15 ms·

Kid Automates Work, Is Fired, Hired Back, Automates Business

566 points by andrewcooke 14y ago

andrewcooke 14y ago
don't normally like linking to reddit, but thought this was awesome. also, felt i had to give different title as original not informative.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 14y ago
  Reddit is a diverse place. And sturgeons law applies. (I even found some thoughtful discussion on youtube recently.)
- petepete 14y ago
  There are some excellent subreddits and some terrible ones; admittedly since the huge rise in popularity (thanks Digg) the good stuff is harder to find.
nicholassmith 14y ago
I remember reading the original post when he was asking for advice, nice to see him coming back with a good follow up. The company he works for is definitely doing it right, they've spotted an opportunity to put someone in a correct role with no hiring process, and with them up to speed on the corporate background. They've optimised a department out and managed to retain the staff in other areas, and saved once again money on hiring, and saved money on firing the dead weight (I'm not sure what Dutch employment law is like but it's notoriously difficult to fire someone in the UK). Pragmatic and sensible, companies take note. EDIT: from my limited experience, every Dutch person (all 6) I've met has been pretty pragmatic and sensible, maybe a cultural thing. I could be wrong though!
- hencq 14y ago
  Firing people in the Netherlands is sufficiently hard that it causes me to think that this story has been fabricated or at least been exaggerated a little. I can see how his original 'cheating of the system' could be seen by his employer as misconduct and thus be grounds for firing, so I'm willing to believe this part. However, the firing of the other people in his department and his old boss smells a bit fishy. Unless they were temporary workers, the employer would have to start a redundancy procedure. The story makes it seem like they were fired on the spot as well.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    I'd guess they were temp. workers from how it sounds with bonus based on performance and a few other bits from the first post, but even if they're temps you'd still have to begin a firing process unless you can say 'hey, no work left'. But then shifting temps elsewhere is unlikely so who knows, I'd lean towards potential exaggeration.
  - outworlder 14y ago
    I am willing to believe that the story was embellished a bit. For instance, in Brazil I could say that I was "fired on the spot", even though in most cases the company is required to give notice, meaning I'd still be working in the company for a month. Doesn't change the fact that I am effectively fired in this case.
- martincmartin 14y ago
  The Dutch certainly have a reputation for being pragmatic and sensible.
  - nakkiel 14y ago
    My experience too. But well, it was in the NGO field so my sampling may be slightly biased. Still.
- Estragon 14y ago
  Sounds like they got a software engineer for super cheap, too. I bet his boss's boss was laughing so hard because the kid doesn't realize how much money he could have been making.
jcromartie 14y ago
I wonder what the thought process of the original boss was? It seems like his decision to fire the clever programmer was based entirely on the fact that he wasn't doing what he was "supposed" to be doing, regardless of the massive benefits. I'm glad I've never worked for someone like this. But I'm afraid it's because I've mostly worked in start-ups or small companies where efficiencies and clever hacks are always appreciated. Is that kind of "logic" common in power structures?
- rythie 14y ago
  I think the problem is the boss manages, say, 10 people. Someone points out that the work of those 10 people can really be done by one person part-time and now the boss is redundant because no management is really needed anymore.
  - planetguy 14y ago
    Pretty much it. This is also a good illustration of the difference between the private and the public sector. In the private sector your boss would rather keep all his employees, but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit. Start working for the government, though, and every level of management is keen on having as many people beneath them as possible, and there's no real desire at any level to reduce costs; the less efficient your department is the bigger your budget is and the more important you look. Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.
    - zacharypinter 14y ago
      I had a co-op job with the Navy (civil service) while in college. I sat next to a really nice lady named Peggy who was on the phone every day fielding lost password requests. She'd reset the password, then read the new password to the person over the phone, day after day after day. I went to my boss and offered to add a forgot password link to the site. His response: "But then what would Peggy do?"
kvnn 14y ago
1. Kid disrupted his entire company through the combination of a resentment towards manual labor and a skill set that allows him to automate it. 2. Kid did not respect the authority of Boss. When Boss fired him, Kid went over his head and sold his actions to Big Boss. Skill, resentment towards inefficiency, and careful disregard for authority. That is a good combination to get ahead.
- swalsh 14y ago
  I the the password he attached to the program also helped a bit. It would seem the boss wanted to continue using it. It's possible he would not have received proper credit without it.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    Depends on how hard it is to setup. He seems to think it is a little brittle.
- slig 14y ago
  > 2. Kid did not respect the authority of Boss. When Boss fired him, Kid went over his head and sold his actions to Big Boss. No, he did respect the chain of command. He first went to his immediate boss, which promptly fired him. After being fired, I think it's fair game to sell his actions to the Big Boss.
moron 14y ago
I remember reading the original post as well. And, man, that could not have ended much better. I'm glad to see that someone at the company realized the potential of what this person created. I would have expected pride to get in the way of all that, so kudos for him having the balls to go above his former boss's head. That was crucial.
eggbrain 14y ago
For those of you who want the short version of his story, the OP wrote a password-protected program on company time that automated his data entry, and because he was so accurate, was getting most of the bonus money meant for the rest of his group (without anyone knowing he was automating it). He told his boss, who fired him, but then the boss and manager asked for the password to the program. OP refused, called up the boss's boss, OP was brought in to talk, and given a new job as a software engineer. He negotiated for a salary as good as what he was making before (with bonuses), and negotiated for all the other employees who would be fired from data-entry to get other jobs in the company. OP's original scumbag boss gets fired, all the old data-entry employees/friends are better off, OP gets amazing new job. Now that being said, perhaps I'm skeptical, pessimistic, or just being negative, but this story seems too perfect. Clever employee gets huge promotion, and negotiates for all of his coworkers to be better off as well. Scumbag boss who fires employee gets fired himself. All within the span of a month. Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
- ktizo 14y ago
  They have all the property, the password will be encoded in the software. Writing it down for them is work and he was no longer working for them.
  - eggbrain 14y ago
    So if I buy a safe secretly with the company credit card, and fill it with material I completed on company time, and they fire me, I'm not legally obligated to tell them the combination to the safe?
    - ktizo 14y ago
      If your job was securing their stuff, which was before in piles on the grass outside the offices and they fire you for putting it in a safe instead, then probably not. You haven't stolen anything and they fired you for doing your job too well. All safes are openable and they opted for the hard way when they fired you. Would probably depend on the court though.
simonbarker87 14y ago
Don't see why he was told he shouldn't have done it on company time as the time he spent writing the script was more than made up for by the increased rate of record entry
micahgoulart 14y ago
As a backup strategy, the guy should have made a version of the program that is buggy and only gets 7x the regular production rate of the other workers. Then if company wants his code, they get the inefficient program and he gets hired to make it work 100%. He can explain his bonuses as script + great manual work in case they wonder.
- tfb 14y ago
  I really don't like this idea. While it might have helped ensure the OP's longevity in the company, it's selfish and is really doing more harm then good in the long run. And that doesn't really seem like the OP's style. I hope you and others don't view the world this way. If you do, you're only holding the rest of us back. It reminds me of the other comment here about screwing things up on purpose just to increase budget: Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167459
  - micahgoulart 14y ago
    How is that any different than adding a password? He's protecting his own interests so he won't be fired without a chance to come back to his job and finish automating the whole company. He made himself indispensable with the password. This would be another way to do it in case they figure out the password with some other methods, such as a keylogger, before letting him go.
    - rtkwe 14y ago
      There's a difference between protecting a buggy alpha, which he probably didn't realize (or maybe wouldn't be) company property, and intentionally making an artificially weaker program in order to ensure your job security.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I have a similar story which I posted on HN before, here is the repost: A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database. There were a few more steps that I don't quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice. A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0. Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work. Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors. So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat. "You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal. No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way. Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!
- adamio 14y ago
  I did something similar, boil about 5 hours of work down to 15 seconds using an Excel macro. I was told to re-do it by hand, because my future replacement wouldn't understand how to use a macro.
zaidf 14y ago
When I was 14, bunch of my cousins and I started working at my uncle's start-up as a summer "internship." Bulk of our job was to find product images and resize them in various sizes. For a while, my cousins were using photoshop to do them and at the least, each image would take a minute. I saw the repetitiveness and wrote a Visual Basic tool that would process entire directories in seconds. Their work was significantly reduced. We decided not to tell my uncle about my tool for a while so that we could all finish our work a bit early and get out to play cricket together before it got dark.
Turing_Machine 14y ago
I've mentioned this here before, but this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. When the SF writer Arthur C. Clarke was a young man he had a tedious civil service job that involved merging and consolidating figures (IIRC, it had something to do with government pensions, and he got the job because he scored well on a math test). Since the final numbers only had to be accurate to within a few percent, he started using his slide rule to get his day's quota done before noon then take the rest of the day off.
scarmig 14y ago
BS, BS, BS. Way too perfect. At the end, all of his coworkers get transferred to other places in the company to do translation work, for the same pay? Uh huh. The only thing this kid did is spin a good yarn and rack up a ton of reddit karma. Between this and the passing out at 10, I'm more and more of a grumpy, cynical old man...
- vaksel 14y ago
  you don't get karma for self posts on reddit
  - Alterlife 14y ago
    That's probably the Bait. The poster gained a lot of comment karma from his responses. It seems very unlikely that this story is true.
  - jquery 14y ago
    Like that matters. Getting front page is satisfaction enough. People are way to credulous about Reddit stories, as if the usernames make them more credible than 4chan.
    - mcantor 14y ago
      Now listen here, "jquery", if that is your real--oh, whoa, wait, jquery? The javascript framework!? Dude! Oh I'm sorry, man. My bad, I was just... I didn't... I'm really sorry!
      - kyberias 14y ago
        This definitely made my day. Thank you.
      - jquery 14y ago
        Now let me tell you a really cool nerd fantasy story that never happened.
- 14y ago
snitzr 14y ago
This is the dream of many HN readers.
krobertson 14y ago
Preface this by acknowledging don't know much bout the OP and his professional experience, but he is likely young. I don't care for the "I'm now the Lead Software Engineer with my own department". If he was in manual data entry, he is likely young and has limited professional coding experience to cut his teeth on. He is likely soloing himself, will limit his advancement by not having peers, and when he changes jobs he may have unrealistic expectations not realizing these.
- dpritchett 14y ago
  He didn't have the resume to get a job in a proper software house with strong peers before. Two years from now he will, assuming he wants to leave his one-man-band operation.
ck2 14y ago
This would never happen in the USA. I had a somewhat similar experience and was fired. I had a young, naive friend insist on giving two week notice at a job after I warned him not to, and he was terminated immediately. Just doesn't work like that anymore, maybe high-end salary jobs but not hourly wages.
- PotatoEngineer 14y ago
  Depends on the manager, and probably labor supply. I worked a minimum-wage stocking job a while back, gave my two-weeks' notice, and worked those two weeks. YMMV.
- mynameishere 14y ago
  Depends entirely on whether a brain dump is required.
domador 14y ago
Assuming the story is true, I especially like the part where he insisted that his former coworkers keep their employment with the company, even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence. Nice solidarity!
- MartinCron 14y ago
  even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence He didn't automate away their domain knowledge or the company's understanding of them as known quantities. Immediately getting rid of someone just because their narrow job description doesn't fit anymore is incredibly wasteful.
Homunculiheaded 14y ago
I'm not entirely sure this guy is a "kid", and this clearly isn't just data entry that he's doing (as many people are claiming). He claims to be making 250,000 USD with bonuses a year [0]. I'm surprised no one has questioned what's really going on here, but if the author's claims are accurate this certainly isn't the story of someone fresh out of college guy working a mindless data entry job just barely scrapping by. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/c4m2owc http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_f...
mikemarotti 14y ago
This is reddit nerd fan-fiction.
jquery 14y ago
Reddit needs a 4chan disclaimer at the top--"only a fool would take these stories as fact". Real life rarely has bookends.
paulsutter 14y ago
I'm skeptical. The story seems fishy to me. And who would trust an employee who develops something, keys it to his machine only, password protects it, and goes around boasting about it? TLDR: Believability low + employee proud of poor ethics
mynegation 14y ago
Automating something and efficiency may or may not be desirable thing depending on the alignment on incentives. Let's say you are a small company with a relatively flat structure and you as the owner, also work as CEO. Then every bit of efficiency is precious to you. Let's say you, a techie hotshot, come to work for a big company, and automate some process that suddenly makes 20% of staff in your department redundant. Essentially that means that your boss and may be boss of your boss will have to lay people off (which is bad for morale and relationships), they get smaller headcount and budget numbers. Let's just say you may see a lot of resistance.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tlianza 14y ago
I searched the threads and couldn't find anyone asking this question, but this is a red flag to me: > they have a 90% accuracy rating and 60-100 transactions > a day completed. I have 99,6% accuracy If there's no automated system to do this, who or what is calculating the accuracy down to a fraction of a percentage?
mratzloff 14y ago
This is fantasy, of course. My guess is that it's some college course doing a social experiment rather than an individual troll. Perhaps it's called The Creation of Myth (user's name is CM-NL). There's probably some college class out there patting themselves on the back for convincing so many people through a cleverly-crafted-but-just-a-little-too-perfect story that was tailor-made for Redditors. After all, the follow-up is basically created from the most popular responses to the original post.

566 points by andrewcooke 14y ago

don't normally like linking to reddit, but thought this was awesome. also, felt i had to give different title as original not informative.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eru 14y ago
Reddit is a diverse place. And sturgeons law applies. (I even found some thoughtful discussion on youtube recently.)
petepete 14y ago
There are some excellent subreddits and some terrible ones; admittedly since the huge rise in popularity (thanks Digg) the good stuff is harder to find.

nicholassmith 14y ago

I remember reading the original post when he was asking for advice, nice to see him coming back with a good follow up. The company he works for is definitely doing it right, they've spotted an opportunity to put someone in a correct role with no hiring process, and with them up to speed on the corporate background. They've optimised a department out and managed to retain the staff in other areas, and saved once again money on hiring, and saved money on firing the dead weight (I'm not sure what Dutch employment law is like but it's notoriously difficult to fire someone in the UK). Pragmatic and sensible, companies take note. EDIT: from my limited experience, every Dutch person (all 6) I've met has been pretty pragmatic and sensible, maybe a cultural thing. I could be wrong though!

hencq 14y ago
Firing people in the Netherlands is sufficiently hard that it causes me to think that this story has been fabricated or at least been exaggerated a little. I can see how his original 'cheating of the system' could be seen by his employer as misconduct and thus be grounds for firing, so I'm willing to believe this part. However, the firing of the other people in his department and his old boss smells a bit fishy. Unless they were temporary workers, the employer would have to start a redundancy procedure. The story makes it seem like they were fired on the spot as well.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  I'd guess they were temp. workers from how it sounds with bonus based on performance and a few other bits from the first post, but even if they're temps you'd still have to begin a firing process unless you can say 'hey, no work left'. But then shifting temps elsewhere is unlikely so who knows, I'd lean towards potential exaggeration.
- outworlder 14y ago
  I am willing to believe that the story was embellished a bit. For instance, in Brazil I could say that I was "fired on the spot", even though in most cases the company is required to give notice, meaning I'd still be working in the company for a month. Doesn't change the fact that I am effectively fired in this case.
martincmartin 14y ago
The Dutch certainly have a reputation for being pragmatic and sensible.
- nakkiel 14y ago
  My experience too. But well, it was in the NGO field so my sampling may be slightly biased. Still.
Estragon 14y ago
Sounds like they got a software engineer for super cheap, too. I bet his boss's boss was laughing so hard because the kid doesn't realize how much money he could have been making.

jcromartie 14y ago

I wonder what the thought process of the original boss was? It seems like his decision to fire the clever programmer was based entirely on the fact that he wasn't doing what he was "supposed" to be doing, regardless of the massive benefits. I'm glad I've never worked for someone like this. But I'm afraid it's because I've mostly worked in start-ups or small companies where efficiencies and clever hacks are always appreciated. Is that kind of "logic" common in power structures?

rythie 14y ago
I think the problem is the boss manages, say, 10 people. Someone points out that the work of those 10 people can really be done by one person part-time and now the boss is redundant because no management is really needed anymore.
- planetguy 14y ago
  Pretty much it. This is also a good illustration of the difference between the private and the public sector. In the private sector your boss would rather keep all his employees, but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit. Start working for the government, though, and every level of management is keen on having as many people beneath them as possible, and there's no real desire at any level to reduce costs; the less efficient your department is the bigger your budget is and the more important you look. Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.
  - zacharypinter 14y ago
    I had a co-op job with the Navy (civil service) while in college. I sat next to a really nice lady named Peggy who was on the phone every day fielding lost password requests. She'd reset the password, then read the new password to the person over the phone, day after day after day. I went to my boss and offered to add a forgot password link to the site. His response: "But then what would Peggy do?"

kvnn 14y ago

1. Kid disrupted his entire company through the combination of a resentment towards manual labor and a skill set that allows him to automate it. 2. Kid did not respect the authority of Boss. When Boss fired him, Kid went over his head and sold his actions to Big Boss. Skill, resentment towards inefficiency, and careful disregard for authority. That is a good combination to get ahead.

swalsh 14y ago
I the the password he attached to the program also helped a bit. It would seem the boss wanted to continue using it. It's possible he would not have received proper credit without it.
- gte910h 14y ago
  Depends on how hard it is to setup. He seems to think it is a little brittle.
slig 14y ago
> 2. Kid did not respect the authority of Boss. When Boss fired him, Kid went over his head and sold his actions to Big Boss. No, he did respect the chain of command. He first went to his immediate boss, which promptly fired him. After being fired, I think it's fair game to sell his actions to the Big Boss.

moron 14y ago

I remember reading the original post as well. And, man, that could not have ended much better. I'm glad to see that someone at the company realized the potential of what this person created. I would have expected pride to get in the way of all that, so kudos for him having the balls to go above his former boss's head. That was crucial.

eggbrain 14y ago

For those of you who want the short version of his story, the OP wrote a password-protected program on company time that automated his data entry, and because he was so accurate, was getting most of the bonus money meant for the rest of his group (without anyone knowing he was automating it). He told his boss, who fired him, but then the boss and manager asked for the password to the program. OP refused, called up the boss's boss, OP was brought in to talk, and given a new job as a software engineer. He negotiated for a salary as good as what he was making before (with bonuses), and negotiated for all the other employees who would be fired from data-entry to get other jobs in the company. OP's original scumbag boss gets fired, all the old data-entry employees/friends are better off, OP gets amazing new job. Now that being said, perhaps I'm skeptical, pessimistic, or just being negative, but this story seems too perfect. Clever employee gets huge promotion, and negotiates for all of his coworkers to be better off as well. Scumbag boss who fires employee gets fired himself. All within the span of a month. Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.

ktizo 14y ago
They have all the property, the password will be encoded in the software. Writing it down for them is work and he was no longer working for them.
- eggbrain 14y ago
  So if I buy a safe secretly with the company credit card, and fill it with material I completed on company time, and they fire me, I'm not legally obligated to tell them the combination to the safe?
  - ktizo 14y ago
    If your job was securing their stuff, which was before in piles on the grass outside the offices and they fire you for putting it in a safe instead, then probably not. You haven't stolen anything and they fired you for doing your job too well. All safes are openable and they opted for the hard way when they fired you. Would probably depend on the court though.

simonbarker87 14y ago

Don't see why he was told he shouldn't have done it on company time as the time he spent writing the script was more than made up for by the increased rate of record entry

micahgoulart 14y ago

As a backup strategy, the guy should have made a version of the program that is buggy and only gets 7x the regular production rate of the other workers. Then if company wants his code, they get the inefficient program and he gets hired to make it work 100%. He can explain his bonuses as script + great manual work in case they wonder.

tfb 14y ago
I really don't like this idea. While it might have helped ensure the OP's longevity in the company, it's selfish and is really doing more harm then good in the long run. And that doesn't really seem like the OP's style. I hope you and others don't view the world this way. If you do, you're only holding the rest of us back. It reminds me of the other comment here about screwing things up on purpose just to increase budget: Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167459
- micahgoulart 14y ago
  How is that any different than adding a password? He's protecting his own interests so he won't be fired without a chance to come back to his job and finish automating the whole company. He made himself indispensable with the password. This would be another way to do it in case they figure out the password with some other methods, such as a keylogger, before letting him go.
  - rtkwe 14y ago
    There's a difference between protecting a buggy alpha, which he probably didn't realize (or maybe wouldn't be) company property, and intentionally making an artificially weaker program in order to ensure your job security.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I have a similar story which I posted on HN before, here is the repost: A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database. There were a few more steps that I don't quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice. A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0. Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work. Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors. So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat. "You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal. No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way. Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!

adamio 14y ago
I did something similar, boil about 5 hours of work down to 15 seconds using an Excel macro. I was told to re-do it by hand, because my future replacement wouldn't understand how to use a macro.

zaidf 14y ago

When I was 14, bunch of my cousins and I started working at my uncle's start-up as a summer "internship." Bulk of our job was to find product images and resize them in various sizes. For a while, my cousins were using photoshop to do them and at the least, each image would take a minute. I saw the repetitiveness and wrote a Visual Basic tool that would process entire directories in seconds. Their work was significantly reduced. We decided not to tell my uncle about my tool for a while so that we could all finish our work a bit early and get out to play cricket together before it got dark.

Turing_Machine 14y ago

I've mentioned this here before, but this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. When the SF writer Arthur C. Clarke was a young man he had a tedious civil service job that involved merging and consolidating figures (IIRC, it had something to do with government pensions, and he got the job because he scored well on a math test). Since the final numbers only had to be accurate to within a few percent, he started using his slide rule to get his day's quota done before noon then take the rest of the day off.

scarmig 14y ago

BS, BS, BS. Way too perfect. At the end, all of his coworkers get transferred to other places in the company to do translation work, for the same pay? Uh huh. The only thing this kid did is spin a good yarn and rack up a ton of reddit karma. Between this and the passing out at 10, I'm more and more of a grumpy, cynical old man...

vaksel 14y ago
you don't get karma for self posts on reddit
- Alterlife 14y ago
  That's probably the Bait. The poster gained a lot of comment karma from his responses. It seems very unlikely that this story is true.
- jquery 14y ago
  Like that matters. Getting front page is satisfaction enough. People are way to credulous about Reddit stories, as if the usernames make them more credible than 4chan.
  - mcantor 14y ago
    Now listen here, "jquery", if that is your real--oh, whoa, wait, jquery? The javascript framework!? Dude! Oh I'm sorry, man. My bad, I was just... I didn't... I'm really sorry!
    - kyberias 14y ago
      This definitely made my day. Thank you.
    - jquery 14y ago
      Now let me tell you a really cool nerd fantasy story that never happened.
14y ago

snitzr 14y ago

This is the dream of many HN readers.

krobertson 14y ago

Preface this by acknowledging don't know much bout the OP and his professional experience, but he is likely young. I don't care for the "I'm now the Lead Software Engineer with my own department". If he was in manual data entry, he is likely young and has limited professional coding experience to cut his teeth on. He is likely soloing himself, will limit his advancement by not having peers, and when he changes jobs he may have unrealistic expectations not realizing these.

dpritchett 14y ago
He didn't have the resume to get a job in a proper software house with strong peers before. Two years from now he will, assuming he wants to leave his one-man-band operation.

ck2 14y ago

This would never happen in the USA. I had a somewhat similar experience and was fired. I had a young, naive friend insist on giving two week notice at a job after I warned him not to, and he was terminated immediately. Just doesn't work like that anymore, maybe high-end salary jobs but not hourly wages.

PotatoEngineer 14y ago
Depends on the manager, and probably labor supply. I worked a minimum-wage stocking job a while back, gave my two-weeks' notice, and worked those two weeks. YMMV.
mynameishere 14y ago
Depends entirely on whether a brain dump is required.

domador 14y ago

Assuming the story is true, I especially like the part where he insisted that his former coworkers keep their employment with the company, even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence. Nice solidarity!

MartinCron 14y ago
even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence He didn't automate away their domain knowledge or the company's understanding of them as known quantities. Immediately getting rid of someone just because their narrow job description doesn't fit anymore is incredibly wasteful.

Homunculiheaded 14y ago

I'm not entirely sure this guy is a "kid", and this clearly isn't just data entry that he's doing (as many people are claiming). He claims to be making 250,000 USD with bonuses a year [0]. I'm surprised no one has questioned what's really going on here, but if the author's claims are accurate this certainly isn't the story of someone fresh out of college guy working a mindless data entry job just barely scrapping by. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/c4m2owc http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_f...

mikemarotti 14y ago

This is reddit nerd fan-fiction.

jquery 14y ago

Reddit needs a 4chan disclaimer at the top--"only a fool would take these stories as fact". Real life rarely has bookends.

paulsutter 14y ago

I'm skeptical. The story seems fishy to me. And who would trust an employee who develops something, keys it to his machine only, password protects it, and goes around boasting about it? TLDR: Believability low + employee proud of poor ethics

mynegation 14y ago

Automating something and efficiency may or may not be desirable thing depending on the alignment on incentives. Let's say you are a small company with a relatively flat structure and you as the owner, also work as CEO. Then every bit of efficiency is precious to you. Let's say you, a techie hotshot, come to work for a big company, and automate some process that suddenly makes 20% of staff in your department redundant. Essentially that means that your boss and may be boss of your boss will have to lay people off (which is bad for morale and relationships), they get smaller headcount and budget numbers. Let's just say you may see a lot of resistance.

deleted 14y ago

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tlianza 14y ago

I searched the threads and couldn't find anyone asking this question, but this is a red flag to me: > they have a 90% accuracy rating and 60-100 transactions > a day completed. I have 99,6% accuracy If there's no automated system to do this, who or what is calculating the accuracy down to a fraction of a percentage?

mratzloff 14y ago

This is fantasy, of course. My guess is that it's some college course doing a social experiment rather than an individual troll. Perhaps it's called The Creation of Myth (user's name is CM-NL). There's probably some college class out there patting themselves on the back for convincing so many people through a cleverly-crafted-but-just-a-little-too-perfect story that was tailor-made for Redditors. After all, the follow-up is basically created from the most popular responses to the original post.