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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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
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.
[+] [-] efsavage|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lrvick|4 years ago|reply
It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day .
I wrote a script to fill it out with technical sounding nonsense. After a few weeks the manager came to compliment me on hearing his demands out and being so detailed in my reporting without productivity going down as I suggested in my early reservations.
I explained that I automated it. He was fascinated and asked how it knows what I am doing, smelling a startup opportunity. I explained that it just makes stuff up to appease non technical managers.
"Did you just do this as an elaborate way to give me the middle finger?"
"Pretty much."
He never tried to manage me again, realizing I had automated his job reporting to his managers too.
Said script for fun: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f5578...
[+] [-] keiferski|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patrickk|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
I've also seen worse waste in other industries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary
[+] [-] eterevsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Melatonic|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|4 years ago|reply
Plenty of people get value out of the modern economy. There are always outliers, and OP is a Spiders Georg.
[+] [-] jedberg|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lolc|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I don't think I could work like that. I always look for ways to improve life, and that includes the life of my customers. Not letting them know that the thing is automated keeps them in the belief that it requires manual action, and that to me is a lie by omission. Likely there are other low-hangig fruit to automate, once you're in the mindset.
Another consideration is when the script does something dumb a human wouldn't have done. Is the operator liable for that? Because after all it was not considered part of the job to automate it? Of course, the likelihood of human mistakes weighs more in all likelihood. But when the firm argues (they're lawyers right?) that the mistakes wouldn't have happened if the employee followed protocol, there may be some ugly liability.
[+] [-] leetcrew|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] binarytox1n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TriNetra|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zffr|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nlh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cgriswald|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jbigelow76|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robinduckett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dfxm12|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] readams|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Exactly. Don't underestimate the volume of fake stories posted to Reddit.
I tried giving advice in several computer career subreddits for years. I was always stunned by the volume of obviously fake stories people would post about their boss or company or coworkers. Many of them are easy to debunk with even the slightest attention to detail or a quick browse of the user's posting history.
I could barely believe how frequently I'd read a post with some oddities, only to check the poster's history and see 5 different creative writing style lies posted to other subreddits with entirely different details. A lot of people really like using Reddit to create fake outrage stories, because it's a trivially easy way to collect a lot of upvotes and internet sympathy points.
Very strange phenomenon.
[+] [-] yung_steezy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kluny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hogrider|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loceng|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|4 years ago|reply
It's more about triggering some old memories and getting people to talk than about even telling the whole truth
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exadeci|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supperburg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idworks1|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eckesicle|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nemothekid|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] runjake|4 years ago|reply
I know too many people who've done this during the pandemic, by reading through Automate The Boring Stuff with Python[1] or one[2] of a number[3] of PowerShell books and automate some/all parts of their jobs.
1. https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
2. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-cookbook-4th...
3. https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunche...
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.
[+] [-] dkarl|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] null_object|4 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sebringj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allenu|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wombat-man|4 years ago|reply
Can't even hate and hope things work out for that guy.