My 5-year getting paid for doing nothing is over. I'm heartbroken

In the mid-1990s I dropped out of college and took a temp job doing data entry, a job that was supposed to last 6 months. I had very minimal programming skills but even so, it was clear from the first day that I could automate the entire job. In a few weeks I wrote a combination of macros and some SQL to do literally 99% of the work.

The only problem was that it ran too fast and the DBA started to get cranky due to the load on the database. The official word from my boss was to stop immediately and proceed at a more normal pace. I showed him the automation, he shrugged and said "can you just slow it down a bit?". So I throttled the script and added some pauses, slow enough to make the process look like a human was doing the work. The DBA was happy because his Oracle database wasn't under load, my boss was happy since the work would definitely be done in 6 months and he didn't have to hire anyone else, and I was happy because I got to sit on ass and read books while getting paid. NO ONE CARED. The hardest part was looking busy to my co-workers who weren't in the loop.

Eventually in my spare time I got so bored that I learned SQL proper, which prompted me to go back to school and start a career in data and software.

What an excellent story about the working class reaping the rewards of automation. Had the business developed the solution, they would capture the difference instead. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. At worst it is a parable. The lesson is that automation is not our savior.

Sorry, my BS detector tripped at paying two months salary for someone else to develop the solution. Someone in that situation doesn’t have two months salary.

We recently changed some UI at work and suddenly there were thousands of errors, the stack went into some tampermonkey methods, so users were definitely automating our system to do their job. Now the problem is tracking the users, finding who originally wrote this and seeing about getting them a better salary to help improve how the site works.

I worked a job that went from busy all day, every day, to showing up and waiting for things to break over a decade as a system administrator. I tried to help improve the way things were done with their database, wrote a ton of code, 3 different times, and immediate needs always trumped long term fixes.

It broke me. I have no motivation these days as a result.

> Sometimes some co-workers will try to match my order entry quota, which would make me open the code, and change an 8 to 9 to increase my production and keep myself on top. I'd change the numbers regularly "just in case" but nobody even noticed.

He should have tried to get management to offshore the position and bid for the outsourcing contract himself... Replace a whole department!

I thought this would be one of those 'my employer forgot I exist' posts, but it's actually quite different. When it comes to jobs that can be easily automated, I'm torn between the feeling that a person's potential is being wasted on an easy job, vs the feeling that they may be unemployed if somebody automates their job.

Getting laid off isn't the worst that could have happened. What if the company had banned AutoHotkey, so he would have had to go back to entering data by hand, eight hours a day, knowing he was wasting his life.

I ask about AutoHotkey and Karabiner at interviews. My life would be miserable at a company that didn't allow them.

4 years to automate something that some janky autohotkey code could do? Jikes

link: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_g...