I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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...

Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.

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 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 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 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

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.

Can't even hate and hope things work out for that guy.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

As a rule, I always do the work assigned to me just a bit shy of the target.

And, I always automate my work. And I never say a word of it to anyone.

I work in an engineering firm and most of my colleagues are clueless about programming.

Am I cheating? Perhaps. Do I feel guilty? Absolutely not.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Think of your wages as a subscription service to your automation program lol. Big companies love subscription services, right?

spot on, hahah

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!

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.

Join Zoom. Use a heart or snaps emoji in the first five minutes. Turn off camera. Leetcode.

In the end it worked out, but people did get fired or not replaced.

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.

I'm glad I took the high road.

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.

I’ve been wary of what I automate ever since.

If the person is paid a salary then it's fine. Salaried employees are paid to get a job done, not for their time.

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.

[0] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/macros-defining-your-own.html

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.

Personally, I would:

1. Work on personal projects to build skills for something I actually care about

2. Study until I get a new non-boring job.

I would lose my mind if I had to do nothing but play video games all day. I struggle to fill the hours AFTER work! I can't imagine doing nothing.

Laughed out loud at this.

"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.

I have no clue who would pay someone 90$ for copy and pasting files from left to right.

But if this is true I still don't envy him.

When his gig is up he has nothing to show and is stuck were he was when taking that job.

Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed or not making a real difference.

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.

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.

Let the downvoting and flaming begin (sadly).

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.