid spending all his time searching for notes in source code, Mac made a small modification to the compiler the programmers used. Thereafter, whenever the compiler hit a note, it would e-mail him the note and wait for him to e-mail back the replacement code. Unfortunately, even with this change, Mac had a hard time keeping up with the programmers. He worked as carefully as he could, but sometimes-- especially when the notes weren't clear--he would make mistakes. The programmers noticed, however, that the more precisely they wrote their notes, the more likely it was that Mac would send back correct code. One day, one of the programmers, having a hard time describing in words the code he wanted, included in one of his notes a Lisp program that would generate the code he wanted. That was fine by Mac; he just ran the program and sent the result to the compiler. The next innovation came when a programmer put a note at the top of one of his programs containing a function definition and a comment that said, "Mac, don't write any code here, but keep this function for later; I'm going to use it in some of my other notes." Other notes in the same program said things such as, "Mac, replace this note with the result of running that other function with the symbols x and y as arguments." This technique caught on so quickly that within a few days, most programs contained dozens of notes defining functions that were only used by code in other notes. To make it easy for Mac to pick out the notes containing only definitions that didn't require any immediate response, the programmers tagged them with the standard preface: "Definition for Mac, Read Only." This--as the programmers were still quite lazy--was quickly shortened to "DEF. MAC. R/O" and then "DEFMACRO." Pretty soon, there was no actual English left in the notes for Mac. All he did all day was read and respond to e-mails from the compiler containing DEFMACRO notes and calls to the functions defined in the DEFMACROs. Since the Lisp programs in the notes did all the real work, keeping up with the e-mails was no problem. Mac suddenly had a lot of time on his hands and would sit in his office daydreaming about white-sand beaches, clear blue ocean water, and drinks with little paper umbrellas in them. Several months later the programmers realized nobody had seen Mac for quite some time. When they went to his office, they found a thin layer of dust over everything, a desk littered with travel brochures for various tropical locations, and the computer off. But the compiler still worked--how could it be? It turned out Mac had made one last change to the compiler: instead of e-mailing notes to Mac, the compiler now saved the functions defined by DEFMACRO notes and ran them when called for by the other notes. The programmers decided there was no reason to tell the big bosses Mac wasn't coming to the office anymore. So to this day, Mac draws a salary and from time to time sends the programmers a postcard from one tropical locale or another. [0] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/macros-defining-your-own.html https://gigamonkeys.com/book/macros-defining-your-own.html
• habeebtc 5y ago
  I use Azure Logic Apps to pay attention to things I should be paying attention to, and then send emails or take other actions when something happens which needs attention. Some of my colleagues think I never sleep. I think partly because I do work very hard, and long hours at times (just not all the time). However, I make no secret that a lot of these emails are coming from, essentially, simple bots. Some definitely have a mistaken impression about how much I actually work.
• lrvick 5y ago
  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 technical sounding nonsense. After a few weeks the manager came to compliment me on hearing his demands out and being so detailed in my reporting without productivity going down as I suggested in my early reservations. I explained that I automated it. He was fascinated and asked how it knows what I am doing, smelling a startup opportunity. I explained that it just makes stuff up to appease non technical managers. "Did you just do this as an elaborate way to give me the middle finger?" "Pretty much." He never tried to manage me again, realizing I had automated his job reporting to his managers too. Said script for fun: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f55783a/raw/d83753d0eb583adc045dc812bf4531d3f2caae4d/basecampbs.sh https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f5578...
  • CTmystery 5y ago
    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?
  • higeorge13 5y ago
    One of the best gists i have ever seen!
  • hobs 5y ago
    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.
• idworks1 5y ago
  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.
  • noasaservice 5y ago
    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.
    • sjg007 5y ago
      You sell the solution as a Windows app that includes a barcode scanner and a barcode on the receipt. You then have an application interface to an Access database or something.
• dom96 5y ago
  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.
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    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/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tech-sucks/
  • patrickk 5y ago
    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.
• WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  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.
• madrox 5y ago
  Lots of people on HN have clearly never worked for a cost center. If you work in a cost center like IT, employees never see the benefits of improved efficiency unless they do what this person is doing and not disclose their process. If they did, they'd simply cut his hours and return the saved money to the business. The people wondering why management wouldn't reward him don't understand that the business views IT as a necessary evil and not an area of growth. Budgets go down; not up.
• Moto7451 5y ago
  90K! We have a couple similar problems at work and paid a vendor $200k per year each time and then paid for Engineers to glue our systems into the vendor. Sounds like a deal to me.