I once almost completely automated my job, and didn't hide it. The job was to load data files into the backend system. The problem was there there were almost as many formats (~80) as there were partners sending data (~120), not just in structure but in content (deltas, full replace, etc.). This job was burning people out every 6 months, and I was the hapless next victim who was just looking to break into a tech position.
I started scripting and automating parts of it, which eventually got pieced together to be completely hands off unless a new partner came on board or there was some new error. Since some of these steps used keyboard macros on VT100 terminals, I couldn't even use my computer while it was running, so I requested another, with the explicit intent that I could use it to surf the web while my main computer was doing it's thing. Data load lag times went from weeks, to days, to hours.
When it came time for performance review, I was told I had "completely redefined the position". I would therefore be assessed against the new definition, and was therefore deemed average, and got a 3% cost of living raise (pro-rated to 2% since I'd only been there 8 months) with no merit increase. A few weeks later, my manager was somehow surprised to the point of tears that I had a new job elsewhere.
A few months later, I got a call from my ex-manager, asking if I had any backups of the programs I wrote (this was long before the days of offsite source control). I said no, I had no need for them and that would probably be illegal. My replacement had somehow lost everything, and was now trying to keep up the old burnout way and they were weeks behind.
re: the performance review: don't know about your work place, but the first quarterly review I got at [insert name of large known company], my manger sat me down and explained she is budgeted a certain amount of bonus points for her 5 team members, and required to "grade on a curve". Hence, 1 team member will be "above average", 3 will be "average", and one "below average" every quarter. And for fairness, she rotates the names. I was deemed "below average" since it was my first quarter, but the good news, she said, is when she nominates me for "average" next quarter, she'd add a "shows improvement" comment to it!
Bare in mind, real actual money was tied to this stupid scheme, and you had to spend at least 2 hours writing a document explaining what you've done for the company, the team and the product, to justify your "averageness".
I lasted 3 quarters in that social experiment. And I'll laugh in the face of corporate recruiters till the day I die.
I was a manager in a nearly identical situation. I had 5 engineers working for me at a remote office. The "curve" had not been used in past years. Now they insisted on applying it. Since 4 out of 5 had substantially exceeded their goals it would have been a lie to state that any of them had not met expectations. So I told my boss no, I'm not doing it. You can take whatever raise you planned for me and spread it across my direct reports (unstated was that I would almost certainly quit as a result). Or you can fire me for insubordination. He ran that back up the chain of command. Apparently I wasn't the only middle manager who refused to do it, as senior management ended up rescinding the order.
Moral of the story: If you are a middle manager then grow a backbone.
(I think this is a true story, but it was somewhat before my time.)
Control Data decided to lay off 10% of its employees, and to do so across the board. Seymour Cray had a group of only 20 engineers in his lean development group in Chippewa Falls, so they told him to fire two. So he and Les Davis, his right-hand man, quit and started Cray Research.
"March 1972 an appalling rumor swept through the hallways at Control Data--Seymour Cray had resigned! The rumor was quickly confirmed by a press release. The press release was worded carefully to soothe investor fears. Seymour was reported to be "phasing out" of full-time employment with Control Data It was emphasized that development would continue at the Chippewa Lab. Trading in Control Data stock was briefly suspended. Old-timers who had followed Seymour's career since his Univac days, many of whom had worked with him at Chippewa, were skeptical of the official statements. What could have caused Seymour to resign? He was, of course, a wealthy man from his stock holdings and could do what he wished. But because he had always done just exactly what he pleased at Chippewa, why should he resign to seek more freedom as his own boss? The statement in the press release simply did not make sense. Two rumors told to me at the time may have no truth whatsoever, but they do capture the flavor of the suspicions of many employees.
The first story concerns a Control Data senior financial executive who one day reportedly called Seymour at Chippewa Falls and told him that the lab budget would have to be cut by 10 percent. The Chippewa Lab, with its thirty-odd employees was certainly the most cost-effective computer development facility in the world. Certainly it was the envy of IBM, as attested to by the Watson memo described earlier. Seymour reportedly replied, "Fine, cut me and Les Davis out of the budget" and hung up the phone. This rumor was given credibility by the continuing budget crunches and by the fact that Les Davis, Seymour's chief assistant did resign and join Seymour in his new venture.
The second story was told to me by a friend who had worked at the Chippewa Lab. He met Seymour in the hallway at headquarters one day. Knowing that Seymour hated being away from his work at Chippewa, he asked him what he was doing at headquarters. Seymour replied that he had been asked to serve on a senior technical task force that had been convened to recommend the future direction of computer development at Control Data Seymour intensely disliked meetings and task forces, but he agreed to serve because he had been personally assured by a very senior executive that the recommendation of the task force was vital to the future of the corporation. The task force of seven members met for some weeks and concluded that the design direction being taken by the model 8600 (the newest machine under development at Chippewa, successor to the model 7600) was indeed the best architecture for future CDC computers. Just before the final report was submitted, the members of the task force received memos from a second senior executive thanking them for their efforts and stating that the corporation had elected to go in a different design direction. Seymour immediately resigned."
Still have my dad's "Programming Univac Systems Instruction Manual 1" from 1953 when he started working for Sperry Rand. 1950s-1960s must have been a phenomenal time to work in the nascent computing industry.
> If you are a middle manager then grow a backbone.
This applies more generally even if you’re not managing people. Particularly as most corporate cogs are programmed to avoid confrontation. You’re more likely to get someone who respects your principles or someone who just bends over than an incalcitrant “no”.
I put together performance metrics that showed my team members were less than 5% deviation from each other, thus I couldn't grade on the curve. HR couldn't argue against that.
That is definitely (and self-evidently) true! Of all managers who rate everyone on their team as having achieved the highest performance standard, what fraction of those cases do you think are subjectively “correct”? In my experience, it’s way, way, way under half.
Further, it’s rare for the managers giving the 100% top performance evaluation to individuals to be leading groups with high overall accomplishment/delivery. (Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s evidence of poor leadership to be squandering the ability and contributions of all these high-performers. An analog might be an MLB Manager with All-Star players at every position and turning in a 0.500 season; they should expect to be fired.)
It's a bad metric anyway. A persons rating should not be depending on the work performance. It should be depending on the happiness factor of the person. The performance of that person is the responsibility of his/her manager.
So whenever a person performance bad, the manager must either fix it or leave. This principle is having so much more success than your example.
This is going too far the other direction. Even if we assume no one is just slacking (which is a bad assumption), sometimes people are just not suited to the job they're in, and there's nothing a manager can reasonably do to change that, short of removing them.
Oh you're one of those people who thinks other people are the cause of one's own happiness? Or lack thereof? Geesh. Your emotions are entirely your own responsibility. Full stop.
It doesn't have to be a big fraction, just non-zero. Trying to ban the expression of improbable states is a form of trying to force the territory to fit the map, then also suppressing the creation of more accurate maps. I can't overstate how stupid this is.
Under such a moronic system, with your reports' welfare on the line, I believe marking everyone as a top performer is an admirable form of rebellion.
As someone who’s worked and managed in that type of environment and later left that world to start small companies, I was very glad, that this corporate insanity made it possible to hire great individuals away from big corporations.
Welcome to Microsoft 15-20 years ago. Or any company that uses stack ranking or a euphemism for same. As it was explained to me, “Jesus, John the Baptist, and the apostle Paul go in for their reviews. Who gets the ‘below average’?”
I had a very similar experience. Also, the year after a promotion there was a universal unwritten rule that you get a need improvement review no matter how well you performed.
hmm, I'm not sure how to feel about this story (now, 35 years later). On paper, the lessons seems pretty clear: look productive and don't be afraid to be a bit fancy or cryptic to flaunt your talents. This is (IMO unfortunate) standard workplace stuff you'd learn in any field.
But nowadays... I'm not sure with the strict hierarchies on if Alan would actually be promoted. And ofc, in todays' unprecedented environment there's probably more Charles out there than people want to admit, who's still providing value to companies. Very interesting story, one where you can argue that there's no obvious moral to take away when considering this 80's tale in the 2020's.
I did something similar as a summer intern back in the late 90s, but instead I got a permanent job offer at a rate 3x my intern wage. Then, a few years later when the dotcom bust hit, I became a bartender.
Nothing as dramatic as your story, but the reason I learned Perl back in 1999 or so was because I was a contractor for a contractor for a company that imported a CDs worth of XML into a database every week. The importer was written in Java, the import took around 3 days, and frequently broke because the XML didn't have escaped ampersands etc.
I wrote some scripts that chunked the input, sanitized it, scripted loading and reloading (basically baby's first ETL) and got it to run without failing every week.
A few months later I fat-fingered a rm -rf and lost all the scripts. There were no backups because the machine was not rated as being in production.
File recovery is always possible. Unmount the partition (remount read-only if you have to), use a program like hexedit to open the raw disk partition and search for a unique series of text found in your script files, copy and paste the contents into new file, script restored!
I did something similar at my starting tech job at a callcenter. Part of my job was to process bulk RMAs that was so boring I automated it.
I didn't get a big merit increase but they created a new position to oversee the callcenter technology a few months later that was really my thing. Then the merit increases came too. This was almost 20 years ago and I still work there today. During this time I built custom reports, wall displays and even a basic call recording system when there was no budget to buy off the shelf :)
I'm sorry that company didn't appreciate you but a lot of them also do!
Yeah, you take a person like this, teach them about people management, and then move them one level higher to give them access to more problems to solve.
Hours of butt in seat doesn't necessarily correlate with value delivered.
Even disregarding how much goodwill the company had burned at that point. Your solution implies that they would've set up a backup method once the employee left.
For most company the exit interview is done to tick a box. The feedback given will not be listened to at all. I can absolutely understand why he didn't feel like it was his job to setup and entire source control system on his way out the door.
I think the question boils down to do you believe the employee is obligated to disclose the backup issue within the responsibility of the employment contract? I would say no, since the entire creation of the software was not within the responsibility of the contract, why would the documentation of the backup issue be within it?
I think the situation is analogous to the company giving the employee a big unwarranted pay raise, and then the employee lazily not doing more work, then the company firing the employee, but then arguing that at a minimum, the company has a reasonable professional courtesy to give the employee hours for their vacation days, even though it isn't specified within the contract.
are you kidding? he totally made the place better. did his job infinitely better than the job description required and what did he get for all his trouble? a big slap in the face from his boss. of course he left and took his skills with him. most companies just don't know how to recognize and appreciate above average skills/productivity, this is sadly a recurrent feature of many work places.
Just once I would like to read one of these stories where the conclusion is "and the company rewarded me with a large bonus and a paid two weeks of leave, and when I came back they had lined up some training and a project plan for me to stabilise what I had built and automate as much of the drudgery as possible"
I tried to force this at a company I was at. I was like a robot, automating as much as possible, anything and everything I touched. Spreadsheets, data loading, surveys, analytics, daily reports. I even built a chrome extension to improve a cash transfer approval workflow.
Weirdly enough, the director that forced me out had been a programmer in a past life. All he could see of me was that I was a cost center on his spreadsheet. He never sat down with me to ask what I did all day. He'd see me in a corner of the office wired in and I guess he assumed I was watching cartoons or something.
Fuck 'em. I left and I'm sure dozens of systems I had built and maintained broke, just by virtue of my company email address being shut down. I did try my best to document what I could and onboard others. There's only so much you can do in two weeks when you have to start with explaining what Firebase and Google Apps Script is to multiple people.
Hopefully more like, after the program was stabilised and automated I leveraged my new skills and left for more money elsewhere and on good terms with my company.
How is that your conclusion? OP had a number of things that were improved in-scope of his role, specifically cited this was before offsite version control, and that his replacement somehow deleted things.
Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping.
It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day .
I wrote a script to fill it out with technical sounding nonsense. After a few weeks the manager came to compliment me on hearing his demands out and being so detailed in my reporting without productivity going down as I suggested in my early reservations.
I explained that I automated it. He was fascinated and asked how it knows what I am doing, smelling a startup opportunity. I explained that it just makes stuff up to appease non technical managers.
"Did you just do this as an elaborate way to give me the middle finger?"
"Pretty much."
He never tried to manage me again, realizing I had automated his job reporting to his managers too.
Haha I have a similar story but I was even earlier in my career just doing support and training things for a big call center and they just changed the policies to send an email to your boss every time you came in and left.
At the time I was working a lot of unpaid overtime, and this rule was just spitting in my face - they were making sure I showed up and they were definitely not caring if you worked more.
So I wrote a script to send an email at the time of my entrance and departure - whatever, I set it up to run and left for the day.
Weellll, it turns out I didn't understand the configuration for the OSX version of cron (and my shitty bash script) that well and when I walked into work the next day, my boss was waiting for me.
"Did you automate sending me your in and out email?"
"Yes... why?"
"I have a hundred thousand emails in my inbox and every time I delete as many as I can I just get... more. You have to stop it, you dont have to send me emails anymore, but you have to stop it."
So I went in and disabled my script and helped him delete the several hundred thousand emails I had sent him.
> The manager of the circuit realized that the night operators might be tempted to shirk their work, and so he required them to telegraph a signal to him every half hour in order that he might be sure they were awake and at their posts. Edison's signal was six.
> This was a wise regulation, but Edison did not appreciate the necessity for it. He found it a great bother to keep his eye on the clock and leave his reading or some experiment that he was working out in the quiet hours of night, to report that stupid "six" every thirty minutes.
> He wondered if he couldn't make a machine attached to the clock that would save him the trouble. After a good deal of thinking and experimenting, he fitted up an instrument that could telegraph "six" as well as he could.
> This was a great relief to him, and he felt free to do what he liked with his time without much fear of discovery. He even left the office and made expeditions about town.
> One night while he was away, the manager tried to call him up but could get no response. He thought this odd as Edison was more punctual with his signals than any other operator on the line.
> He waited, and tried again and again, with no better success, though the signals came with their accustomed regularity. He made an investigation, and the young inventor received a severe reprimand for his cleaver contrivance.
I'm somewhat sorry to say this, but don't you see the irony in tricking your non-technical manager into not improving your life at all? A competent manager can _make your life better_. If you are working 80 hour work weeks and sleeping under a desk, wouldn't it make sense to do some backlog prioritizing to get you under a sustainable workload?
I've been severely struggling with non tech people. Landing mediocre positions in clerk jobs where everybody's is burned or bored out. Yet every attempt at improving the office life through code was met with fear or disdain. (And I never made it a personal gain only)
- I understand fear of change can be a symptom of anxiety, and I've certainly experienced this myself: I've repeatedly found myself wedged into awkward situations that aren't within my ballpark to un-awkward, and found that this can produce a "just keep going, just keep going" mentality that's negatively hypersensitive to any kind of change
- I can see clerk-type positions being heavily dunked in the "we are invisible to the ergonomic considerations of the software upgrade lifecycle" koolaid, and (perhaps not having a balanced/passively-positive general appreciation of software development in abstract) can only see introducing software from the standpoint of "yet another unsolicited burden of workload I have to add to my plate" as opposed to an empathetic load-bearing fulcrum.
I wonder if the distain is coming from simple insecurity, or a more complex broken sense of achievement/self-hazing, where having a given task be simplified or automated or otherwise made nicer is seen somehow "doing it wrong" (eg, the equivalent of writing garbage code to solve a problem as opposed to spending 2 weeks figuring out how to solve something "correctly" etc).
I'm sitting here in my living room by myself laughing my butt off right now after pulling up that script. It kind of reminds me of one of the beginning exercises in the Book Head First java called PhraseOMatic:
Can, perhaps, but do they? I'm thinking people who misspell stuff might waver a bit, and not be as consistent as those who know for sure how it's supposed to be spelled. Just a WAG, though.
This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing video games, because he automated his largely superfluous job at a law firm which itself likely only exists to deal with bureaucratic or unnecessary cases (assuming this is true, as they have a single absent IT person who handles their entire infrastructure.)
On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.
This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber:
> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly.
Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload).
Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time.
One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.
logistics.. its amazing that MORE luggage isn't lost on a daily basis. I traveled every week for 10 years, lost my bag maybe 4 times? usually around a holiday where the airports are burdened with extra people (and 75% of those lost bags were out of O'Hare... )
sure it seems simple take a bag put it in a tube, take it off the tube give it back to the person.. but man, probably 30 people touched that bag in that process, countless conveyer belts, several trucks.. add in TSA and it doubles the handling
There's also significant fanout and sometimes very short layovers. One plane might have luggage that goes to five other planes. Also, the vehicles that transport the luggage are not airtight, so bags can fall out of them. This isn't to mention human error in the scanning process (forgetting to scan something, scanning a bag and then not moving it, etc.).
Had a bag that from all available evidence after the fact fell off a conveyor at SeaTac and got stuck somewhere. Very directional scrape damage on the bag. Found within 13 hours of me filing a missed luggage complaint, but due to a lack of good photo evidence (and alas throwing the no longer fit for purpose bag away) I did not get the cost of the replacement bag comped by Delta.
probably not relevant but one time my mid-trip flight landed late. I ran to the connecting flight and made it on board but my luggage did not. I did get it the next day so the system worked but it just points out a complication I hadn't personally considered before.
Isn't this more of a box-ticker? OP created a permanent solution; at this point, however, he himself is not doing anything useful:
> box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
The right solution short-term for CYA reasons is probably to get this replaced by a real engineer on a time and materials contract from an IT consulting company. That doesn't mean replacing this employee, though. If I was the boss at this company and found this out, I'd make that person in charge of selecting the vendor, specifying the features, accepting delivery of the work, and then monitoring and troubleshooting any malfunctions.
More scope managing the rest of the office IT could be introduced to the position. They're not wasting money on getting things running smoother. That's clearly worthwhile to them. They're wasting time not making better use of the employee's time for which they're paid.
This.
He’s being paid to be responsible for the system.
If he can do that successfully a few minutes a day.
Cool.
If his employer still sees value.
It’s all good.
It's really on the business to have some kind of continual improvement process that looks at everyone's workflow and works out where the time/resource wastage is. If the company wanted to save money on these things they have get someone to identify that a lot of time is spent on "manual" work which could be streamlined.
This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would employees agree to their salary if they fully understood how much of the value they create is pocketed at various other levels of the org?
Because humans are irrational. It's the butts in seats mentality vs results. The business should be bringing in experts to regularly work out what parts of their process are slow and to streamline them. There is no incentive for an individual not in this role to make their lives harder.
If the law firm is making significant profit and this employee is not doing anything additionally shady does it really matter? He provides value to the company regardless of whether or not he is actively working - and if one of his automations fail then he is the one who has to fix it. There are lots of jobs where we pay people for things that do not require a constant work output - think about Firemen for example.
A forward thinking business would promote this guy and then involve him in other aspects of their work to try and optimize and automate wherever they can. The better small / medium size businesses recognize this and realize that IT can be thought of not just as a cost center but also a path to innovation.
The public sector is often tumor like in its structure. It's pile of bad ideas requiring more bad ideas to manage the previous one problems. They're wildly incompetent in terms of productivity all across the chain and resort to petty solutions and hiring more people (with precarious contracts) to attempt at avoiding sinking.
I assume they only have 20 more years to live until the whole thing evaporates through the new generation automating it away.
That’s bollocks. He is providing huge amounts of value - consumer surplus and producer surplus. That’s like saying the creator and maintainer of a machine are useless because the machine does all the work, shall we stop using trains and employ millions of people to transport things on foot because it would employ more people doing strenuous work? As he said so himself, people were taking hours a day doing this before he came along with his skillset.
> This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone.
Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time.
A lot of people in this thread find the story unbelievable. Having done IT consulting for law firms, I absolutely believe this story.
IT for law is 30 years behind in some cases. They still use Wordperfect because that's what all the templates are written in. Most lawyers have no clue about IT and are happy to pay people to keep things running. Most likely the law firm wouldn't even care if OP told them what they were doing as long as it worked.
Also, I know someone who was in a similar situation. He was a VAX admin in the 90s, when that tech was already 20 years old. He worked for a trading firm and all of their software was built on VAX. They made $1M a day from their software, as long as the machine was up during trading hours.
His only job was to sit at the terminal one hour before trading hours until trading closed for the day, and make sure the machine is running, and perform maintenance after the trading day ended. He got what in today's dollars would be about $500K a year to basically just sit there and teach himself modern programming languages while he waited for trading to end.
His boss was well aware of this, and straight up told him, as long as that machine is running during trading hours, the money we pay you is more than worth it. It was literally 1/2 a day's profits.
I thought I wad reading myself. I just left legal sector and wp12 is indeed a vestigial tail from 90s setups. That wouldn't be much of a problem but since every app and process designed since tried to migrate to newer word processor format, they also have a bunch of .odt documents, and higher-up have ms office licenses so .doc and .docx are also in the mix. I've seen people explaining to me that their 'job' was to realign borked bullet lists between format conversion because every employee only has one kind of word processor.
I didn't automate my job, I just did a good enough job that things stopped breaking, and I had less and less to every day. Eventually I'd just show up, make rounds, wait for things to break, make rounds again after lunch, wait until quitting time.
I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change.
So, in the end I was being paid to show up, mostly. I lived in constant fear of getting fired, and in the end the job was outsourced out of existence. Good on them, bad for me.
That job slowly crushed my soul. I haven't recovered, a decade later.
I watched a similar thing happen once. A greybeard was brought in to whip things into shape. He did so. Automated everything and made 100+ linux boxes run like a top. New owners came in, and they weren't the nice kind. He got stressed out and had a heart attack and was gone for several weeks. Things hummed along while he was gone, and his perceived value went down because things "ran just fine without him", ignoring that it was because of him.
They ended up firing him and giving me his responsibilities, which was a laugh because he and I had drastically different jobs, and he was far more experienced and capable in system administration and automation than I was. I too left less than a year later.
I had a similar job. Probably 1 hour of real work per day. It was awesome at first. Quickly I started to hate it. I spend all day dicking around so when I went home I had already done all of my hobbies. I imagine that if I had that job now instead of in my early 20's I would be able to fill that time with more interesting things and/or family time. But I left that job because I feared I was losing any skills I had and eventually the gig would be up and I'd be forced to scramble to find another job.
These types of gigs are often a blessing and a curse.
Ah, I can relate to that story. It reminded me of a position I held many years ago.
Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my leadership chain.
There were a bunch of different phases during my time there that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work" phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML documentation passed W3C validation after that), the "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy" phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase, and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot" phase.
I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net negative for me.
I have a some what similar stint. Worked at a start that got acquired by big co for the product and customers, although not the product my team was responsible for. Our product got quickly put on maintenance mode with promises to rewrite the whole thing at some point.
So by that point I had been working there for a year and some, knew the system pretty well and we had pretty much nothing to do. No new features, very few bugs due to little change in the product.
I'd show up to work at 10, leave for lunch for 2+ hours, and leave the office at 4. And even then I was mostly surfing the web and chatting with friends most of the day. The rest of the team and my manager knew, but they also knew there was actually no work. We'd all go play badminton before lunch some times and so there were 3 hours periods where no one was around.
Was pretty nice at first. Steady pay, no responsibilities or stress. But quickly got really boring. And since it was my first job out of school, not very good for learning and growth. Ironically the slow pace also really dampened by motivation to look for another job, so I hung around probably a year longer than I should have.
I'm still in my first "real" job, almost 6 years later, and while it's not quite as lax as what you describe your comment made me realize that the slow pace is probably a big factor in my own lack of motivation to look for something else. It's awful easy to get comfy.
> I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change
I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die. They don’t really understand the technology that their jobs are bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-go.
Agreed - accountants are a unique breed. They do a fair amount of basic numeric analysis and rote work that is of the sort that is beneficial to automation. But they're often very averse to technology, often stop learning any new tools early on in their career, and tend to stick to the methods they learned as juniors, even many years later.
That's a broad brush, and is certainly unfair to and untrue of some accountants. Some are Excel gods and can VBA it up with the best of them, and would have been productive software engineers in another life. But it's surprisingly true for much of the profession.
Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers will not thank them for making their job easier with better tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was, let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.
It looks like this is a case where everybody is happy. A process that was plagued by manual errors now runs smoothly. And there is an admin around to jump in should it break. While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well.
On the other hand, I don't think I could work like that. I always look for ways to improve life, and that includes the life of my customers. Not letting them know that the thing is automated keeps them in the belief that it requires manual action, and that to me is a lie by omission. Likely there are other low-hangig fruit to automate, once you're in the mindset.
Another consideration is when the script does something dumb a human wouldn't have done. Is the operator liable for that? Because after all it was not considered part of the job to automate it? Of course, the likelihood of human mistakes weighs more in all likelihood. But when the firm argues (they're lawyers right?) that the mistakes wouldn't have happened if the employee followed protocol, there may be some ugly liability.
> While the firm might be indignant if they found out, they may actually already know and just accept it. They're unlikely to change it if it runs well.
if they knew, they might be tempted to fire the person and keep the script. OP talks a big game about how it's running on their own hardware, but the company has a legal claim if it was developed during the workday. not smart to play legal games with a law firm.
The reality is, their core business is law. They probably don't hugely care about IT as long as it works.
The most likely thing, if they found out, is they'd give him some other IT stuff to do as well to fill his time (which he may also be able to automate). I doubt they'd want to fire him - as long as the task is being done appropriately.
They want someone to be available to fix/update and perhaps do other things too. Part of your salary as support staff is being there when they need you.
Yeah, if this is something that is integral to their work, they'd still need to pay someone to be able to respond within X amount of minutes in case something goes tits up even if they got the script in their hands.
They could probably do that for less than 90k/year, but it's still gonna cost them.
There are some interesting corner cases. For instance say he purchased the script from a third party? Is that different than if he wrote it on his off hours?
The problem here is intent. His intention was to write a script for his job.
He can't hire himself to do his own job. Which is what he would effectively be doing by claiming he wrote it "off hours". The very act of writing that script put him "on hours". Now, was it unpaid work? That's a different story. Although since he's also technically not doing work during work hours, one could call it a wash.
If he bought the script, then the company likely needs to reimburse him the cost of that, because its materials for the job. But he wouldn't want to make that request, because then the jig is up.
But then again, we aren't playing "what ifs". There are concrete elements to his story. He did write the script. It is explicitly for this company. It won't work for any other company without large modifications. The non-portability and exclusivity of this script means it was written for the express purpose of doing this thing for this company.
And let's be completely fair here, he cobbled this thing together from StackOverflow snippets. If he's ever found out and fired, even if he takes his script, they're probably looking at a day or two to replicate this work.
The real question for him is would it be worth it? The firm would be minimally affected and could, in turn, make things incredibly difficult for him. This is a law firm. This is what they do. The cost of suing him is negligible, because they already do so much of the work normally. We're really talking about the additional court and filing fees. Whereas, he'd have to retain a lawyer himself. Who would then bill him for all the work they'd do.
Consider, they were paying him $90k to copy files. They have that kind of money to throw at the problem. Do you really want to become a problem?
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.
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.
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.
The story is most likely made up and one of the last clarifications strongly hints at it:
> It can't be this simple / this is fake because you aren't doing blah blah. You're right, it's not this simple. There are more steps involved in the script and it performs functions I haven't discussed. [...] The core of the script, transfer and hash, is accurate
The person focuses on transfer and hash and keeps what looks like an absolutely critical part of the process as barely a mention: checking against a spreadsheet where the automation is most vulnerable. Tens of thousands of files means just as many opportunities for a typo in that spreadsheet. And yet the job is still 10 minutes per day.
Also with the popularity this gained, not being worried at all that the employers can guess who this is about just because they left out some parts of the job is a bit hilarious. Somehow I can buy that a mid-sized law firm never realized how easy it is to automate this task. But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique? That I don't buy.
Everything sounds like a very inexperienced person telling a story they can only fantasize about.
> But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique?
In a past life I used to write for a local TV soap. I would constantly take personal events that my friends and family told me about, minimally jazz them up, and have them happen to our regular cast. I was there for five years and not one person noticed that their story was on the show. It's all about context.
You overestimate how much managers and employers browse social media. Especially non-tech organization, they may not even know what Reddit is.
And no, this isn't a unique experience, given how many people here alone chimed in on similar automation strategies in non-tech situations. It can be weird if you're in tech and you're managing billion line codebases, but you'd be surprised how much a non-tech company would value a 100 line automation script you whip up in a week. The only risk in that relationship is your skills growing stale for if/when you need to change jobs
All regulars are laughing, hard. They shout out in turns "73!", and laugh again. Confused, the person asks what's so good about 73. Says a regular, catching his breath and wiping tears from his eyes: "Heh 73, we haven't heard that one before!"
I also agree that it's not only happened, but it's probably not that rare. Before most businesses were automated to the point where this is possible, I had an engineering job where for at least two years, I may as well have not shown up. I spent all my time reading magazines and doing pet projects because there wasn't anything else for me to do but answer the phone if a customer had a question. I could have easily taken on another job in the mean time if remote work was a thing back then.
I knew at the time that I wasn't alone in this. I knew another engineer whose job consisted of basically showing up to work just in case an alarm went off. He spent his time writing a software package that he sold. Because, again, he really had nothing else to do all day, every day.
This was back in the mid-late 90's. I'd expect that it's even more prevalent now.
> 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.
This reminded me of an issue we had at a previous startup that was growing really fast. There was a process that "created PDF invoices", which was coded by calling a (sync) API, which generated it on the fly.
The problem changed, once those PDF invoices became 100MB large, with hundreds of pages (required by business case). It's a completely different beast that the "MVP" developers did not thought about (as it is expected). Now you either code and maintain an async service which uploads to S3, along with the full lifecycle, or just buy a service to do it for you.
Scale definitely matters, and all systems change once you consider large scale data and workloads.
I don't think so, but it is a recurring issue I've seen at several B2B startups. It makes sense if you think about it. Being B2B, customers' AP departments request detailed usage billing. Someone creates a simple endpoint to produce a PDF, and eventually PDFs get too large to handle synchronously.
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.
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.
You find it suspicious that most of the stories that become popular are appealing as stories and are the sort of stories people tend to tell? Is it also suspicious that they are all in English?
I'm sure some of them are fake, but so what? Let people have their plausible mundane lies. Sometimes my girlfriend lies about her name to the Starbucks barista and she hasn't been called out for it yet.
> 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)
Eh... So unemployed people can't become programmers, or programmers unemployed?
>but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.
my simple rebuttal to this is: what do I have to lose here if I find out that some reddit post is false, but still true enough to inspire more-likely-to-be-true stories? This isn't exactly misinformation that can cost lives.
Everything should be taken with a grain of salt. I don't find this post to be exceptional in that case.
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.
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.
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.
2 jobs ago I had a management level position ("Head of Architecture") for a decent sized engineering multinational.
My fondest moments are actually when I helped people do mind numbingly awful tasks by automating stuff - this was not my day job but I had a lot of freedom.
One guy was so delighted that I had scripted in less than an hour some ghastly bit of spreadsheet work that he estimated was going to take him a few weeks that he immediately ran out and bought me a bottle of wine!
This is partly why I miss it, sometimes. The work itself is largely pretty easy to do and the impact can be huge. Not just in a time-saving way, but to the people involved and ultimately the company.
I often think about the sheer volume of tasks like this the world over where a tiny Python, or even say, AutoHotKey script could automate it. The amount of hours mankind must spend on utter drudgery astounds me.
By far, my favorite accomplishment from last year was (effectively) automating a barcode lookup. The historical process took 5-10 minutes and was performed 5+ times per day. My half day of scripting now saves ~1HR of daily labor. Nearly a year after I created it, and one woman still stops me every time she sees me to thank me for improving her job.
Yup. That reminds me of a time when a co-worker in another department (technical but not software) told me that the people she managed had to do a very tedious task extracting and cross-correlating data from files that my project produced. They were sometimes spending 4+ hours each day doing it.
It took me all of one lazy afternoon to build a utility to do the same work and present it in a nicely formatted report. Their workload on this task went down to about 5 minutes per day.
Had something similar at a larger company I worked at! There was this team that was tasked with automating stuff from the other teams. And then they got split up and individuals were sprinkled around the company. I guess it was sorta like embedded devops in a way because they were supposed to spread that "automate stuff" mindset.
Thinking about it now, it makes sense. It's a bit of a waste to have one team that automates stuff, and everyone else just thinks of automation as "that's not our job!"
You'd be surprised how often that isn't the outcome. It definitely does happen, but a lot of the time the company is left with a task that's now automated and an employee that's received a ton of training on the business systems. There are almost always other products that sales wants to push that there simply wasn't the bandwidth for before...
There is always more business - sometimes companies choose to put automated employees towards that (and get huge moral boosts to the employees that automated the thing - the employees that were automated - and everyone nearby who appreciates how useful automation is) and other times they decide to trim a marginal cost off the bottom line and end up discouraging further innovation and, probably, losing a lot of people they actually still need.
Companies that, essentially, get some of their labour replaced for a free (or marginal cost) should realize that there are a lot of more savings like that to be had - and that if they use that savings to invest in growth it will pay off in the future. Companies that choose stagnation die (and you should leave them to die without you as an employee).
The difference is whether you are automating a "profit center" or a "cost center". Automate a profit center, and you free up people to do more profitable stuff. Automate a cost center, and they can lay everybody off and cut costs.
The whole notion of "cost-" and "profit centers" is a terrible construction of modern management theory. But it is how almost all businesses work nowadays. Never work in a cost center department (unless you can use it for grift the way HR directors do).
The notion of cost centers is why most web sites are crap. For most businesses the web site is a cost center, and everybody working on it is piling on superfluous tech to pad their résumé with, and to make themselves more essential.
It is simply an internal implementation of rent seeking.
You can burn fossil fuels and cause damage through pollution and be applauded for being highly profitable.
Meanwhile people building sustainable energy or at least reducing the damage caused by pollution will be considered a drag and harshly criticized.
Ultimately the problem lies in the fact that we have built entire societies around the idea of exploiting externalities. You can't build a healthy society around such a thing and yet we keep doing and loving it.
This is spot on. The final conclusion is that we are in a cul-de-sac though, any kind of exit seems to be across capital expenditure barriers that are too high to surmount and if you succeed there will always be a competitor to your plan that does things the old way and that looks short term to be cheaper.
I think the big problem is that we do not show the full price at the outset, the 'sticker price' is usually only a fraction of the total cost and the payer of the sticker price has no idea of what the total cost eventually will be. If we could only make them aware of that it would already be a step in the right direction, and the remainder might be fixable by taxation.
It depends on the company. My day job can reduce required headcount for the work we handle. Some companies use that excuse to lower headcount, but in cases where valuable employees are involved they get moved to other jobs where their knowledge can add value while not doing the boring and repetitive tasks.
A lot of industries, despite being "tech", are still just using computers to "push paper". That means a true technical person can often automate these jobs. It's real and it does happen. The thing is... most people like that are not content doing that and then fucking around all day. I've been in this position. I've shared my automation with the team I was on and the manager I had, and I got a raise. I did this at more than one company when I worked in operational roles, since then I'm more engineering focused so less opportunities to do so.
Same here - my first real job involved putting reports together by collecting/combining data from various sources.
Spent the first month doing it be hand, second month I pulled an all-nighter and automated the easy 80%. The last 20% of automation involved switching from Excel to a website - that took a couple of years to make happen because I needed to convince people to make the change.
I spent the time I received improving my skills and automating other things, as well as helping colleges with work which did require manual intervention.
If you add socially normalised work from home to any of these stories the opportunity to do the very little becomes obvious. When we all had to come into the office for 8 hours a day, even if you managed to automate most of your work you still had to show up and sit at your desk.
Yeah, just consider all the places where PDFs are still used instead of a more computer-appropriate format (fixed layout is generally not needed, sometimes even not for printing, and is sometimes even an hindrance, and (m)HTML can be used as a standalone file too...)
Most opportunities are definitely data-entry oriented. For example, making a report in a spreadsheet and then having to feed some of those fields into some kind of form in a web-based UI, or vice versa.
20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of my teams that were basically just template generators. Another table, write code with all the new columns and types.
Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now but I'm sure there are still a lot of jobs everywhere that can either be easily automated now, or would be easily automated except for one little obstacle the worker is doing everything possible to play up and preserve.
> Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now
This seems unlikely. There are lots of companies with 50 employees with no programmers, hobbyist or pro, on staff. That's why taking a business' excel spreadsheet nightmare and turning it into a program is a viable consultancy.
Having a dividing line between the worker and the programmer is where the problem lies. There's tons of jobs where it makes sense to have the worker write a script to automate, which would make no sense for me to come in and automate for them.
This is why I think some basic forms of programming should be standard. You don't need to be a specialist to get a lot out of it.
Tech workers tend to under-estimate the impact that trivial automation can have on other industries. My partner 10x or more their efficiency with some simple Office macro copy-pasta from the search results of "how do I <do thing> in word"
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.
My guess is that a great many of these stories are true. I've seen more than one instance at large companies where a job either was, or easily could be, mostly replaced by a series of Excel Macros.
There was that famous story of a guy who stop showing up to work and got caught years later for stealing from his company by not working and getting wages.
Sounds like your friend is a hell of a lot more honest than that guy who took on multiple sysadmin positions and then automated almost everything and for the remainder hired multiple overseas contractors to do the rest
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In Austria (and I think in Germany it's the same), for most jobs, including IT, employees must track their working time for legal reasons, so I had to clock in and out via a device at the entrance like a factory worker, to prove to HR, accounting and the bureaucratic government institutions in charge of taxing me, that I'm indeed at my workplace 8h/day.
One company I interviewed at had a work-time time tracking machine next to the coffee machine as breaks were not included in the working time. I said no thanks to that job but it's quite common in Austria at more traditional companies who insist you're only productive while your butt is in the chair.
Thanks Covid for the disruption but it's a massive shame it took a global tragedy for companies and governments to realize people working in tech and other sectors can be just as productive without needing to commute somewhere else just so they can keep a seat warm for 8h/day.
>all of a sudden unpaid overtime would be so much harder
Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation.
Basically it's a fancy way to have you wave your right to paid overtime to what amounts to one of the most exploitative legal employment practices I've seen in Europe.
And the strict time tracking is still there for legal and workplace accident insurance reasons ("you claim you hurt yourself through a work related accident at 14:40, but we need to check your time tracking as proof you were actually at work and not somewhere else")
> Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation.
That’s illegal in Germany, luckily. Some unpaid overtime can be included in the contract, but a contract must specify the maximum number of hours.
for companies and governments to realize people working in tech and other sectors can be just as productive
It may seem this way, but the conditions allowing this situation still exist.
I assure you, large swaths of people will be called back to the office ASAP.
And many non-IT/computing types need to be there, to be productive. Which means many managers need to be too. Which means, in non pure tech firms, the call will be stronger, for lots of other employees will be in-office.
Some say, that they'll just refuse. That's fine and dandy now, but when the market crashes, 2 years, 5 years, and jobs become scare?
You, and everyone else will work in office to put food on the table.
I can confirm this is the case in Austria. However, my experience is mostly using a computerised system via the company Intranet. There's an option to use an access card and touch it to a login pad at the office entrance, but I can also work from home, logging the time via the Intranet based system. I don't get paid overtime, but I do receive time off in lieu of excess hours worked.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I knew a chap who left where I used to work to go to a large UK bank at high end contracting rates.
He returned after a few months saying that the team he joined (which was apparently quite large) had been given no work in that time and hadn't even been given any computers - and they weren't allowed to use their own devices for anything. He said he left simply because he couldn't take the boredom - even though, as he freely admitted, the money was fantastic.
Going along with the original story, I could go either way on this. On the one hand, paying someone $40k to do it, probably involves more supervision and turnover, and a chance of someone making a mistake. And then you get to tell your million dollar client: "We lost our case because our semi-skilled clerk misplaced a file and we have no IT department."
On the other hand, what would you pay an outside developer to automate the process and guarantee accuracy, maintenance, and uptime? Could you even do this with no GUI, no dashboard, no management fanfare, and no brainstorming of unnecessary features?
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.
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.
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?
This is basically why I do not automatically discount the story as fake. I have certainly been a part of groups that had a wide range of technical skills. It is an odd experience, but it forces you to think about your audience ( and document everything like you would for your parent ).
I do have an anecdote in a similar vein from a buddy, but he does sometimes tend to exaggerate sometimes so I won't mention it. I absolutely believe though there are companies are still run in a very traditional way for one reason or another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you take a look now, the sub is in a pretty poor state. It's full of almost certainly fake stories and what seem to be actual children. A lot of the demands / proposals posted are extremely counterproductive or not useful. And I assume the actual elite thrive on the fact that the general public don't actually know what they need and instead waste time calling for nonsensical change.
That's the general gist as I recall. A lot of people who aren't structurally opposed to work but are opposed to their relationship with production as workers.
I honestly don't understand the ideological anti work nonsense.
If you were properly compensated for your work with no one dipping into your income and taking their middle man cut, then hardly anyone would be against work.
After all, the anti work people are a drag on people who want to work. UBI doesn't pay itself unless it is funded from taxes on resources where it merely democratizes resources than actually provide an income.
There's a guy named Josh Fluke on YouTube who may qualify as antiwork to you. I find him very very reasonable and a bit dangerous for pulling off the wool over the young generation's eyes. I mean dangerous for the corporate and the myths corporations have built to lure and abuse workers.
Maybe you don't see the irony in anti-work kid using the youtube platform to spread cynicism about Corporate America while getting paid. His stuff is somewhat interesting, for about 10 seconds before you realize it contributes nothing to your life. Also, memes and urban dictionary slang? Are you serious? Don't be like this, indeed.
JAQing off is a concept introduced by the rational/skeptic community. The fact that you found the description in urban dictionary doesn't take anything away from the word.
But if your points are so weak that even urban dictionary and knowyourmeme calls you out, perhaps you should reconsider your position? ;)
I think the point is it's easy to be critical of work if you can make money without working. But for most people, doing menial work is a necessity in order to earn a living. If he has to deal with the consequences of not working I'd be inclined to take him more seriously, but fact of the matter is no one really wants to be homeless on principal
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...
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
When customers picked up their orders from our warehouse, they signed the A4 sized receipt. We made a copy using a photocopier, and kept our copy in a box. Then the following month, we moved the box into a pallet. When the pallet was full of these boxes, we shrink-wrapped it and fork-lifted it into a shelf in the warehouse. After a few years, they had pallets after pallets of receipts.
Customers often called to dispute charges on their credit card, this was an expensive furniture store warehouse. So we would have to dig up those pallets with the fork lift and look for a single signed copy of the receipt to defend the charge. Sometimes, it took days to find. Other times, we never found the copies.
When I took over the warehouse, I installed photoshop on the main computer. IT gave me hell for it. Then I set up a batch job to scan those receipts into 3 parts: Full page, order number section, signature section. I used a .bat file to launch the OCR app that came with the printer and rename the files to include the order number. Now all I had to do at the end of the day, was stack the hundreds of receipt into the printer and watch the computers do my job.
When a customer complained, all I had to do was enter the order number in a dynamic excel sheet and the copy of the receipt was loaded. It took seconds. Everyone in the warehouse called me lazy. But they were happy to continue using my system. Although, the printer/scanner mysteriously broke after I left and they were forced to go back to the manual way.
And that was my first real world programming experience.
And from MANY years working in various businesses, this kind of massive labor-saving and process-saving activities are always wanted, never encouraged, and penalized by more work and no extra pay/bonuses.
And frankly, I love solving business process issues like this. I think it's challenging, fun, and interesting work. But is it monetarily valued? Nope.
You sell the solution as a Windows app that includes a barcode scanner and a barcode on the receipt. You then have an application interface to an Access database or something.
My sister got a 9 month gig with the local municipality to copy-paste cells from a folder of 1000s of source excel sheets (with some transformations) into a master Excel sheet.
They paid her per entry and she was supposed to do 200 entries per day. By the end of the first week she'd automated the entire thing with a script that did just that.
So she ran that script every morning for nine months and spent most of the days biking, hiking, and swimming.
You aren’t being paid to copy and paste files, you are paid so the company can retain your skills in the event anything goes wrong.
If the evidence was gone, corrupted or needed to be changed , they have someone on staff who can quickly remedy that. Isn’t that the point of a high skill job? You get paid for knowing which screw to tighten, you don’t get paid for tightening screws.
I think it's actually a bit more subtle than that. The post says the law firm "wanted [them] to be the only person with admin access to the Cloud, everyone else would be limited to view only". I wonder if their job is, more than anything else, to be the person who is legally on the hook if anything goes wrong, because they're the only one with write access.
Assuming the story is true, they're preying on ignorance. You're describing normal employment and service contracting. The law firm has a huge misconception about the complexity of the task and the human labor required for normal and exceptional operations. Even the spreadsheet sanity checking could probably be automated. This is a few thousand dollars of consultant time to setup, and maybe a few thousand/year to maintain.
I did a similar thing almost 20 years ago, I had to manually verify that the image files from one network drive were the same as the image files from a different location (some internal web-page, I think, I had file access to them, too). That was taking me about one hour each working day, in fact each working night/morning, as this was a night job and I had to do that at the end of the shift (6-7AM).
I had started learning some PHP but very quickly realised (by reading on the web) that Python was way better for this job. With the help with the Python docs page, the Python mailing list (very friendly back then with newbies, maybe still is, haven't been there for a long time), of tkinter (excellent library!) and of py2exe I was able to write a quick script on my Mandrake distro at home, turn that script into an .exe, copy it to a floppy disk and use it at work. Just like that, an ~1 hour job turned into a maximum 2-minute job, the time it took me to open the tkinter-based "program" and press a button or two. One or two years later I was getting my first job as a computer programmer, writing Python, thanks in part to that realisation of "I can make this thing way faster and easier by using Python".
A lot of commenters are calling this fake. Maybe it is. But I don't think it is.
I know too many people who've done this during the pandemic, by reading through Automate The Boring Stuff with Python[1] or one[2] of a number[3] of PowerShell books and automate some/all parts of their jobs.
People are focusing too much on whether the story is actually true. It sounds plausible to me, but the real story here is that a heck of a lot of processes would benefit from having a programmer look at them.
Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.
YMMV, but I'm 100% in agreement with GP about programming being the new literacy.
I quit my old SWE job to run a bloody eBay store and am raking it in because I'm competing against people who can't program.
The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the problem but getting people with domain expertise literate enough to write some hacky Python scripts.
This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms of productivity.
This is exactly right. People who are actual programmers are like poets, essayists, or authors in the original literacy. They have a title that actually says "person is literate".
But there were always great poets and authors. The big win was that you got a bureaucrat class with their own domain titles who could use writing to get things done.
Likewise if the boss in the original article had been taught how to hack some scripts together, they wouldn't need to hire the author for $90k.
I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success.
Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.
We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.
As anyone who has read random fanfiction.net stories or middle school penmanship homework can attest, being able to write is not that same thing as being able to write well.
When I was in high school (early 90's) I was a TA in drivers ed for a period. I also took the class the period before it. My job? Enter grades into the computer and run it for the teacher so he didn't have to. When I asked him about what grades to put in for myself he said "Just give yourself A's". So I did. Also aced the DMV written and drivers test 100%. But that's besides the point. I had the knowledge, so I didn't have to work the same as other kids. Been that way ever since!
I feel like this is something that has been a common occurrence since personal computers started entering the workplace, but people who accomplish it usually follow up by expanding the scope of their job. Personally, I know someone who has "automated her work" using Excel at several jobs, to the point that she spent a few days per month doing the entire job of the person she replaced. These were jobs that anyone could have automated any time in the previous 10-15 years, and were automated at other companies she worked at, but at several companies she was the first to do it.
In software development, I "automated my job" many times in the old days in the sense that I was given a task that I was expected to do in a brute-force manner over several weeks, but I solved it by spending a few days cleaning and structuring the data and then writing a script. Now people are less and less surprised by the ability to solve problems with programming, so instead of handing out tasks like that, they are more likely to ask a product manager to design a new capability for internal tooling.
I haven't personally encountered somebody who used automation to coast in a job. The intersection between people who can achieve this technically and the people who can achieve it socially is probably pretty small. (If I automated my job, I would have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about it. My Excel friend is a squeaky-clean go-getter and would not be able to resist taking on extra work.) I understand the choice, though.
I think most of us are feeling some schadenfreude because the poster is ripping-off a law-firm - but the disappointment for me is that (for the most part) (s)he seems to be treating it as an 8-hour day where (s)he simply skips work - which I would definitely find totally soul-destroying.
I saw in the follow-up comments that there are is some "passion project" that's being worked on, but apparently it wasn't 'relevant' enough to mention it in the original post, and came under the miscellaneous "computer games or do whatever"
I really do think it happened. Just look at the explosion of no-code tools that handle this sort of tedious work for small businesses. The caveat is that once the owner figures out they can automate this person's work, that person will be out of a job.
I once got a contract, early in my career, migrating marketing landing pages to a new format in which the contents of the pages (anything inside of the <body> tag) were moved into `marketing_page_name.tmpl` files in a directory. From there they'd be pulled into a shell, and all kinds of tracking and link magic could happen from there. A few things like anchors needed new template variables instead of hard-coded links.
I realized I could automate this after the third or fourth page. There were hundreds of them, so I did a quick calculation: How long will it take to automate this? How long will it take to do it by hand? You know, the one we always do, then ignore because we want to automate stuff anyways.
In this case the automation made sense. I was paid per hour so I only stood to lose money.
I realized automating it and lying about how long it's taking would be immoral. I needed the money (I think this was my second job, ever, before ever getting a full time job. Maybe year 2005!). So what, do I just do it by hand and struggle through the monotony? No, that would be dishonest in a sense, too.
I talked to the people who contracted me and explained the options, showed them a sample of how well the automation worked, talked it through. They were really happy. They gained trust in me and my abilities. After I completed the project, they wanted to hire me for full time work. They gave me great references for years.
I couldn't handle automating my job away and slacking off. I love learning. I love doing my best work for people, providing real value. The cool thing to me about my job is that I can offer more and more value over time at a scale I couldn't in any other job my brain could navigate.
So all that is to say: this guy's story sounds awful to me. Let me automate it, then if I'm redundant, I'll go find something else interesting to do. I'm sure as hell not going to sit around playing counterstrike.
Not to say this person is bad or wrong or whatever. It just sounds like misery to me. The key difference might be that I enjoy my work and this guy doesn't, really.
I think the r/antiwork mindset of “no loyalty, no social connections, no extra effort, no two-weeks notice, work only work the wage” only applies when you’re working for a job that treats you like shit. If you have a half-decent employer you should provide some loyalty and extra effort when necessary or you’re a garbage employee. If you have a good career and you get a bad employer you can just leave.
The context with r/antiwork is that many of these people are in extremely toxic workplaces but need money because they’re very poor. It's a free-for-all, "take advantage of" or "be taken advantage of". And that most of the submissions are probably fake dystopia rage-bait.
Haha, yeah – that’s why I left consulting. It felt like a treadmill where succeeding more than I could as an IC at a company required running a business I didn’t want to run.
> The key difference might be that I enjoy my work and this guy doesn't, really.
He probably enjoyed it while he was working on the scripts, but once he was done, there wasn't anything much else to do, so he moved on to doing stuff he likes to do, while getting paid.
I helped someone do this for their accounting job once since I saw them working with obscure data re-entry moving from old DOS systems to SAP. They had a ton of material to manually move over and it seemed painful ergonomically.
I used Sikuli from MIT to deal with the randomly changing window locations.
Management got mad at them for completing the task so quickly (it took a week instead of a few months) since it fell on management to deal with what to do with the data entries next, and they didn’t like a huge stack of work looming. Ha
AutoHotKey and Pulover's Macro Creator[1] (which spits out AHK scrips from mouse and keyboard input) can do a similar job in a windows environment, and can trivially click on UI elements on the screen via PixelSearch. It runs lightning fast too, and is simple to learn.
I've used it to automate simple web games for shits and giggles.
A cross-platform fork of Sikuli is at http://www.sikulix.com/ using Java, Python and OpenCV for automation.
PyAutoGui is another nice option - https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - cross platform Python module for keyboard and mouse automation with some support for taking and analysing screenshots.
Keyboard Maestro can do similar on the Mac with the "Find Image on Screen" and "Click on Found Image" actions. You can do some fairly sophisticated GUI automations with its image, OCR, button clicking, JavaScript, and menu actions.
If this is true or not, I had a situation in my past where I was developing an ecommerce API as a business that had both web and backend. Basically, it made integrations take a day instead of 3-4 months. I hired some offshore developers to use my API to setup for new clients, effectively making a killing as I could still charge quite a lot for this specific integration and yet undercut all the competition. Long story short, my API code was stolen from under me by the offshore people I hired and I subsequently was made obsolete in my business model. I did not know how to prove this or go forward with litigation. Anyways, that's in my past but kind of a reverse way of screwing yourself.
At some point in my 20-year career, I've realized there isn't a tight coupling of the work you do when it comes to effort, time, and overall impact and the pay that you receive.
I've been on both ends where I worked extra hard and didn't get anything out of it, and I've done barely anything and got paid and management was happy. There's a kind of cognitive dissonance you encounter if you have this notion of "fairness" when it comes to work done and reward earned. It feels like you're cheating someone if you don't do enough work, but then you can do a whole bunch of work and it becomes meaningless if someone up in the management chain decides on a whim that your project isn't essential.
This story does sound truthful to me because there are so many things we pay for because we don't know what goes into it and we're happy to be ignorant of what goes into it, so long as it gets done. You're paying for the security of knowing the job will be done. As others have said in the posts here, I also would feel unfulfilled doing something like this because there's still an inherent need many of us have to do something productive regularly.
This is like the dream. I feel like I would spend the time learning an instrument, or maybe do online learnings to maybe get another job I actually enjoyed doing.
Can't even hate and hope things work out for that guy.
In my experience it gets boring very quickly. In my case I hadn't automated anything, the company was just bad at utilizing their staff and they were happy to keep me on the payroll doing next to nothing. It resulted in my worrying about skills deteriorating and being more depressed than usual.
I learned to play the fiddle the past two years working from home during Xcode's abysmal compile times. Sadly my new M1 max whatever has solved that problem, ha!
If eight hours a day of free time is the only thing separating you from your dream, then there must be SOME way to adjust the math of your life to get that for at least a period long enough to learn the instrument or train for a new job or both.
Reducing your monthly expenses by 1/12 means you could take a full month off and get a jump start on the training you want. You could also add overtime or a part time job and increase your income by 1/12 and then take two months off. Think of it like buying your freedom.
yeah it's not just the time. I am kinda tired at the end of the day. Certainly too tired to whole heartedly take on a non-trival side project. I need 'non productive' activities like meeting up with friends or some kind of recreation.
I'm in a good place now. But if I were getting paid essentially for free, I might just take on another job. But given his current job is $90k, I'd maybe start thinking about shooting for a higher paying remote gig.
Instrument mastery is a much longer process as far as I can tell. Takes years.
“The only thing”—only half of all weekdays if one follows the in-bed-for-eight hours recommendation. And you of course have to eat and groom yourself outside of those hours.
I’m not saying that you are wrong. But it seems weird to dismiss a whopping 40 hours a week as a seemingly small thing.
Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated me, I got transferred to what was effectively a punishment team - officially I was hired as a game designer and then officially moved to the programming department, but then I was moved onto "cinematics", which meant setting up shots, camera transitions, and dialogue timing. Naturally I had zero qualifications to do this. Another person moved onto the punishment team was a QA tester that a lead had actively tried to block hiring. The supposed justification for this was that cinematics were behind schedule (this did seem to be true, at least).
Anyway, within a couple weeks me and the QA tester (who also knew how to code) had written a set of tools to make our work 3-4x faster and improve quality, so the three of us got our work done in a couple hours a day and spent the rest of it doing whatever we wanted - watching tv, working on side projects, reading programming books, etc.
To me the best part was that if I hadn't automated this the rest of the project would have fallen behind, because at that point the entire design department relied on my unauthorized side project (a comprehensive set of authoring and debugging tools for the design team) and I spent some of my spare time maintaining it. Game dev is wild.
I had a prior job out of college where I automated the vast majority of the technical position I was in. It was a combination sys admin and data validation role for the government -- not really my interest, but it was after the economy melted down and finding a proper programming job was tough. Over the span of about a year, I had a set of scripts, batch jobs, and other forms of OS/database level automation that made most of the manual tasks we had obsolete.
Unlike the original article though, I went to my manager and bragged about it. My manager was ecstatic and had me deploy the same set of scripts to the entire team. I would now be in charge of coding it full-time and got to implement things like authentication, a UI, reports, a dashboard, and so on. I eventually left that job because I was desiring a more proper engineering role, but it was a good case of win-win for full-blown automation. It didn't replace any humans (though it certainly could have), but instead our management had use it to enhance the existing humans and have them scale.
These are fun to read. I laughed at the one where the guy shared a photo of his bong and TV setup at home. One of his major innovations was creating appropriately-named folders for his work. And seriously, a lot of businesses don't know how to get _that_ organized. They are good at other stuff.
Also noteworthy IMO are the jobs you don't need to automate--just bring yourself, do your normal thing with baseline effort for a couple weeks max, and suddenly you're two months ahead and C-levels are 1) telling you essentially "stop working so hard" and also 2) "we think you are a partnership candidate if you can do this for 10 more years."
As far as I can tell from listening to stories from friends who aren't in tech circles, sorta halfway knowing how to use a computer still makes you a wizard in most non-tech offices. And the newer generations are only barely better than the old ones, on average, so that's not putting an end to that state of things.
I'm talking, like, you understand how external drives are represented, know how to cut & paste files & kinda know what a filesystem is and how it's laid out (not what a FAT table is or anything like that, I mean just how folders and links/shortcuts practically work and such). If you can do more than basic arithmetic in Excel, you're basically god. If you can write batch scripts (like this person, assuming it's true) or a little glue-code python, that's beyond what the others around you could even imagine.
I'm not sure whether this is a UX failure or there's just too much necessary complexity to make things better. To some degree I think the basic metaphors we use for representing computer concepts and UI to ordinary users are badly underdeveloped, or in some way misguided. Certainly I think the "iOS is dumbing things down and making people unable to compute!" folks have things exactly backwards.
Yeah, that's really the direction to look in--the people themselves, what they're expressing in their way of work, and how they perceive their value.
I used to do some psychometric testing for work and was mentored about "tech people" in terms of their/our psychology. When most people sort themselves by interest, they indicate a preference against technology, which can also be described as "novel organizations of things." But they also indicate against tech by indicating pro-other-stuff interests.
So you can still find lots of offices full of non-tech people where people are organized, but using yesteryear's tech, i.e. yesterday's organizations of things. Plus they are using their other strengths.
From a tech POV though, that inclusive view of others' strengths is sometimes overlooked, and it's an unfortunate truth that the tech-wise are somewhat naturally blinded to others' preferred leverage points in doing business.
For example, the ability to give responsive, personal customer service. That service may involve some tech people, but the person giving the service may be at a significant advantage if they don't have a tech background, and have some improvisational or emotional-spectrum talent, or other reasonable problem-solving tools where tech would otherwise fill the skill gap.
This rings very true for me, but I think the disconnect is often an inability to formalize any task. Seems like often the same people who can't get a computer to do what they want also can't write coherent instructions for another human to do what they want.
To those saying this can't be true, while it may be exaggerated, I can believe the core of it.
My first job was for a doctor who fancied himself a programmer. He was a reseller of customizable medical software. The customizations were essentially really simple config files. The most complex thing was a half-baked pseudo HTML document language.
My job was "programmer". I was supposed to help customize and maintain the system.
This took absolutely no time at all. I filled my time with skunkworks, busy work, education, and job searching. I think when I left they eventually had to decommission the patient web portal that I wrote and some other bits. Because they had no one to update and maintain them. So when the parent company would change the structure of the database, they couldn't reflect those changes in what I made.
One week, I probably spent way more time making a SVG/CSS eyeball follow a mouse cursor than doing anything remotely related to my job.
tbh, something similar happened to me too. I took over a sysadmin job, multiple servers. They had a lot of problems in the backend, because of bad configs, sometimes they spent days resolving the same issues on multiple servers, without trying to fix the root causes. I just took the time and went through the configs and corrected them. Also made some simple scripts that do the same thing that they did manually. No one knows how much is changed in the background, so they don't bother me with how much I actually work with the administration, they just know they used to spend hours with problems before, now nothing really comes up, maybe one problem every two months. Now my job with them is just generating monthly health reports, spending five minutes looking through the logs, making the invoices and being available when something doesn't work.
So yeah I can believe the poster. Some firms never thought about automatization, maybe they don't even know how much is possible, so they are happy to pay the same amount if everything just works, without bothering you about actual time spent with it. Maybe it even works better, than it used to when the other dude did it manually as a full time job.
I'm a systems engineer. I will always automate if it makes sense. And depending on how the environment is, I may or may not tell others about it.
I think of automation like a box of tools. On journeyman jobs, the tools are yours. You paid for them, and you have use of them as you see fit. I think of automation the same.
You're not buying my tools - you're buying my skills that bring my tools. You quit paying, you quit getting work. In no world do you get my tools.
I once saw a presentation from a man who build entire products this way. He automates hiring contractor devs based on their review scores, sends them to a huge Trello board that they use to self-onboard and then take on tasks, and automatically tracks of their progress by Trello cards completed and amount of code written.
He said he just spends 10 minutes a day firing contractors that aren't doing good enough, and maybe adding a new card to Trello now and then. This presentation was almost a decade ago so this automation might be a full product of its own by now. No saying if his product was any good or still exists, though
I think stories like this are read more widely than a lot of folks in forums such as HN suppose (often forwarded via email), and provide additional motivation for workplace surveillance solutions.
After all, if a manager can identify when tasks are being automated away by an idle employee, they've also identified a task that can be done manually by a cheaper employee. The alternative is getting rid of the position entirely and keeping the automation, but then the manager has to take responsibility for pushing the button.
Lots of people on HN have clearly never worked for a cost center. If you work in a cost center like IT, employees never see the benefits of improved efficiency unless they do what this person is doing and not disclose their process. If they did, they'd simply cut his hours and return the saved money to the business. The people wondering why management wouldn't reward him don't understand that the business views IT as a necessary evil and not an area of growth. Budgets go down; not up.
I helped automate data entry once into a horrible piece of shit system.
It was a web UI that was slow to load, slow to work with, and its speed varied between "slow" and "fuck you, I'm going home".
Not only was it slow, it was also unforgiving of mistakes. It did on-the-fly validation, but you had to maintain the order you filled the fields. A mistake in the middle noticed too late? Tough shit. You start over. Or you do nothing wrong, but when you submit your form, the system says that it's overloaded, which means you have to wait a bit and start over. It probably meant that the number of concurrent users just went up from 1.
In other words, all hallmarks of a raw prototype implemented by an intern who saw an ASP.NET tutorial the day before that went into production.
There were several big ass spreadsheets to retype data from, and a deadline.
So I thought, kinks can be ironed out and quirks can be worked around with some Python and Selenium. These two rarely complain when put to work, and they have a lot of patience.
So I spent almost a whole day helping my friend in need. The deadline was saved.
But it didn't give me any satisfaction. It was a thankless piece of work I was happy to lose after it was no longer needed. My friend was grateful, their higher-ups took it for granted. I felt nothing but burned out in the end. All I got was a heavily editorialized story on TheDailyWTF. I should probably make a tshirt, or something.
at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company) one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system, format it in a specific way, save it to a shared drive and email to a few different people. it was really repetitive, fairly simplistic and the report from the ERP was very consistent.
after about 2 weeks of doing this every day i thought there had to be a way to automate it, so I did. i set the ERP report to be emailed to me, set an email rule to save attachment to desktop with a naming convention (from the specific sender), then my excel macro would identify the current date's file and run roughly 30 min after the report's usual sending time and format it as required, then send to an email list.
this was supposed to be the first hour to hour and a half of my day. once i was confident it worked, i let it rip and enjoyed hour and a half breakfast every morning, or roamed the office talking to other interns, etc.
a couple months later i mentioned to my manager that maybe automate it and save some time but they had no interest and brushed my comment off. so i kept enjoying my breakfast and free time for the rest of my time there.
my "automation" wasn't complicated at all, just took some creative thinking and a bunch of attempts to get it right. sometimes people either a) simply dont want to believe things can be automated because it "devalues" what they do or have done in the past, or b) are happy having tasks like this assigned to underlings so they "know" and can easily explain what that person is doing at any given time.
We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution to this problem was to complain about every procedure we weren’t following exactly.
One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs. We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki pages into a different set of files.
By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was handled by a CI/CD job.
I use Azure Logic Apps to pay attention to things I should be paying attention to, and then send emails or take other actions when something happens which needs attention.
Some of my colleagues think I never sleep. I think partly because I do work very hard, and long hours at times (just not all the time). However, I make no secret that a lot of these emails are coming from, essentially, simple bots. Some definitely have a mistaken impression about how much I actually work.
For 5 months, I had a gig that involved upgrading a large CRM app. After a few weeks of yak shaving and planning, I had automated most of my tasks. It was a 6 month contract, but by the 3rd month it was basically finished. A few weeks after that, I was bored out of my mind. One day my manager called me out about "not working enough hours". 2 weeks later I was making more money at a more stable job.
Great engineers try to automate their way out of a job. It would seem like their employer would reward them for using a little ingenuity. Why wouldn't he just come clean about it?
Why would he be rewarded? They would likely try to save that $90k by replacing him, or give him a lot more work with very little increase in comp.
If there's anything I've learned in 10 years, you keep your mouth shut when things are easy because if you speak up they screw you with more work and the same (or nearly so) pay.
This is a very cynical way of looking at things. And maybe rightly so given your experience. Every job I've ever had though there's never been a shortage of work - the few examples that I can recall of whenever one of my engineers frees up a significant amount of time I gave them harder things to do and a recommended a raise (Im a lead not a people manager) to go along with it.
Using "cynical" in looking at the job market when compared to potential abuses is a very boomerish thing.
Us millenials and zoomers see how this society is played out. You work hard for a company - you get more work for same pay.
They demand 2 weeks notice but have no issue in hauling your ass out with no severance on a term.
Managers promise increases and you get 2% , or 1/3 of inflation.
Companies' recruiters target their own employees for their own jobs at $20k more than they're making. And new people (without experience) get more than the experienced ones.
Health insurance costs more and more each year, all the while covering less and less.
And the harassment. Damn, the harassment.
And you, individually, cannot do much of anything regarding the company when negotiating grievances. Unions can, but tech people have this poisonous mindset that they can somehow do better than a union.
So yes, I am /r/antiwork . I've lived through enough of stupid shit. And we're done with it.
I'm not anti-work. I'm just anti-work for exploitive jerks. I have no problem working hard for myself (projects, chores, improvements, etc).
I think we both just realize that the rewards are simply not commensurate with effort in most cases. Executive and management pay goes up, yet they are just overhead, not production. So essentially they have to take advantage of the value produced by their worker for themselves. We recognize this and are unmotivated.
In the US with its dominant at-will, employer-favored asymmetric, antagonistic worker-business employment policy model, unless the employee is in a hot du jour skill (and trust me, this current local maxima programmers like us are enjoying will come crashing to an abrupt, sobering end) where they can with 100% certainty quit one day and pick up a new job in a couple weeks, or they observe from history they report to a leadership structure like yours that they can trust coming forward, the incentives are all aligned against sharing such productivity gains with the employer. At least until the employee has another job lined up.
This is because the leadership incentives are massively tilted in favor of taking big, quick wins off the table as soon as they appear, and the details are not transmitted up the reporting chain. Eliminating a position and maintaining its work output through automation is bonused far more than "just" the automation by itself. The numbers of the elimination show up on the books, but the skills, organizational knowledge, innovation, organizing, perseverance, and other attributes it took to bring the automation across the finish line do not show up as numbers or even slide decks with conceptual angles.
When faced with showing a 2X or greater cost savings plus a productivity boost, or a 0.10-1.00X valued productivity boost and re-positioning the employee to another role with a spin-up cost, the effect on bonuses is noticeable. When the leadership's tenure themselves is uncertain, is it any wonder why incentive choices fall where they do?
I come at this from the consulting side, and I see far more short-sighted incentivized leadership than leadership like you in my client accounts because of the prevailing incentive structures in my clients. This is interesting to me because one of my theses I'm observing for is going forward, the high-margin companies are going to be the ones that buck this trend. I suspect this is because those companies are tapping into what I believe is a growing successfully adaptive response to the technologically-driven complexity increasingly associated with high margins: you need high capital, low time preference, and high+deep trust. It used to be with sufficient capital and moderate trust at just leadership levels, you could power through nearly any business, but I'm seeing signs this model is increasingly mal-adaptive to economic structures with strong network effects affinities.
Because he doesn't care about the job being done, but only about getting paid for the results. It's like admitting someone already owns a goose that lays golden eggs when you can instead sell them the eggs.
Why, its a law firm, not a tech company, there are no other jobs for him to do. By giving them the script he would literally "automate himself out of a job". What would be the incentive to keep him?
I work in enterprise architecture and the most annoying part of my job is telling dev teams to comply with policies and best practices, which are fully documented and yet ignored. I would love to have AI solution that could review a uml or a design document or a terraform script and write out responses.
I've been working 4 jobs SWE roles remotely (3 full time, 1 part time) for several years now. I have to admit that the most challenging aspect of working multiple jobs is finding the right balance of working hard enough at each job just to get by. Automating a lot of the busy work sounds challenging for more hands on technical roles. I may need to take some pay cuts to find easier roles that I can automate.
If anyone has any tips on how to automate parts of their engineering work I'm all ears!
I've done this as well, multiple swe jobs, I also did not find ways to automate. Just trying to get a little something done every day to report in the stand ups is what I did. Most teams are so low performing it was easy. Every so often a new manager would come along and make my life hell then I'd have to move on.
I worked at a Big Important Place, and two or three times a day I'd shut down an online transaction system, back up a file, move a new file into place, then bring the online transaction system back up. Took maybe two minutes.
On any given day, I'd do literally five minutes of work, maybe eight.
I didn't need to check any logs at the end of the day. That wasn't my job.
Easier way - attend all the "allyship" and DEI meetings instead of doing your job. If confronted say "challenging white supremacy is everyones job!" and insist they should "do the work"
Join Zoom. Use a heart or snaps emoji in the first five minutes. Turn off camera. Leetcode.
Isn’t this a prime opportunity for disruption? These kinds of stories seem to crop up now and then. Is it inevitable that a startup will offer a service for creating custom solution for such repetitive manual tasks at a fraction of the price? $90k per annum leaves a lot of margin.
Examples where computers are actually made to save routine manual labor seem to be few and far between. Mostly, computers of today are a form of nuisance (as described in this sad blog post[0]). These stories could have happened in the 1980s, and be just as impactful. You would think we're long past this, but it's AD 2022 and whole industries seem to only start noticing that automation exists, is possible, and is relevant to them.
I think that in many regards, automation is more or less fully used only in the IT industry itself, and maybe a couple more where computers actually are front and center. A lot of others, after having bitter experience with computers, seem more skeptical, maybe justly so.
Startups like you say seem to crop up now and then, but it seems to me that while you could have some dolce vita as an individual, this approach won't make a company rich.
It’s difficult to disrupt companies or even whole industries that are stuffed with busy work, and had management completely uninterested in efficiency. Especially prevalent in some (non US, non Tech, high barriers to entry) work cultures that value jobs for the boys and value relationships over merit or efficiency.
I’ve seen countless processes that were locked in place to protect the status of prima Donnas in Legal or Finance, which must rubber stamp projects or infrastructure requests. So nothing gets done except what suits those inside the broken process.
Except you just told the whole world and just like the fools that are bragging about their "overwork" on reddit, they're doing so against their own interests. These kinds of things end up on the front page of the BBC under the "work life" section which your boss may inevitably see, then get a wild idea that his/her employees must be doing the same, and start a crusade to end it. Pro tip: if something is meant to be kept a secret, don't spread it online. This goes for job automation, multiple jobs, favorite camping spots, etc.
As a company it can be really hard to assess whether your problems require permanent employees or whether a contractor could just come in and give you a button to click. Sometimes you actually know about the second option, but the process is so important that you want someone technical to monitor the results of clicking the button everyday. Because if the button stops working, or does the wrong thing and you don’t know, the results are disastrous. So his employer might actually prefer this arrangement to having him just give them the script and walk away.
90K! We have a couple similar problems at work and paid a vendor $200k per year each time and then paid for Engineers to glue our systems into the vendor. Sounds like a deal to me.
I automated the most time-consuming tasks of my job about a year after I joined the company.
Instead of sitting back and gloating about it on social media, I used the extra time to take on additional projects and to help other departments in order to increase my value to the company.
When the COVID cuts came, I was labeled "essential" staff. So while the rest of my department was downsized from over 50 people to fewer than 10, I was able to keep my job.
Yeah that isn't even remotely close to market, which is why ATL was writing about it. Kellogg Hansen pays significantly over market salaries, too. Turns out I was wrong about 8th years, though. This is the scale most biglaw firms adopted this year (https://abovethelaw.com/2021/12/davis-polk-bonuses-21/).
We just got memos about $10-20k raises, too, and it looks like Milbank kicked that off yesterday.
Still no $400k bonuses unless you're at Wachtell or Kellogg.
FWIW I read this awhile ago or some version of it but I have absolutely automated a job or an entire department’s job away with scripts.
Think debt collection and EDI file transfers daily to Equifax/Transunion and parsing the response files for skip tracing. People got paid to drag and drop files in an FTP client and my first inclination was to script it.
Assuming for the moment that this is a true story, IMO if the person is "clocking in" and getting paid by the hour, then this is dishonest and perhaps criminal.
If the person is paid a salary then it's fine. Salaried employees are paid to get a job done, not for their time.
As someone who definitely agrees that people shouldn't have to work in poor conditions, I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated. Does anyone else get that feeling?
I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor.
The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.
I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do.
Some of the manipulation seems obvious. Some of it less so. I always felt like some kind ublock origin style plugin that highlights or removes known instances of PR/manipulation/propanda would be helpful. Perhaps an AI trained on press releases from big corps and governments that performs authorship identification for a start. 'The writing style in this post are an 80% match for a press release by <government body> linked below'. Kind of like those websites that try to identify fake product reviews.
Theres a high chance that would probably get gamed, too, I guess.
>I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated.
What sounds off to you? It seems pretty straightforward how the "fake posts" can arise out of uncoordinated behavior. Antiwork discusses various grievances that reddit's demographics has (capitalism, under/un-employment, poor working conditions). Readers are more likely to engage with topics that they're passionate about, so the subreddit becomes a great place to farm karma/upvotes, and content creators happily oblige.
I don't think so. Humans are pretty good at keeping in sync with one another. This story and most on antiwork are likely fake and people are just keeping in sync to play reddits upvote game.
This story reminds me of a junior developer named Mac [0]:
Once upon a time, long ago, there was a company of Lisp programmers. It was so long ago, in fact, that Lisp had no macros. Anything that couldn't be defined with a function or done with a special operator had to be written in full every time, which was rather a drag. Unfortunately, the programmers in this company--though brilliant--were also quite lazy. Often in the middle of their programs--when the tedium of writing a bunch of code got to be too much--they would instead write a note describing the code they needed to write at that place in the program. Even more unfortunately, because they were lazy, the programmers also hated to go back and actually write the code described by the notes. Soon the company had a big stack of programs that nobody could run because they were full of notes about code that still needed to be written.
In desperation, the big bosses hired a junior programmer, Mac, whose job was to find the notes, write the required code, and insert it into the program in place of the notes. Mac never ran the programs--they weren't done yet, of course, so he couldn't. But even if they had been completed, Mac wouldn't have known what inputs to feed them. So he just wrote his code based on the contents of the notes and sent it back to the original programmer.
With Mac's help, all the programs were soon completed, and the company made a ton of money selling them--so much money that the company could double the size of its programming staff. But for some reason no one thought to hire anyone to help Mac; soon he was single- handedly assisting several dozen programmers. To avoid spending all his time searching for notes in source code, Mac made a small modification to the compiler the programmers used. Thereafter, whenever the compiler hit a note, it would e-mail him the note and wait for him to e-mail back the replacement code. Unfortunately, even with this change, Mac had a hard time keeping up with the programmers. He worked as carefully as he could, but sometimes-- especially when the notes weren't clear--he would make mistakes.
The programmers noticed, however, that the more precisely they wrote their notes, the more likely it was that Mac would send back correct code. One day, one of the programmers, having a hard time describing in words the code he wanted, included in one of his notes a Lisp program that would generate the code he wanted. That was fine by Mac; he just ran the program and sent the result to the compiler.
The next innovation came when a programmer put a note at the top of one of his programs containing a function definition and a comment that said, "Mac, don't write any code here, but keep this function for later; I'm going to use it in some of my other notes." Other notes in the same program said things such as, "Mac, replace this note with the result of running that other function with the symbols x and y as arguments."
This technique caught on so quickly that within a few days, most programs contained dozens of notes defining functions that were only used by code in other notes. To make it easy for Mac to pick out the notes containing only definitions that didn't require any immediate response, the programmers tagged them with the standard preface: "Definition for Mac, Read Only." This--as the programmers were still quite lazy--was quickly shortened to "DEF. MAC. R/O" and then "DEFMACRO."
Pretty soon, there was no actual English left in the notes for Mac. All he did all day was read and respond to e-mails from the compiler containing DEFMACRO notes and calls to the functions defined in the DEFMACROs. Since the Lisp programs in the notes did all the real work, keeping up with the e-mails was no problem. Mac suddenly had a lot of time on his hands and would sit in his office daydreaming about white-sand beaches, clear blue ocean water, and drinks with little paper umbrellas in them.
Several months later the programmers realized nobody had seen Mac for quite some time. When they went to his office, they found a thin layer of dust over everything, a desk littered with travel brochures for various tropical locations, and the computer off. But the compiler still worked--how could it be? It turned out Mac had made one last change to the compiler: instead of e-mailing notes to Mac, the compiler now saved the functions defined by DEFMACRO notes and ran them when called for by the other notes. The programmers decided there was no reason to tell the big bosses Mac wasn't coming to the office anymore. So to this day, Mac draws a salary and from time to time sends the programmers a postcard from one tropical locale or another.
I once had a coworker who told me the story of someone who fell through the cracks and quite literally get lost in the bureaucracy of a fortune 50 company.
To set the stage, my coworker was an investigator who primarily focused on physical security, legal and HR investigations. We worked at a very large company (around 140,000 employees) and during the 90s/early 2000s one of the primary ways they grew was through mergers and acquisitions.
Well, during this time period the company went through an acquisition spree, purchasing hundreds, maybe even thousands of smaller companies in very high margin, specialty products. They would then optimize their costs (read: layoff a good portion of their workforce like R&D, HR, finance, IT) and basically let the product run the course and then sell it off for about 60-80% of what it paid for it once it no longer was profitable.
As you can imagine this could make things a bit chaotic at times, where people were coming and going all the time, with constant org-changes and layoffs happening all the time.
Meet Tom. Tom was came to work at this company in the late 80s after his small company was acquired by the large company. Tom had been working at the company ever since and when he hit his 20 years at the company, he opted to retire with a full pension. He did what every good employee does, notified his manager and let him know that at the end of the month he would be retiring.
The Executive VP whom Tom reported to, who had just started about 6 months earlier asked his admin "who the fuck is this guy, I don't know any Tom that works for me". The admin replied, actually he does report to you and he has been here for a very long time. The EVP was confused and asked what he did, which nobody could really answer. So he reached out to HR and was like "hey, I have no idea who this is or what they do, can you look into this?".
Tom had a very inflated title when his old company had gotten acquired. Something to the effect of "Senior VP, Engineering" but his role was effectively customer support, providing customer support for some legacy industrial systems that the company had manufactured and deployed in the 70s/80s. Right after the acquisition his immediate boss (the acquired companies old CEO) quit, which kicked off a bit of a perfect storm. After his boss left Tom was told that he would report to one of the executives, lets call him John, of the large company, while they figured things out and that he should coordinate with some of the other customer support people to align the way the work with their customers.
A few weeks later, John was then promoted to run one of the other divisions of the company as part of the yearly promotion/review cycle. Before John had moved on though, he had written the performance review for Tom which consisted of your doing a great job, keep working with the support team and going forward, they will have a better feel for your performance and manage your workload. When Tom tried to meet with his new boss, the new boss cancelled several meetings and then said "Just keep doing what your doing, only let me know if we have issues".
As the company bought and sold companies like playing cards, a culture of keeping your head low while looking busy took hold of the company and nobody wanted to be the sqeaky wheel about anything. Tom had a set of tasks and reports that he was responsible for and he worked diligently on those tasks.
Since there weren't any issues that he couldn't take care of, he never needed to meet with his direct manager. Other people in the company saw his title and who he reported to and generally thought he was some sort of bigwig and avoided talking to him for fear of getting on an executives radar. Each year, his boss would rate him as meets expectations and his admin assistant would ask the customer support people how he was doing, which would always respond with "no issues".
However, about 2-3 years after Toms old company was bought, they stopped selling the product and put the things Tom supported went into a maintenance only status. Weeks, months, years and then decades went by and every week Tom would sit in his office, waiting for support phone calls and deliver his report on Friday.
From the investigation, they had found that over the last 10 years that Tom was employed at the company there were only 2 customers who paid for support. 2 years before Tom retired, one of the customers didn't renew support and when they reached out to the other customer they responded "we have no idea what this is for, we just pay the invoices when we get them".
They estimated over the last 10-15 years at the company, that Tom worked approximately 20-30 minutes/week but had otherwise followed all company policies and procedures.
Although these reads more than a bit contrived, I actually believe the gist of it. I once worked in such a "acquired for the product that won't be invested in and let die" companies/subsidiary and something like this did happen for the entire org. I joined after it'd been going on for about 20 years and they had a hiring spurt because someone got the idea to "modernize". The modernization effort ended when that exec left, and the company and it's products languished for several more years. Eventually the acquiring company was acquired and the new owner was super focused on margins and cut a lot of people. So yeah, it does happen.
"different people have different opinions" but it's funny to see the cognitive dissonance. Lots of hate ITT for anti-work, yet HN is usually a hotbed for pro UBI sentiment.
> When his gig is up he has nothing to show and is stuck were he was when taking that job.
The right answer is "start finding a second job, now." Make $180k for 8 hours and 10 minutes of your life! Or alternatively, keep on keeping on and market yourself as a legal document management automation specialist when you bounce.
> Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed or not making a real difference.
I have a wife and kids to help me feel needed, and a garden that needs tending when I want to feel myself making a difference. Work is work. 90% of jobs are filled to the gills with bureaucracy and designed to ensure the average employee does very little and accomplishes nothing. Might as well enjoy it when they make it easy to enjoy.
I was for a few years in college a data entry clerk making $12.50/hr. It was effectively copy/pasting with some extra clicks and being a computer science student at the time I wrote an excel connector that did ~80% of my job. It only required me to intervene on especially hard data entry stuff (lots of math or formulas). There really was no benefit to tell anyone I did this. Not because I wanted to be lazy but it would just mean more data entry and not what I wanted to do (automating other people's stuff).
There's loads of these BS jobs out there especially when numpty salesmen are involved. It was relatively soul crushing because it didn't really afford me any extra time to do school work (cube farm yay) but I was able to basically zone out and make money, or stash some homework problems and work them while appearing to stare intently at the screen. I don't harbor any ill will towards them though unlike most of these /r/antiwork losers. They were friendly to me and it was just the culture there that "if it isn't done manually then we dont need a person to do it".
I ended up getting a couple raises and only left when I got my first real SWE job. I got in touch with them recently and there are still some scripts running some important IT processes I wrote many, many years ago running today.
I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could do it in a minute (it was a slow machine)
Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a "file upload" feature and I figured out the format.
I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data to the format the mainframe needed.
I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's info in the daily Lotus 123 update files.
All of this should have been done in a database but I had just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about computers in the first place.
Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software companies the next summer.
Ugh that subreddit is just a cesspool. Most of the stories are fake and it attracts the bottom feeders of society.
People need work to feel fulfilled. I get that a corporate job may not meet that demand but this idea that you can just eschew any work and be mentally ok isn't true.
Vast majority of rich are not idle and live very active life. While they may not do work as you understand it, they do philanthropy, investment, etc. Few if any just stay home to watch TV - which is equivalent of automating work and not telling anyone.
Oh. So making them not dependent on losing 8 hours of their work per weekday to a boss, and giving them freedom to do what they like in that time, isn't making their lives worse? But if the same state is achieved by a poor person then...?
I would agree that also not needing to be available for a boss at all, even "just in case something goes wrong", is better, but that doesn't seem to be the argument. Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to do much of your waking hours is morally or psychologically harmful. Which obviously becomes absurd when we apply it to rich people. Which is my point. Why's it fine for one group and something to worry about with another?
[EDIT] More directly, I'm wary any time I encounter "be careful with that freedom, poor people, it might be bad for you, and I'm not sure we can trust you to do the right thing with it! Rich people, carry on as you were, you're all fine and need no oversight or pointers, obviously." as an argument.
Dude you're a fool if you don't think rich people put in hours and hours of work. They're almost never not working. Their entire lives typically revolve around work and nothing else.
You might have a point if you're talking trust fund babies but those people are miserable because they do nothing. They're not happy. The vast majority of wealth is not handed down.
>Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to do much of your waking hours is morally or psychologically harmful.
Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give you this freedom, nor should they because it would then be meaningless.
I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and lacking in any real world experience. You need to grow up and realize that almost nothing in life that's easily obtained is worth a shit.
> Dude you're a fool if you don't think rich people put in hours and hours of work. They're almost never not working. Their entire lives typically revolve around work and nothing else.
This is most people, rich or not. The rich just don't have to do work they aren't enthusiastically choosing to do. The ~50% of normal folks' work that they're not paid to do—property maintenance, the boring kind of shopping, cooking, driving themselves and others around, fighting with insurance, keeping a schedule and making appointments, cleaning, childcare, et c.—are, tellingly, the kind of work that rich folks typically pay others to do for them. What remains is work that is done purely by choice. Not only no boss, but no personal work that isn't done by choice. That's the difference. The "idle" poor still have more work imposed on them—work they cannot avoid doing—than the "idle" rich, by a long shot.
So again: rich folks can have little to no work imposed on them (and in fact pay to avoid nearly all such imposition) and that's fine, but if poor people are in the situation of having merely a substantial part, but nowhere near all, of their required-work burden removed, that may be a bad thing for them and we should worry? That seems odd. My "idle rich" quip has you responding as if I've attacked something sacred, because, as you state, most of those folks stay plenty busy, but if that's the case, what's the motivation for worrying about poor people not being able to do the same?
It's also the case that having lots of money means being able to turn hobbies into "work", and maybe even money-making ventures, without ever having to do the parts you don't want to. That looks an awful lot like play, even if it's producing an income. Which, to be clear, I think is fine. Shit, that's exactly where I, and probably most people, want to be. The part where I get lost is when poor people gaining a fraction of that freedom is worrisome.
> Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give you this freedom, nor should they because it would then be meaningless.
Where, exactly, the fuck, did I claim that getting rich if you're not already rich is not, typically, very hard work?
> I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and lacking in any real world experience.
This is perhaps the most appropriate time I've ever employed this: I'm rubber, you're glue.
[EDIT] Are we using very different definitions of rich, perhaps? I find this exchange baffling enough that I'm beginning to wonder if we're operating from entirely different terms. I wouldn't consider anyone who'd suffer a large drop in quality of life if they decided to stop working for several normally-work-aged years, to be rich. That's what I mean by rich. Not an entrepreneur with a whopping mid-seven-figures in the bank, or the owner of a modestly successful local chain of stores, or anything like that. People who hang out at expensive parts of the "Med" and ski the Alps annually, despite living in the US, who could afford a very nice new car every month if they decided that's what they wanted, keep a personal staff on payroll, and, crucially, who don't need to work to keep doing that kind of thing indefinitely, are rich. Fussell's "upper" and "top-out-of-sight", not his "upper-middle" (who may do much of the above, but can't keep doing it without continuing to work) and certainly not anything lower than that.
Can confirm this to be true. I was lucky enough to sell my tech startup a few years ago and become a multi-millionaire overnight. I did the usual newly-rich stuff like buy a sports car, take vacations, go to the beach a bunch, etc. It became boring, and I started sliding into bad behaviors such as drinking most days. I knew I had to change it up for my own health and sanity, so I started another company. This has given me something to do with my day and I'm much happier and healthier for it.
You're maliciously interpreting OP to imply that "slaving over a hot keyboard" is the only way to feel fulfilled.
Whether you are an employee, company owner, gardener, woodworker, whatever you are being fulfilled by "working". Applying yourself willfully and deliberately to a problem. If you are not being fulfilled you find something else. Or, like most people, you realize working for someone won't be fulfilling, so you instead seek fulfillment in work that you enjoy - such as your hobbies.
This equating of employment with slavery by the /r/antiwork types is why the subreddit is quickly becoming the butt of every joke. Yes, it's not uncommon your profession is unfulfilling. Most well adjusted people derive fulfillment from work outside of their profession.
Once one understands your idiosyncratic definition of "work", you are of course right.
But your statement is still quite meaningless as part of a discussion, because that's not how everybody else uses the word, and a discussion where one participant uses his own terms, wildly divergent from everyone else's, can never get anywhere meaningful.
Huh? Are you expecting others to take care of your needs while you do nothing?
At what time in history has this ever been an option. You would be dead in a ditch with this attitude for most of our history. Maybe you need to go out into the woods and survive without help to force an attitude change.
You have a skewed since of reality egged on by a society that's let you survive off of doing basically nothing and yet you still complain. The problem here is that you believe all of the stuff to keep you alive just magically appears without anyone doing any work.
While you're likely to get skewered for this line, I think it's because of a mismatch in vocabulary that is being ignored. The "work" in antiwork is usually referring to paid employment, but it seems that you're using it more akin to fulfilling accomplishment. I agree with you on the whole that people need to feel that they are making a positive impact on their surroundings to feel satisfaction.
Maybe that comes from paid employment, or volunteer work, or hobbies, or social interactions. A street preacher, a stay at home parent, an ancient cave painter, a bricklayer, and a software architect might all feel equally satisfied by their work, irrespective of the value placed on that work by their society.
In fact, I would argue that the (professed) goals of antiwork are aligned with your view -- people should be free to pursue the work they personally find the most fulfilling, rather than the most profitable.
>The "work" in antiwork is usually referring to paid employment,
Except it's not, the posts also reflect this.
"A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles."
Exactly. A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, and want to get the most out of a work-free life that they can in stead devote to the fulfilling accomplishment that you -- but no-one else -- call "work".
Reading comprehension. You neglected to pay attention to most of my comment.
Who is forcing you work a mind-numbing job?
Do you want everyone else to pay for you to do nothing? Do what you want, but don't expect others to donate what they've earned to your finger painting or whatever it is you think you should do to be fulfilled daily. This idea that everyone will just suddenly become creative happy geniuses as soon as "mind-numbing" work is alleviated is false.
Love the poster's ingenuity and hate his attitude, and the antiwork subreeddit.
Attitude: $90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for this person's retirement, particularly if they encounter major expenses. He should be spending his new free time either developing a side-hustle, a business, or delivering additional value for his employer for which he must insist on additional compensation. I used to be well aware of evidence & case management systems and this person is one decision away from existing software making his perceived job less relevant.
Antiwork: I entered the workforce during a deep recession, and I was a recruiter for infoTech during another recession. I've traveled extensively overseas for work. It will be an employers market eventually, perhaps soon, and the antiwork crowd is going to meet reality head-on when it happens. Nothing wrong with ditching bad employers & developing side-hustles. There is something wrong with demonizing work. Part (by no means all) of the growth one sees abroad is due to acceptance and often positive attitudes about work, with less emphasis on "fairness". Life isn't even close to fair and some societies and people understand how to work with that better than others do.
HN really lives in a some sort of wealthy bubble. $90k is plenty of money to save for retirement in most of the country. If it's not, then the majority of people in the US will never be able to retire.
That's what it has become in an economic system that failed at its only task, ensuring proper distribution of resources. Most jobs serve only the purpose of making a restricted group of people richer, while stealing the workers' time on earth and often worsening society.
Edit: if you think that's not true, you live in a bubble. Try some of the jobs the majority of the population has to put up with, then we can talk again.
Yeah, for reference the median household income in the US is under $70k. Of course cost of living depends a lot on the locality, but 90k as a single person goes pretty far anywhere other than the Bay Area, NYC, or a few other expensive hubs.
It's not enough to save for retirement in the US, and that "majority will never be able to retire" is a reality in any of the 50 states. We just haven't had it hit the fan yet.
Edit: I read that as $90k total, to be dispensed over the remaining years. I agree that $90k per year indeed ought to be plenty.
I thought r/antiwork was really about calling out abusive employers and guiding us to better work/life relationship, but it is actually against all work in any form. Meaning, if your house catches fire, it's up to you to put it out - they don't want anyone employed as professional firefighters who might actually know WTF they're doing. Medical problems? Fix it yourself. There's no paramedics to respond, no surgeons to fix you, no pharmacists for drugs, no nurses/techs for recovery.
If it was a movement about fixing worker conditions (a submarine advertisement for unions, if you will), it'd actually be a good movement. But right now, it's positioning itself as just an angry outcry forum that apparently wants the planet to be ruled by anarchy and extreme independence.
What a waste of potential. If you don't believe me, try asking them what the good industries are that have good work/life balance. The answers you'll get boil down to "there are no good jobs at all".
I think it's a movement about fixing work conditions and somewhat aggressive towards corporations and their practices. Taking it to an extreme may be a push to kill off the movement.
The side-hustle culture is a cancer.
> delivering additional value for his employer for which he must insist on additional compensation
Good luck with that.
/r/antiwork is a societal response to this exact sentiment. "Oh make a decent amount more than the national average and still cant afford to retire? Simple, monetize what little free time you have left!"
No, the requirement for a side-hustle is due to the decades of upper management and C-levels taking advantage of employees and leading the stagnation of wages.
The solution to a systemic issue is a systemic solution. The personal responsibility solutions are just a distraction.
>$90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for this person's retirement
uhhh... what? that's almost double the average US salary
>Life isn't even close to fair and some societies and people understand how to work with that better than others do.
"Life isn't fair" is not an argument against striving for fairness. My understanding of the antiwork people is that they think they're being more productive than what they're being paid for, and often being treated poorly along the way. There's data backing that up, and it doesn't seem ridiculous to try and recapture some of that.
Nobody asks to be born and society is setup to extract as much as possible from you until you die. Fuck society, fuck humanity, fuck productivity, and fuck work. It can all burn for all I care.
I'm saving as much money as I can to escape wage slavery then just coasting the rest of my life without living another productive second.
"$90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for this person's retirement, particularly if they encounter major expenses."
This simply isn't true in most areas. You can live a modest lifestyle and have a very good chance of retirement at a "normal" retirement age (60-65). The median US software dev makes about $110k and is one of the more highly compensated jobs. I make about the same as the poster, and I'm actually in decent shape for retirement, even with a family.
On the second point I sort of agree. Why not take a second job and make more?
The amount you need in retirement is roughly proportional to how much you spend while working, so that if you save 15% of your gross salary throughout your career and invest it in stock, you should be able to retire by 65 and maintain a similar lifestyle in retirement to what you lived while working. The salary is not what matters, it is the savings rate.
Meh,plenty of deluded kids there, but the core idea is basically true. Nobody is arguing against work per se (most healthy humans like to do stuff), they are arguing about the XXI century version of soulless indentured service many jobs are. Productivity exploded in the last 50 years and yet the people are still running the same thread-mill for even less benefits so I dont blame anybody who gives the middle-finger to the corporate world and try to find an alternative.
"For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. "
Not a win for the COO/GM/CFO/FP&A/whatever who is tasked with finding efficiencies in the business and doing optimization. By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business.
Are you really saying that the poster should tell them about his script, which they will then take and use, removing the need for OP? So OP who as far as anyone at the firm is concerned is doing a terrific job should sacrifice his position and take a financial hit so that the COO/GM can get a nice bonus? That makes no sense at all.
Actually he should have discussed it with others in the company as he went, given that chance has passed... Sans your hyperbole, that is indeed what I am saying. OP most certainly should discuss how he is executing his job with his employer, if they say it's fine, cool... but that should be their choice, business does not happen in a vacuum, it's a team of people working together. He's taking it upon himself to decide what work needs to be done for the business, that's unfair to the rest of the team.
how is he taking it on himself to decide what work needs to be done? He was hired to perform a set of tasks, and has written a script to accomplish them. You could argue he has taken it upon himself to decide how the required work is done and then one could say "so what?". If the business is happy with his output then everyone is a winner. To think its an employees job to suicide their employment is not the actions a rational actor takes. If that is the case, OP would be incentivized to destroy his script and return the prior method of manually processing files which he specified was not keeping pace with business needs. Society has reached a strange place when bottom of the food chain employees are expected to suffer financial hardship for the good of the company execs.
Employees are resources to the business, as the work changes, the resources change, it's not his job to decide how he should be resourced in the business. It's literally why HR is called HR.
If an employee is a resource, what exactly do they owe them? Why should a "resource" have any sort of respect at all. It's fundamentally adversarial - the resource must maximise their gain from their position and the company most maximise their gain from their "resource". You're just sour that the resource is winning for once.
Friend what you are suggesting is a very slippery slope and leads to employees not making any suggestions at all to improve business processes as its not part of their job description. You are essentially saying that OP would be better off just never attempting to automate the process at all and to just continue the existing process that was not working after all its the role of whoever is in charge of efficiency to come up with better solutions. The business would still experience delays but OP would not be "stealing". Your position actually incentivizes employees to work as slowly as possible as long as they meet the letter of their employment contract.
"Hey folks, I'm going to implement this script, I'm concerned in doing so, you will just fire me and keep the script, I enjoy my job and working with you all, is there a way we can find additional tasks for me to do in the business" is a fine conversation to have with your manager, sure.. you don't have to, but in my humble opinion, then pretending you're not stealing from the company knowing what you know, is questionable at best.
ok, lets go with that. What happens when the manager says "yes, implement the script and then we are going to fire you". What if Op refuses to implement the script then and just quits? A logical employee with rational self interest would never have that conversation because they know it likely ends with their termination. So in reality your proposal actually leads to the employee never implementing or recommending the script for fear of losing their job and the employer continuing to suffer as the prior manual process leads to missed deadlines. Your suggestion can only end with a lose / lose scenario. This is a prisoners dilemma where OP is incentivized not to discuss his solution with the employer and is really his only rational option.
Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script and explain it, and then get an intern to run it once a week. If the script isn't written, I now know I can hire a consultant to write the script once. Sounds like a win for me.
Except that's not how it would play out in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution, if they're not excited about ANY other work in my business at all, I'm not sure they are a good fit for my business. As big boy buffet said. Price is what you pay, but value is what you get, the terms of that deal should be pretty clear imo.
"Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script" This is exactly why the employee is incentivized not to tell his employer. whether he voluntarily discloses how the script works or not there is a pretty good chance he loses his job as soon as he reveals its existence even if management is thrilled about it and tells him what a great job he has done.
"in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution" Its a law firm, what is OP going to do abandon tech and become a paralegal?
Your arguments are all very much ignoring the point of how every facet of this situation incentivizes OP not to tell management and that the most likely outcome of telling them is that they lose their job while the company benefits from OP's work and slashes a 90k salary. You are ignoring that OP as a rational actor can only take 1 of 3 actions.
1. Create the script and don't tell management. This is a win / win. Company gets its documents processed on time and OP keeps his job.
2. Don't create the script. Lose / Don't Win. Documents continue to be processed behind schedule but OP keeps his job but does hours of slow manual labor.
3. OP voluntarily gives company his script. Win / Lose. Company gets their documents processed on time, and saves 90k in salary. OP loses his job.
Option 1 is the only option where both parties win.
I understand the situation. I take real issue with them poster taking it upon themselves to make the decision it's win win, you don't, that's fine. :)
I don't not see your perspective, I do, I just don't agree they can say it's win win given the facts. Had they posted the whole thing and ended with "so I told the company and they laughed and now I get paid to do nothing, win win" I'd never have commented. I see why they can say it's a win all around, I just don't agree it truly is, in my opinion further negotiation should happen to test it, however for the reasons discussed exhaustively, that isn't advantageous so won't happen, so I don't think we can truly say it's a win-win, they are working on asymmetric information! :)
re: give up and become a paralegal, no: there may very well be other scripts to be written.
The employee can do as they please, in fact I'm not even saying I disagree with the employee. I'm saying to call it win-win is patently false if it's being kept a secret, they cannot know it's win-win while also lie about it. Everyone else is using my comment as a way to make a dig a capitalism, fine, no problem... but as the system is structure, what the redditor said is not true, it is not necessary win win.
If employees are just "resources", then they can obviously only have the same responsibility towards the employer to make themselves redundant as any other resource has.
So please drop this line for now, and get back to us the next time a brick, a hammer, or a forklift truck takes such an initiative.
Shouldn't whoever is tasked with finding such inefficiencies realize that a simple script could be written to replace the process of manually transferring files to and from cloud storage?
Imperfect analogies so please read between the lines....: Take a finance team, you have a group of specialists who don't really know what each other do, FP&A vs BM&A or Investor relations. However, they don't need to know what each other do because they can trust the person next to them to say, hey.. payroll is now automated, I have extra time now, what should I work on to improve things, is it fair to take advantage of that in a team simply because one person isn't an expert? If you know someones job is to do something, say.. buy servers, but you know they don't know anything about servers, only how to finance them, should you exploit that for your self gain? If there is a person who's job it is to optimize, but the system is obfuscated, is that fair to the team? OP said it's win win, that is intellectually dishonest, it is not win win. that's my real point.
"By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business."
That's not how the law works either. If employee A, B and C all have different processes to do the same task and employee A is faster than the other 2, employee A is not stealing and neither are the other 2.
I don't know what jurisdiction you're referring to, here in Canada what he did would likely be illegal, and the other instance would not. I don't know of a locality where what typon said is illegal. It's not difficult to get creative when pursuing theft of company time, and here I doubt you'd even need to get that creative. I'm an EIR at a law firm so I will ask and report back.
Are you talking law here, or ethics? Your talk about how employees are "resources" with a "duty" to "care" about the business sounds a lot more morality play and less legalistic than you're suddenly switching too now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Depends on if you care about other people I suppose. The West subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move society forward, so yes, till that changes, do think of the business imo.
You’re conflating different things. The business doesn’t really care about the person. The west as a whole subscribing to capitalism does not then lead to the things you are saying “if you care about other people”. There is no logic there.
There is a stock market, people invest in business. People use those investments to put their kids through schools. Profits are distributed to employees in coops, those funds are used to buy things from other people, etc etc etc etc etc, this moves society forward per the capitalistic philosophy. One individual not being forthcoming with the truth in a system like that, creates inefficiencies in the system, and has ripple effects across the whole system. Butterfly effect.
Business is just an implementation of a philosophy, it doesn't care about you, but the idea of business is to care for all, that is the theory and why we use the system. Sadly, it's gotten extremely fucked up over the last 100 years, and we end up with people on reddit doing stuff like this. Capitalism is broken, absolutely, but the redditer is still being intellectually dishonest about the win-win situation.
The business does not care about you. The business is fundamentally a sociopathic entity. Only a fool would care about that, unless you have a personal connection to the shareholders.
I started scripting and automating parts of it, which eventually got pieced together to be completely hands off unless a new partner came on board or there was some new error. Since some of these steps used keyboard macros on VT100 terminals, I couldn't even use my computer while it was running, so I requested another, with the explicit intent that I could use it to surf the web while my main computer was doing it's thing. Data load lag times went from weeks, to days, to hours.
When it came time for performance review, I was told I had "completely redefined the position". I would therefore be assessed against the new definition, and was therefore deemed average, and got a 3% cost of living raise (pro-rated to 2% since I'd only been there 8 months) with no merit increase. A few weeks later, my manager was somehow surprised to the point of tears that I had a new job elsewhere.
A few months later, I got a call from my ex-manager, asking if I had any backups of the programs I wrote (this was long before the days of offsite source control). I said no, I had no need for them and that would probably be illegal. My replacement had somehow lost everything, and was now trying to keep up the old burnout way and they were weeks behind.