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.
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.
> > 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.
> 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.
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.
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
“We don’t say that one anymore. You’re going to have to leave.”
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!"
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 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.
It's not that unreal.
I have done something similar in the past, I just kept quiet and let the script do all the work without telling anyone.
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.
It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.
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.
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.
Eh... So unemployed people can't become programmers, or programmers unemployed?
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.
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.
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.
I sort of miss it, in ways.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!"
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.
Its sort of similar situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
$90k may be somewhere in between.
* It had to directly relate to the product.
* You could not use the time to work on some existing project.
* You had to be able to finish it by the end of the hackathon.
Hackathon projects were sometimes adopted by a permanent team, if there was a good fit.
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.
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.
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 don't think this will stick.
It should be, but it’s not in most circumstances. (Industry is fighting it tooth and nail, 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")
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.
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.
Also for probably any litigation that is IT related you could probably get away with a lot more
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'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.
But they really did try to get us to go whole hog on it at first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-accounts/ [1] https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/
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.
Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is stopped
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's more about triggering some old memories and getting people to talk than about even telling the whole truth