This. My friend automated his whole job in Excel.
He supposedly can do a days work in fifteen minutes and then just hang out. Their computers are super locked down, can’t install anything, can’t go to any non-whitelisted sites, but they have Excel.
He supposedly can do a days work in fifteen minutes and then just hang out. Their computers are super locked down, can’t install anything, can’t go to any non-whitelisted sites, but they have Excel.
There are two reasons: 1. They have a specific job with a specific set of duties (think sysadmins, or administrative duties) in a large company or in a state beurocracy. 2. They would rather go home or do something more but they are not permitted: they have metered time in the office and other people would and do shut them down on any initiatives.
To me, a workplace like that is like a kafkaesque nightmare but they seem to be fine with it, or rather, have accepted it. It lets them focus on other things in life outside of work.
i mean, i would imagine some people want to see purpose in their jobs, while others are just treating it as a job and whatever happens with the output of the job is of no consequence. And this is esp. true of gov't jobs, but by no means do the gov't have a monopoly on such inefficiencies.
But my opinion is that there's something systemic that is preventing these jobs from being competed on and efficiencies eked out.
The problem is actually in the work culture, where other coworkers would prevent another worker from becoming too efficient and proactive. So, nothing changes.
Although I wasn't in the condition of automating the time required down to N minutes, I can see how this dynamic plays - essentially, BigCo with dysfunctional management, where efficiency doesn't really matter.
There are also the other stories we don't hear: One of my first jobs involved a very repetitive software task that got boring quickly. I spent four weeks trying to automate it, but eventually had to declare failure[1] and then I had to explain to my boss why I was a month behind on my work that was due in a couple of weeks[2].
I imagine that for every "automated my job and now I can do it in 15 minutes" story there are 15 stories of "I automated my job and now I work just as hard maintaining the automation" and another 50 stories of the "I tried automating my job but failed" kind. Only the first one gets re-told.
[1]: Mainly due to hardware quirks I didn't have the experience and skill to work around.
[2]: This is not a story about how automating something is bad; it's a story about the bad decisions one makes when one is inexperienced!
A few weeks into the job I completely automated these in python and all I had to do was turn my laptop on in the morning, then off in the evening, and I was done.
They were slower, but they also chit chatted with half the office, went to lunch, etc.
Their jobs consisted of pulling some data from here or there, entering it into excel, sending a few emails, entering some data into another system, printing some checks. All stuff that's easy to automate (you'd probably need more than Excel in this case)
In one of his memoirs, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke recalled his days as a young man working for the British bureaucracy (something to do with teacher pensions, as I recall). His particular job involved consolidating huge lists of figures into reports. He observed that the numbers in the reports were rounded to two significant figures, well within the accuracy of his slide rule, and started using the slide rule to do all his work.
He could finish his daily quota before lunch and take every afternoon off.
We both worked at a tox lab and there are masses of numbers to be reviewed. He strung together 8-10 steps to transform, massage, etc. the data for presentation to mgmt, accounting, etc.
What he found was that most of the time, it all ran fine, but when it didn't he had to spend some of that saved time troubleshooting an issue.
They also added more to his plate, since he no longer needed XX hours to accomplish the data push.
In the end, he was more clever than the last person, but didn't have the 7.75 hours of free time that's often touted.
It may exist, but it's rarer.