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Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma f

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.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      You’d be surprised. I interviewed at a multi-million dollar firm and there were two IT people there for the whole firm.
      - rhino369 5y ago
        Two is infinitely more than zero.
        withinboredom 5y ago
        My point was that they may not even be big enough for one. “Plug and play” might be good enough for now (a shared drive means someone is around though, someone had to set it up).
        rhino369 5y ago
        There are definitely small firms that rely on the young paralegal who is a self taught super user. But that sort of firm wouldn't pay someone 90k for doing a small part of all IT. Slight chance this person was hired as a "case assistant" or "litigation support" and not IT. Firms definitely hire that sort of person--though they usually bill their time--so hopefully the OP isn't submitting fraudulent time entries. But 90k is a lot for that sort of role without expectation that you are performing other tasks.
        withinboredom 5y ago
        I’m still skeptical. I was hired at ridiculous rates once ($2k an hour) to validate DKIM signatures by a small time firm. 90k to be “on call” and validate things seems totally reasonable even from a small firm.
        rhino369 5y ago
        Courts don't actually require you to check hashes like the OP claims. They do remarkably little evidence authentication unless the opposing party contests the evidence. Digital evidence is by default produced to the other side by low quality TIFF files. If you want to accuse the other side of manipulation, you bring in an expert (who probably bills at nearly 1000 bucks an hour). I didn't take this as a sign of OP being false because its likely he just doesn't understand why the firm wants to him to validate hashes. The likely reason is other employees fucked up transfers.
- laurent123456 5y ago
  $90K just to move some files from one folder to another seems high too. Either the job involves more than what's he saying, or it's simply fake.
  - vlunkr 5y ago
    Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern or something, this is not skilled work.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      It's easy to overstate the technical difficulty of lots of basic IT work, especially if people are tech illiterate. There might be an element of deliberate fraud if this guy is spelling out the difficulty of the job as justifying his pay to management. I've seen very clever goldbricking similar to this, where management doesn't know enough to understand what good IT looks like, or how to value IT work.
      - downrightmike 5y ago
        how to value IT work-- yup
      - toyg 5y ago
        On the other side: the business can clearly afford it, so the value he brings is entirely justified from a commercial perspective. The fact that they can find cheaper alternatives on the IT market is a different issue. You can buy a new branded car for $$$ and be sure it will work for years with minimal maintenance, or you can shop around and buy a passable 15-year-old car; in both cases it will likely get you from A to B for a while, but the chance of having problems is lower with the new "whip". This guy, to the business, is the equivalent of leasing a new car every year: they can afford it and brings no risk as far as they can see. The obsession with capital efficiency can often turn into a disease. Why should we drive down our own wages, when the market is willing to pay more?
      - 5y ago
- adrianN 5y ago
  I had a software engineering job where I clocked in and time was tracked. Pretty good deal for people who tend to overwork themselves.
  - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
    I did as well. My company ran a 36 hour hackathon. By law, hours 8-12 were 1.5x time and hours 13+ were 2x time. It was basically an extra paycheck.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Your company ran a paid hackathon? Were you able to do whatever you want? Or was it a crunch to get a project launched?
      - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
        Yep, paid hackathon, but participation was voluntary. There were a few limitations: * It had to directly relate to the product. * You could not use the time to work on some existing project. * You had to be able to finish it by the end of the hackathon. Hackathon projects were sometimes adopted by a permanent team, if there was a good fit.
        bckr 5y ago
        How many incidents did those nice new features cause?
        hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
        They didn't cause problems in the way you're implying. We took the time to polish hackathon projects before releasing them. We didn't just shove them out the door as soon as they were done. That said, one of them was an unmitigated disaster. Leadership loved it, users hated it, you know the drill. The company eventually gave in and turned the feature off three years later.
- michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  That actually rang fairly true to me as some of the law offices I interacted with (consultant) did so as they did some sort of fractional billing to the clients for internal IT time. I actually wonder if that's not the bigger scam here, that the firm is re-billing this person's make-work job in some sort of time and materials way that there is financial incentive to keep him doing this unnecessary role.
  - rhino369 5y ago
    If the firm was billing his time, he'd have to create a billing log. You generally can't get away with billing for IT. But you can bill for "litigation support" which is the intersection of IT and litigation. Though its much more involved than just uploading files to an FTP.
    - Melatonic 5y ago
      Depends how shady the firm is :-) Also for probably any litigation that is IT related you could probably get away with a lot more
      - rhino369 5y ago
        Firms navigate this by making the employees fill out their own billing entries. If OP is filling out fraudulent billing entries then that would explain why nobody is checking up on him. If he's billed out, his real work output is billed-hours.
        OJFord 5y ago
        No reason (to need, in this situation) for the automated program to run faster than a human. The right hours billed to a human instead of the human's computer is.. not quite so fraudulent?
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  I've never seen an IT company in North America use that.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  This is how a lot of small businesses operate, and Law Firms are small in terms of staff. Everyone tracks their hours, even if their hours aren't billable. The same thing happens at engineering firms small or large. Everyone tracks their hours the same way. Heck, I'm a salaried IT staff at an enterprise level nfp and have to track my hours in two different systems. One of those systems is the same one used by hourly staff and has the concept of clocking in/out.
- decebalus1 5y ago
  I disagree. Yes, 'clocking in' is not a frequent process for IT people but it heavily depends on the company. My first job was for a company that billed its clients based on hours. Even if it was pretty much ridiculous for us (IT crowd) to do so, we did clock in just like everyone else, so that our billing department had a more 'accurate' representation of how much we worked for that client, even if our work was pretty much shared across all clients. I'm skeptical of these anonymous texts as well, but 'clocking in' is not a red flag. Also, in my current role I still do 'shifts' when I'm on-call, although I don't 'clock in' anymore.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I had a job that tried to implement a time logging system. Most of IT just didn't. Eventually they explained to us that the payroll guy uses that to cut the checks, and it's a huge pain in their ass if we don't use the system. They compromised by asking us to log in and out at least once each pay period. That was fine, and we did. But they really did try to get us to go whole hog on it at first.
echelon 5y ago
> Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. I didn't take this at your original meaning, because my mind fixated on this sentence. Social media and our surroundings create an environment for either production or consumption. They can't be totally geared towards consumption, or they run out of fuel. Communities like ArtStation, DeviantArt, etc. are incredibly focused on the creative aspect. Wikipedia, Hacker News, /r/slatestarcodex, and a bunch of other forums tend to foster inspired writing. Open source, Github... I want to build more communities like these that focus on high-effort, high-impact creation and learning. It would be really great if it were cross-discipline. I imagine game or world-building communities where people from different backgrounds can contribute to constructing elaborate narratives. We need more of these and fewer dopamine-optimized clickstreams.
TriNetra 5y ago
Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced support services" to his clients. I charged only $950 to build the initial version, but charged monthly maintenance which started from $300 something, and over the months/years went onto $840+ monthly. Mostly, it was Mailman that would require some tweaks re error handling/retry logic, as there were weird errors I would see from different providers once in a while. However, the code would work flawlessly and for months I didn't even need to check it at all. So, yes it's possible IMO, just that you need to be in a right situation at the right time with the mindset of a hacker (the one who wants to make machine works for him), you can achieve something like this.
- tikhonj 5y ago
  I mean, if I were running a small business and needed to run my own Mailman instance, I would pay those prices—or even substantially more!—in a heartbeat. And I'm technical enough that I could manage Mailman myself. It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > So, yes it's possible IMO, All of these highly-upvoted Reddit stories have the same few things in common: 1) They're vague enough to be possible. If it's too outlandish, people will call it out. 2) Verifiable or falsifiable specifics are conveniently omitted. This is easy to justify due to the anonymity. 3) They have an element of good guy versus bad guy, where the reader can empathize with the person telling the story but can also accept the counterparty (the company, boss, whatever) as the "bad guy" without feeling bad about it. These subreddits are built on the premise that companies and bosses are bad, so anything that fits that narrative is welcomed without question. Basically, the stories are vague enough that they can't be falsified, but there are so many of them with so many convenient details falling perfectly in to place for the poster that it's extremely unlikely that all, or even most, of them are real stories. In the past, people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else), but lately Reddit is such high-volume and fast-moving that nobody really cares to check anything. If it sounds good, it gets an upvote. Take it all with a grain of salt. It may sound plausible or "truthy", but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.
dfxm12 5y ago
There's a kernel of truth in all good fiction. Whether this is 100% true, or just exaggerated, it's still worth knowing & evangelizing that there are a lot of tools out there that can automate a lot of your job. Between shell scripting and LCAP tools, a ton of what a lot of people do, not just IT professionals, can be automated. I know a bunch of people who could be in a similar situation as the OP if they just took a couple days to learn how to use power apps, power automate and gasp powershell.
- robotnikman 5y ago
  I try automating as much as I can at my current job. Probably out of laziness, but also because it leads to less room for error, and I feel much more mentally stimulating when trying to figure out how to automate something
robinduckett 5y ago
The key hint for me was "the type of script people put on GitHub with a $5 price tag" :)
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Have you never seen a readme with a donate button?
  - futharkshill 5y ago
    On a gist?
loceng 5y ago
Years ago I was hosting guests from Airbnb. Due to my location I got a lot of English language students coming to Canada for 2-3 long immersion courses. One guest shared with me that one of their assignments was to engage with hosts, even if they weren't planning to ever book; obviously these people eventually did, but it's a bit problematic as it's time not compensated for - sure, it's built into the cost of business but without an agreement to accept such practice conversations it's verging on dishonest.
- letitbeirie 5y ago
  Send them an invoice. You'll never see a penny mind you, but IME (which includes getting pimped out to help the admin office a decent bit in grad school) mystery invoices have a pretty good chance of getting "wtf is this"'d all the way up to the dean's office.
readams 5y ago
Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs. Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted highly.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  I wonder what's the dynamic that leads to this. Same with some localized cultural phenomena here that peddle "silver water" as cure for many illnesses. Or some news channels giving quite odd health advice...
- mikkelam 5y ago
  Another take: Antiwork is a much needed uprising in america for low paid workers to finally stand together and stop dealing with an unfair system. Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is stopped
  - vsareto 5y ago
    They're plainly against any work at all right now. If they shift towards better working conditions and pay, then great.
    - The-Bus 5y ago
      Those complaints have been raised for the last two decades and weren't heard.
    - alecbz 5y ago
      That subreddit's a mixed bag from what I remember. I think there's a core of "true" antiworkers that are genuinely against the idea of working (categorically? within capitalism?) in some deep philosophical sense, but I think most of the sub are people that are okay with the _idea_ of work but are very unhappy with current working conditions. I remember there being fights between them where the diehards would post stuff like "if you're a 'work reformist' this sub isn't for you" but the comments would be full of people telling them to stop gate keeping.
hogrider 5y ago
Well, this being the post truth era an all I pretty much think everything is sponsored content or trolls, someone doing some free writing is pretty harmless. That said, lawyers are prettt clueless as to what they would need of this kind of worker so I can see it happening.
Aissen 5y ago
Even if that were true, no harm done… But imagine for a minute it isn't. What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? Plus, we are social creatures, and sometimes we just need to offload our personal stories. Quite often there's a new fun thing that I wish I could write about or tell the world, but I don't because of real consequences to some people, or even myself. Recounting these stories is cathartic. And to go back to the original point, they are also weirdly cathartic even if fabricated.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  The harm done is that impressionable young people on /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.
  - hyprmynd 5y ago
    What a terrible dream, especially since most games are just jobs now.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      You can always play old games over and over again...
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Ah, hackernews, the anti-antiwork. There are many things I come to HN for, but looking for a healthy work culture is not one of them.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Let everything die of the building plague.
- dave5104 5y ago
  > What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? reddit accounts are built up and then sold[0][1], and then used for who knows what. Helps to have an "established" account with high karma and a post history. In more popular subreddits (like /r/funny), you'll see frequent re-postings of content from 5+ years ago just for the "karma whoring" as it's called. [0] https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-accounts/ [1] https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/
jerf 5y ago
Like TheDailyWTF stories, this is in the category of stories where even if the literal person who wrote that wrote fiction, something that is effectively the same story is true for someone. As developers who start writing big servers learn, scale matters. Crap you'd never think twice about when running a script on your workstation will bring your entire service down. There's 7-ish billion people in the world. Entire industries live in situations you've never experienced. There's plenty of scale that all sorts of weird things really do happen to someone, somewhere in real life. I don't find this all that hard to believe. To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're finding hard to believe. What exactly is it? That a law firm could be that clueless about tech? That someone would discover this opportunity and simply milk it for all its worth? I don't find any aspect of this story particularly hard to believe. I'm sure this story is happening at least a thousand times over somewhere in the world in some form. In fact I'd bet that if we could investigate carefully enough, we'd find someone out there who has at least three of these jobs with different companies. Someone who blundered into one of these, figured out some useful pattern, and figured out how to do it systematically. Probably as a contractor.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  This exchange has been the long drawn out version of: > > Story > r/thathappened r/nothingeverhappens --- Where subreddit "ThatHappened" is a sarcastic one, a response to far-fetched and unlikely sounding stories, implying they are not true. Such response has been overdone enough that subreddit "NothingEverHappens" has become a reply implying that unlikely sounding things actually do happen. And all of it is a real-world version of the joke "a person walks into a bar, and hears one of the regulars say 'number 38' and the other regulars laugh. A bit later another one says 'number 17' and they laugh. The person asks a regular what's going on, and they say 'we have all been here so long and told the same jokes so often that we know all the same jokes and just refer to them by numbers. Try one yourself'. The person says 'number 22'. Nobody laughs. The regular shrugs, eh, it's the way you tell 'em". But suggesting that joke plays out in real life might be r/thathappens . But it does happen, and people do laugh.
  - buran77 5y ago
themodelplumber 5y ago
The creative writing argument is used all over the place on Reddit though. I once shared an anonymized true crime story that you could verify by reading the previous week's local news where I live, and about half the comments on the thread were people saying it was obviously fictional, congrats on becoming a crime novelist, etc. Among other things I think it really says something about the way people choose to look into, or not look into things. In a lot of cases it would really easy to casually verify these stories, even if offline or via PM, rather than going with the straight-up subjective interpretation.
zffr 5y ago
I personally know someone who claims to have automated his work with Excel after learning how to code. He ended up telling his manager after feeling guilty. He got a promotion and eventually left the team to become a real software engineer. The rest of his team was eventually let go since they were not needed. This was at a large company you have definitely heard of. Its possible that my friend lied or exaggerated the situation, and also possible that the author of the reddit post isn't being completely honest. Personally, I'm inclined to believe the stories are mostly true. Even at my BigTech job I have seen opportunities were non-technical people were doing highly repetitive work that could be automated if they knew how to code.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  A very good friend of mine has done almost the same thing (except he works from home for different reasons). He's done this with three companies in the 10 years I've known him. It's not fiction - this kind of thing is completely doable with the tools we have available now, and the antiquated thinking that many offices are still run by.
- AeroNotix 5y ago
  When I worked at HP over a decade ago it was literally my job to walk into a department and find processes that were automatable, implement whatever program or automation was necessary and gtfo. One of the highlights for me when working there was automating a process which took three people thirty days to perform. I made a point to unnecessarily optimize the program to the point where it ran in a handful of milliseconds. These kinds of low-hanging fruits are all over certain industries and companies which aren't primarily software-development based. I sort of miss it, in ways.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    A good way to make friends too.
    - macintux 5y ago
      Not the people whose jobs likely went away as a result, however.
kodah 5y ago
Eh, if the user is in the Midwest or South, I'd believe this story. I wouldn't believe it on the coasts though. One of my first jobs out of the military was being a sysadmin for a national company with next to zero IT infrastructure. I was interested in scaling their storage infrastructure due to some commitments I found in their contracts, but they had no cognizance of their systems capabilities. I was also NAASCO certified and qualified to work on their robots and trucks so my job was fairly expansive but I have no doubt they'd let something like this happen in a well-defined position.
- bluedays 5y ago
  this tbh. As someone who lived in Missouri for a couple years it was astounding how many things weren't automated.
supperburg 5y ago
What is the point of karma farming?
- decebalus1 5y ago
  Accounts with high karma are sold for all sorts of purposes, for marketing campaigns (reddit is a cesspool of astroturfing) all the way to political campaigns. https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/
- Gigachad 5y ago
  People will list out lots of practical reasons but I suspect the main one is that the number on your profile going up makes people feel good. As well as the temporary fame every time they make a popular post. Same reason people post dangerous stunts on tiktok despite gaining nothing monetary from it.
yung_steezy 5y ago
I also think companies pay to have their totally-not-astroturfed subreddit featured on the frontpage such as /r/tinder
MattGaiser 5y ago
A friend of mine was an HR reporting analyst who can also code. He automated his internship and we spent days gaming (I worked for a startup that had a lot of meetings with limited real work).
cgriswald 5y ago
It might be true, or not. I worked as an overnight computer operator years ago, and could easily have replaced myself with a batch script, except for a couple manual tasks that I could have done either at the beginning or end of my shift. I didn't do that, because I enjoyed going to work and being able to work on my hobbies while being paid. The company didn't do it largely out of ineptitude. They'd say they wanted a warm body there in case something went wrong, but one of us was always on-call anyway, even with another of us actually there; no reason the system couldn't just alert the on-call person. One of our overnight operators worked a second job during his shift. He'd fire up a batch of jobs, go work elsewhere, come back on his lunch break and fire up another batch of jobs, go finish his shift elsewhere, then come back and fire off the last batch of jobs and be there when people started coming for work in the morning. He got caught because he was the only one of us who was always a little behind in his work; so they watched the cameras. When confronted, he admitted it. If he'd have automated the stuff, he'd have gotten away with it for a lot longer.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
I have a similar story-ish but without the cloak and dagger part. I was employed as a temp working for a large custodial bank. On of the functions there was to confirm that the holdings we thought we had in various assets matched the holdings that issuer thought we had. They had a system which would automatically accept various spreadsheet from issuers and would flag up the discrepancies. Our job was to identify why we had discrepancies. By far the most common discrepancy was trades which occured over the report period. I wrote an VBA macro in Excel which scraped the IBM 390 terminal emulator and would identify these and automatically and close the discrepancy in the system referencing the transaction IDs. Often it would automatically close more than half of the discrepancies with no manual intervention. Literally days of work each month. I could easily see someone more ballsy coming up with something like than and keeping it to themselves. Add socially normalised work from home and it would be trivial to do nothing for several days which still appearing to be working faster than most people on the team.
samatman 5y ago
It's funny you'd say this because this is a classic tale in the BOFH genre. Scripting your way out of stuff to do is a time-honored IP pastime. The old tradition was to hit the boss key (F10 for you youngins), now with remote there's no need.
Kluny 5y ago
I couldn't say whether this story is true or not, but I do have to remind myself to steer clear of /r/antiwork and take it with a grain of salt. I'm a person who is happy when I'm working hard, and my current life goals include gaining skills in an industry where I can't really operate as a solo entrpreneur with a startup business. I need a job where I can learn, and I need to work hard, both for my goals and for my own happiness. Reading too much /r/antiwork makes me bitter and angry, which colors my relationships with my coworkers and employer. It's not good for me, even though I agree with most of their philosophical points (ie, pro-union, don't work for free, insist on your rights, etc).
jbigelow76 5y ago
Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. One really annoying trend I am seeing in some mainstream news publishing online is repackaging social media clips and "reporting" on them as if NewsWeek breaking a story, Reddit and TikTok seem to be the current darlings of this form of phone it in journalism.
- Kluny 5y ago
  Yeah, it's trash and you're almost always better off just reading the original story (if you haven't already, since it was probably on the front page of a major subreddit).
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  It makes it easy to play games with journalistic integrity if you have a beef with a local paper and want them to get egg on their face. Then again, this is not unique to the internet—only easier. It was a major plot point in the final season of The Wire.
PragmaticPulp 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. Exactly. Don't underestimate the volume of fake stories posted to Reddit. I tried giving advice in several computer career subreddits for years. I was always stunned by the volume of obviously fake stories people would post about their boss or company or coworkers. Many of them are easy to debunk with even the slightest attention to detail or a quick browse of the user's posting history. I could barely believe how frequently I'd read a post with some oddities, only to check the poster's history and see 5 different creative writing style lies posted to other subreddits with entirely different details. A lot of people really like using Reddit to create fake outrage stories, because it's a trivially easy way to collect a lot of upvotes and internet sympathy points. Very strange phenomenon.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
May not be true itself, but it's relatable and equates to other stories many others have on first or thirdhand accounts. That's why these stories become popular It's more about triggering some old memories and getting people to talk than about even telling the whole truth
exadeci 5y ago
Most IT/Data entry guy will have a similar story so I'm pretty sure it's true because I've had a similar story from when I was working in a Fortune 100.

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.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    You’d be surprised. I interviewed at a multi-million dollar firm and there were two IT people there for the whole firm.
    - rhino369 5y ago
      Two is infinitely more than zero.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        My point was that they may not even be big enough for one. “Plug and play” might be good enough for now (a shared drive means someone is around though, someone had to set it up).
        rhino369 5y ago
        There are definitely small firms that rely on the young paralegal who is a self taught super user. But that sort of firm wouldn't pay someone 90k for doing a small part of all IT. Slight chance this person was hired as a "case assistant" or "litigation support" and not IT. Firms definitely hire that sort of person--though they usually bill their time--so hopefully the OP isn't submitting fraudulent time entries. But 90k is a lot for that sort of role without expectation that you are performing other tasks.
        withinboredom 5y ago
        I’m still skeptical. I was hired at ridiculous rates once ($2k an hour) to validate DKIM signatures by a small time firm. 90k to be “on call” and validate things seems totally reasonable even from a small firm.
        rhino369 5y ago
        Courts don't actually require you to check hashes like the OP claims. They do remarkably little evidence authentication unless the opposing party contests the evidence. Digital evidence is by default produced to the other side by low quality TIFF files. If you want to accuse the other side of manipulation, you bring in an expert (who probably bills at nearly 1000 bucks an hour). I didn't take this as a sign of OP being false because its likely he just doesn't understand why the firm wants to him to validate hashes. The likely reason is other employees fucked up transfers.
laurent123456 5y ago
$90K just to move some files from one folder to another seems high too. Either the job involves more than what's he saying, or it's simply fake.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern or something, this is not skilled work.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    It's easy to overstate the technical difficulty of lots of basic IT work, especially if people are tech illiterate. There might be an element of deliberate fraud if this guy is spelling out the difficulty of the job as justifying his pay to management. I've seen very clever goldbricking similar to this, where management doesn't know enough to understand what good IT looks like, or how to value IT work.
    - downrightmike 5y ago
      how to value IT work-- yup
    - toyg 5y ago
      On the other side: the business can clearly afford it, so the value he brings is entirely justified from a commercial perspective. The fact that they can find cheaper alternatives on the IT market is a different issue. You can buy a new branded car for $$$ and be sure it will work for years with minimal maintenance, or you can shop around and buy a passable 15-year-old car; in both cases it will likely get you from A to B for a while, but the chance of having problems is lower with the new "whip". This guy, to the business, is the equivalent of leasing a new car every year: they can afford it and brings no risk as far as they can see. The obsession with capital efficiency can often turn into a disease. Why should we drive down our own wages, when the market is willing to pay more?
    - 5y ago
adrianN 5y ago
I had a software engineering job where I clocked in and time was tracked. Pretty good deal for people who tend to overwork themselves.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
  I did as well. My company ran a 36 hour hackathon. By law, hours 8-12 were 1.5x time and hours 13+ were 2x time. It was basically an extra paycheck.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Your company ran a paid hackathon? Were you able to do whatever you want? Or was it a crunch to get a project launched?
    - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
      Yep, paid hackathon, but participation was voluntary. There were a few limitations: * It had to directly relate to the product. * You could not use the time to work on some existing project. * You had to be able to finish it by the end of the hackathon. Hackathon projects were sometimes adopted by a permanent team, if there was a good fit.
      - bckr 5y ago
        How many incidents did those nice new features cause?
        hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
        They didn't cause problems in the way you're implying. We took the time to polish hackathon projects before releasing them. We didn't just shove them out the door as soon as they were done. That said, one of them was an unmitigated disaster. Leadership loved it, users hated it, you know the drill. The company eventually gave in and turned the feature off three years later.
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
That actually rang fairly true to me as some of the law offices I interacted with (consultant) did so as they did some sort of fractional billing to the clients for internal IT time. I actually wonder if that's not the bigger scam here, that the firm is re-billing this person's make-work job in some sort of time and materials way that there is financial incentive to keep him doing this unnecessary role.
- rhino369 5y ago
  If the firm was billing his time, he'd have to create a billing log. You generally can't get away with billing for IT. But you can bill for "litigation support" which is the intersection of IT and litigation. Though its much more involved than just uploading files to an FTP.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Depends how shady the firm is :-) Also for probably any litigation that is IT related you could probably get away with a lot more
    - rhino369 5y ago
      Firms navigate this by making the employees fill out their own billing entries. If OP is filling out fraudulent billing entries then that would explain why nobody is checking up on him. If he's billed out, his real work output is billed-hours.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        No reason (to need, in this situation) for the automated program to run faster than a human. The right hours billed to a human instead of the human's computer is.. not quite so fraudulent?
hungryforcodes 5y ago
I've never seen an IT company in North America use that.
cptskippy 5y ago
This is how a lot of small businesses operate, and Law Firms are small in terms of staff. Everyone tracks their hours, even if their hours aren't billable. The same thing happens at engineering firms small or large. Everyone tracks their hours the same way. Heck, I'm a salaried IT staff at an enterprise level nfp and have to track my hours in two different systems. One of those systems is the same one used by hourly staff and has the concept of clocking in/out.
decebalus1 5y ago
I disagree. Yes, 'clocking in' is not a frequent process for IT people but it heavily depends on the company. My first job was for a company that billed its clients based on hours. Even if it was pretty much ridiculous for us (IT crowd) to do so, we did clock in just like everyone else, so that our billing department had a more 'accurate' representation of how much we worked for that client, even if our work was pretty much shared across all clients. I'm skeptical of these anonymous texts as well, but 'clocking in' is not a red flag. Also, in my current role I still do 'shifts' when I'm on-call, although I don't 'clock in' anymore.
wccrawford 5y ago
I had a job that tried to implement a time logging system. Most of IT just didn't. Eventually they explained to us that the payroll guy uses that to cut the checks, and it's a huge pain in their ass if we don't use the system. They compromised by asking us to log in and out at least once each pay period. That was fine, and we did. But they really did try to get us to go whole hog on it at first.

echelon 5y ago

> Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. I didn't take this at your original meaning, because my mind fixated on this sentence. Social media and our surroundings create an environment for either production or consumption. They can't be totally geared towards consumption, or they run out of fuel. Communities like ArtStation, DeviantArt, etc. are incredibly focused on the creative aspect. Wikipedia, Hacker News, /r/slatestarcodex, and a bunch of other forums tend to foster inspired writing. Open source, Github... I want to build more communities like these that focus on high-effort, high-impact creation and learning. It would be really great if it were cross-discipline. I imagine game or world-building communities where people from different backgrounds can contribute to constructing elaborate narratives. We need more of these and fewer dopamine-optimized clickstreams.

TriNetra 5y ago

Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced support services" to his clients. I charged only $950 to build the initial version, but charged monthly maintenance which started from $300 something, and over the months/years went onto $840+ monthly. Mostly, it was Mailman that would require some tweaks re error handling/retry logic, as there were weird errors I would see from different providers once in a while. However, the code would work flawlessly and for months I didn't even need to check it at all. So, yes it's possible IMO, just that you need to be in a right situation at the right time with the mindset of a hacker (the one who wants to make machine works for him), you can achieve something like this.

tikhonj 5y ago
I mean, if I were running a small business and needed to run my own Mailman instance, I would pay those prices—or even substantially more!—in a heartbeat. And I'm technical enough that I could manage Mailman myself. It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> So, yes it's possible IMO, All of these highly-upvoted Reddit stories have the same few things in common: 1) They're vague enough to be possible. If it's too outlandish, people will call it out. 2) Verifiable or falsifiable specifics are conveniently omitted. This is easy to justify due to the anonymity. 3) They have an element of good guy versus bad guy, where the reader can empathize with the person telling the story but can also accept the counterparty (the company, boss, whatever) as the "bad guy" without feeling bad about it. These subreddits are built on the premise that companies and bosses are bad, so anything that fits that narrative is welcomed without question. Basically, the stories are vague enough that they can't be falsified, but there are so many of them with so many convenient details falling perfectly in to place for the poster that it's extremely unlikely that all, or even most, of them are real stories. In the past, people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else), but lately Reddit is such high-volume and fast-moving that nobody really cares to check anything. If it sounds good, it gets an upvote. Take it all with a grain of salt. It may sound plausible or "truthy", but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.

dfxm12 5y ago

There's a kernel of truth in all good fiction. Whether this is 100% true, or just exaggerated, it's still worth knowing & evangelizing that there are a lot of tools out there that can automate a lot of your job. Between shell scripting and LCAP tools, a ton of what a lot of people do, not just IT professionals, can be automated. I know a bunch of people who could be in a similar situation as the OP if they just took a couple days to learn how to use power apps, power automate and gasp powershell.

robotnikman 5y ago
I try automating as much as I can at my current job. Probably out of laziness, but also because it leads to less room for error, and I feel much more mentally stimulating when trying to figure out how to automate something

robinduckett 5y ago

The key hint for me was "the type of script people put on GitHub with a $5 price tag" :)

withinboredom 5y ago
Have you never seen a readme with a donate button?
- futharkshill 5y ago
  On a gist?

loceng 5y ago

Years ago I was hosting guests from Airbnb. Due to my location I got a lot of English language students coming to Canada for 2-3 long immersion courses. One guest shared with me that one of their assignments was to engage with hosts, even if they weren't planning to ever book; obviously these people eventually did, but it's a bit problematic as it's time not compensated for - sure, it's built into the cost of business but without an agreement to accept such practice conversations it's verging on dishonest.

letitbeirie 5y ago
Send them an invoice. You'll never see a penny mind you, but IME (which includes getting pimped out to help the admin office a decent bit in grad school) mystery invoices have a pretty good chance of getting "wtf is this"'d all the way up to the dean's office.

readams 5y ago

Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs. Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted highly.

Gravityloss 5y ago
I wonder what's the dynamic that leads to this. Same with some localized cultural phenomena here that peddle "silver water" as cure for many illnesses. Or some news channels giving quite odd health advice...
mikkelam 5y ago
Another take: Antiwork is a much needed uprising in america for low paid workers to finally stand together and stop dealing with an unfair system. Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is stopped
- vsareto 5y ago
  They're plainly against any work at all right now. If they shift towards better working conditions and pay, then great.
  - The-Bus 5y ago
    Those complaints have been raised for the last two decades and weren't heard.
  - alecbz 5y ago
    That subreddit's a mixed bag from what I remember. I think there's a core of "true" antiworkers that are genuinely against the idea of working (categorically? within capitalism?) in some deep philosophical sense, but I think most of the sub are people that are okay with the _idea_ of work but are very unhappy with current working conditions. I remember there being fights between them where the diehards would post stuff like "if you're a 'work reformist' this sub isn't for you" but the comments would be full of people telling them to stop gate keeping.

hogrider 5y ago

Well, this being the post truth era an all I pretty much think everything is sponsored content or trolls, someone doing some free writing is pretty harmless. That said, lawyers are prettt clueless as to what they would need of this kind of worker so I can see it happening.

Aissen 5y ago

Even if that were true, no harm done… But imagine for a minute it isn't. What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? Plus, we are social creatures, and sometimes we just need to offload our personal stories. Quite often there's a new fun thing that I wish I could write about or tell the world, but I don't because of real consequences to some people, or even myself. Recounting these stories is cathartic. And to go back to the original point, they are also weirdly cathartic even if fabricated.

vlunkr 5y ago
The harm done is that impressionable young people on /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.
- hyprmynd 5y ago
  What a terrible dream, especially since most games are just jobs now.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    You can always play old games over and over again...
- pixl97 5y ago
  Ah, hackernews, the anti-antiwork. There are many things I come to HN for, but looking for a healthy work culture is not one of them.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Let everything die of the building plague.
dave5104 5y ago
> What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? reddit accounts are built up and then sold[0][1], and then used for who knows what. Helps to have an "established" account with high karma and a post history. In more popular subreddits (like /r/funny), you'll see frequent re-postings of content from 5+ years ago just for the "karma whoring" as it's called. [0] https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-accounts/ [1] https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/

jerf 5y ago

Like TheDailyWTF stories, this is in the category of stories where even if the literal person who wrote that wrote fiction, something that is effectively the same story is true for someone. As developers who start writing big servers learn, scale matters. Crap you'd never think twice about when running a script on your workstation will bring your entire service down. There's 7-ish billion people in the world. Entire industries live in situations you've never experienced. There's plenty of scale that all sorts of weird things really do happen to someone, somewhere in real life. I don't find this all that hard to believe. To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're finding hard to believe. What exactly is it? That a law firm could be that clueless about tech? That someone would discover this opportunity and simply milk it for all its worth? I don't find any aspect of this story particularly hard to believe. I'm sure this story is happening at least a thousand times over somewhere in the world in some form. In fact I'd bet that if we could investigate carefully enough, we'd find someone out there who has at least three of these jobs with different companies. Someone who blundered into one of these, figured out some useful pattern, and figured out how to do it systematically. Probably as a contractor.

jodrellblank 5y ago
This exchange has been the long drawn out version of: > > Story > r/thathappened r/nothingeverhappens --- Where subreddit "ThatHappened" is a sarcastic one, a response to far-fetched and unlikely sounding stories, implying they are not true. Such response has been overdone enough that subreddit "NothingEverHappens" has become a reply implying that unlikely sounding things actually do happen. And all of it is a real-world version of the joke "a person walks into a bar, and hears one of the regulars say 'number 38' and the other regulars laugh. A bit later another one says 'number 17' and they laugh. The person asks a regular what's going on, and they say 'we have all been here so long and told the same jokes so often that we know all the same jokes and just refer to them by numbers. Try one yourself'. The person says 'number 22'. Nobody laughs. The regular shrugs, eh, it's the way you tell 'em". But suggesting that joke plays out in real life might be r/thathappens . But it does happen, and people do laugh.
- buran77 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago

The creative writing argument is used all over the place on Reddit though. I once shared an anonymized true crime story that you could verify by reading the previous week's local news where I live, and about half the comments on the thread were people saying it was obviously fictional, congrats on becoming a crime novelist, etc. Among other things I think it really says something about the way people choose to look into, or not look into things. In a lot of cases it would really easy to casually verify these stories, even if offline or via PM, rather than going with the straight-up subjective interpretation.

zffr 5y ago

I personally know someone who claims to have automated his work with Excel after learning how to code. He ended up telling his manager after feeling guilty. He got a promotion and eventually left the team to become a real software engineer. The rest of his team was eventually let go since they were not needed. This was at a large company you have definitely heard of. Its possible that my friend lied or exaggerated the situation, and also possible that the author of the reddit post isn't being completely honest. Personally, I'm inclined to believe the stories are mostly true. Even at my BigTech job I have seen opportunities were non-technical people were doing highly repetitive work that could be automated if they knew how to code.

andrew_ 5y ago
A very good friend of mine has done almost the same thing (except he works from home for different reasons). He's done this with three companies in the 10 years I've known him. It's not fiction - this kind of thing is completely doable with the tools we have available now, and the antiquated thinking that many offices are still run by.
AeroNotix 5y ago
When I worked at HP over a decade ago it was literally my job to walk into a department and find processes that were automatable, implement whatever program or automation was necessary and gtfo. One of the highlights for me when working there was automating a process which took three people thirty days to perform. I made a point to unnecessarily optimize the program to the point where it ran in a handful of milliseconds. These kinds of low-hanging fruits are all over certain industries and companies which aren't primarily software-development based. I sort of miss it, in ways.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  A good way to make friends too.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Not the people whose jobs likely went away as a result, however.

kodah 5y ago

Eh, if the user is in the Midwest or South, I'd believe this story. I wouldn't believe it on the coasts though. One of my first jobs out of the military was being a sysadmin for a national company with next to zero IT infrastructure. I was interested in scaling their storage infrastructure due to some commitments I found in their contracts, but they had no cognizance of their systems capabilities. I was also NAASCO certified and qualified to work on their robots and trucks so my job was fairly expansive but I have no doubt they'd let something like this happen in a well-defined position.

bluedays 5y ago
this tbh. As someone who lived in Missouri for a couple years it was astounding how many things weren't automated.

supperburg 5y ago

What is the point of karma farming?

decebalus1 5y ago
Accounts with high karma are sold for all sorts of purposes, for marketing campaigns (reddit is a cesspool of astroturfing) all the way to political campaigns. https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/ https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/
Gigachad 5y ago
People will list out lots of practical reasons but I suspect the main one is that the number on your profile going up makes people feel good. As well as the temporary fame every time they make a popular post. Same reason people post dangerous stunts on tiktok despite gaining nothing monetary from it.

yung_steezy 5y ago

I also think companies pay to have their totally-not-astroturfed subreddit featured on the frontpage such as /r/tinder

MattGaiser 5y ago

A friend of mine was an HR reporting analyst who can also code. He automated his internship and we spent days gaming (I worked for a startup that had a lot of meetings with limited real work).

cgriswald 5y ago

It might be true, or not. I worked as an overnight computer operator years ago, and could easily have replaced myself with a batch script, except for a couple manual tasks that I could have done either at the beginning or end of my shift. I didn't do that, because I enjoyed going to work and being able to work on my hobbies while being paid. The company didn't do it largely out of ineptitude. They'd say they wanted a warm body there in case something went wrong, but one of us was always on-call anyway, even with another of us actually there; no reason the system couldn't just alert the on-call person. One of our overnight operators worked a second job during his shift. He'd fire up a batch of jobs, go work elsewhere, come back on his lunch break and fire up another batch of jobs, go finish his shift elsewhere, then come back and fire off the last batch of jobs and be there when people started coming for work in the morning. He got caught because he was the only one of us who was always a little behind in his work; so they watched the cameras. When confronted, he admitted it. If he'd have automated the stuff, he'd have gotten away with it for a lot longer.

VBprogrammer 5y ago

I have a similar story-ish but without the cloak and dagger part. I was employed as a temp working for a large custodial bank. On of the functions there was to confirm that the holdings we thought we had in various assets matched the holdings that issuer thought we had. They had a system which would automatically accept various spreadsheet from issuers and would flag up the discrepancies. Our job was to identify why we had discrepancies. By far the most common discrepancy was trades which occured over the report period. I wrote an VBA macro in Excel which scraped the IBM 390 terminal emulator and would identify these and automatically and close the discrepancy in the system referencing the transaction IDs. Often it would automatically close more than half of the discrepancies with no manual intervention. Literally days of work each month. I could easily see someone more ballsy coming up with something like than and keeping it to themselves. Add socially normalised work from home and it would be trivial to do nothing for several days which still appearing to be working faster than most people on the team.

samatman 5y ago

It's funny you'd say this because this is a classic tale in the BOFH genre. Scripting your way out of stuff to do is a time-honored IP pastime. The old tradition was to hit the boss key (F10 for you youngins), now with remote there's no need.

Kluny 5y ago

I couldn't say whether this story is true or not, but I do have to remind myself to steer clear of /r/antiwork and take it with a grain of salt. I'm a person who is happy when I'm working hard, and my current life goals include gaining skills in an industry where I can't really operate as a solo entrpreneur with a startup business. I need a job where I can learn, and I need to work hard, both for my goals and for my own happiness. Reading too much /r/antiwork makes me bitter and angry, which colors my relationships with my coworkers and employer. It's not good for me, even though I agree with most of their philosophical points (ie, pro-union, don't work for free, insist on your rights, etc).

jbigelow76 5y ago

Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. One really annoying trend I am seeing in some mainstream news publishing online is repackaging social media clips and "reporting" on them as if NewsWeek breaking a story, Reddit and TikTok seem to be the current darlings of this form of phone it in journalism.

Kluny 5y ago
Yeah, it's trash and you're almost always better off just reading the original story (if you haven't already, since it was probably on the front page of a major subreddit).
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
It makes it easy to play games with journalistic integrity if you have a beef with a local paper and want them to get egg on their face. Then again, this is not unique to the internet—only easier. It was a major plot point in the final season of The Wire.

PragmaticPulp 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. Exactly. Don't underestimate the volume of fake stories posted to Reddit. I tried giving advice in several computer career subreddits for years. I was always stunned by the volume of obviously fake stories people would post about their boss or company or coworkers. Many of them are easy to debunk with even the slightest attention to detail or a quick browse of the user's posting history. I could barely believe how frequently I'd read a post with some oddities, only to check the poster's history and see 5 different creative writing style lies posted to other subreddits with entirely different details. A lot of people really like using Reddit to create fake outrage stories, because it's a trivially easy way to collect a lot of upvotes and internet sympathy points. Very strange phenomenon.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

May not be true itself, but it's relatable and equates to other stories many others have on first or thirdhand accounts. That's why these stories become popular It's more about triggering some old memories and getting people to talk than about even telling the whole truth

exadeci 5y ago

Most IT/Data entry guy will have a similar story so I'm pretty sure it's true because I've had a similar story from when I was working in a Fortune 100.