[HN Gopher] I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told ...
___________________________________________________________________
I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone
Author : TriNetra
Score : 459 points
Date : 2022-01-19 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| disambiguation wrote:
| hot take: this is basically UBI in practice.
|
| "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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How is it UBI in practice? It is not uniform, and the guy makes
| $92k which in most areas is well above what a person would
| require basic income.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Just in the sense that a job was displaced by automation, so
| the worker is collecting a check from someone wealthy that
| benefits from said automation.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| These are fun to read. I laughed at the one where the guy shared
| a photo of his bong and TV setup at home. One of his major
| innovations was creating appropriately-named folders for his
| work. And seriously, a lot of businesses don't know how to get
| _that_ organized. They are good at other stuff.
|
| 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."
| brimble wrote:
| As far as I can tell from listening to stories from friends who
| aren't in tech circles, sorta halfway knowing how to use a
| computer still makes you a wizard in most non-tech offices. And
| the newer generations are only barely better than the old ones,
| on average, so _that 's_ not putting an end to that state of
| things.
|
| I'm talking, like, you understand how external drives are
| represented, know how to cut & paste files & kinda know what a
| filesystem is and how it's laid out (not what a FAT table is or
| anything like that, I mean just how folders and links/shortcuts
| practically work and such). If you can do more than basic
| arithmetic in Excel, you're basically god. If you can write
| batch scripts (like this person, assuming it's true) or a
| little glue-code python, that's beyond what the others around
| you could even _imagine_.
|
| I'm not sure whether this is a UX failure or there's just too
| much necessary complexity to make things better. To some degree
| I think the basic metaphors we use for representing computer
| concepts and UI to ordinary users are badly underdeveloped, or
| in some way misguided. Certainly I think the "iOS is dumbing
| things down and making people unable to compute!" folks have
| things exactly backwards.
| bittercynic wrote:
| This rings very true for me, but I think the disconnect is
| often an inability to formalize any task. Seems like often
| the same people who can't get a computer to do what they want
| also can't write coherent instructions for another human to
| do what they want.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Yeah, that's really the direction to look in--the people
| themselves, what they're expressing in their way of work, and
| how they perceive their value.
|
| I used to do some psychometric testing for work and was
| mentored about "tech people" in terms of their/our
| psychology. When most people sort themselves by interest,
| they indicate a preference against technology, which can also
| be described as "novel organizations of things." But they
| also indicate against tech by indicating pro-other-stuff
| interests.
|
| So you can still find lots of offices full of non-tech people
| where people are organized, but using yesteryear's tech, i.e.
| yesterday's organizations of things. Plus they are using
| their other strengths.
|
| From a tech POV though, that inclusive view of others'
| strengths is sometimes overlooked, and it's an unfortunate
| truth that the tech-wise are somewhat naturally blinded to
| others' preferred leverage points in doing business.
|
| For example, the ability to give responsive, personal
| customer service. That service may involve some tech people,
| but the person giving the service may be at a significant
| advantage if they don't have a tech background, and have some
| improvisational or emotional-spectrum talent, or other
| reasonable problem-solving tools where tech would otherwise
| fill the skill gap.
|
| I always thought it was interesting stuff...
| honkycat wrote:
| I'm always shocked by the lack of ambition from my friends who
| land "low-effort" office jobs where they aren't doing much.
|
| 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.
| draw_down wrote:
| jakub_g wrote:
| If the story is true, the most impressive part is that he managed
| to write it as .bat!
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I've done this twice, but I was open about it. Once someone was
| fired, and the second time I was moved into a better dev position
| than where I was at.
|
| In the end it worked out, but people did get fired or not
| replaced.
| eckesicle wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| "For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off,
| but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is
| happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me
| to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to
| enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. "
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Are you really saying that the poster should tell them about
| his script, which they will then take and use, removing the
| need for OP? So OP who as far as anyone at the firm is
| concerned is doing a terrific job should sacrifice his position
| and take a financial hit so that the COO/GM can get a nice
| bonus? That makes no sense at all.
| neom wrote:
| Actually he should have discussed it with others in the
| company as he went, given that chance has passed... Sans your
| hyperbole, that is indeed what I am saying. OP most certainly
| should discuss how he is executing his job with his employer,
| if they say it's fine, cool... but that should be their
| choice, business does not happen in a vacuum, it's a team of
| people working together. He's taking it upon himself to
| decide what work needs to be done for the business, that's
| unfair to the rest of the team.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| how is he taking it on himself to decide what work needs to
| be done? He was hired to perform a set of tasks, and has
| written a script to accomplish them. You could argue he has
| taken it upon himself to decide how the required work is
| done and then one could say "so what?". If the business is
| happy with his output then everyone is a winner. To think
| its an employees job to suicide their employment is not the
| actions a rational actor takes. If that is the case, OP
| would be incentivized to destroy his script and return the
| prior method of manually processing files which he
| specified was not keeping pace with business needs. Society
| has reached a strange place when bottom of the food chain
| employees are expected to suffer financial hardship for the
| good of the company execs.
| neom wrote:
| Employees are resources to the business, as the work
| changes, the resources change, it's not his job to decide
| how he should be resourced in the business. It's
| literally why HR is called HR.
| [deleted]
| antihero wrote:
| If an employee is a resource, what exactly do they owe
| them? Why should a "resource" have any sort of respect
| _at all_. It 's fundamentally adversarial - the resource
| must maximise their gain from their position and the
| company most maximise their gain from their "resource".
| You're just sour that the resource is winning for _once_.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Friend what you are suggesting is a very slippery slope
| and leads to employees not making any suggestions at all
| to improve business processes as its not part of their
| job description. You are essentially saying that OP would
| be better off just never attempting to automate the
| process at all and to just continue the existing process
| that was not working after all its the role of whoever is
| in charge of efficiency to come up with better solutions.
| The business would still experience delays but OP would
| not be "stealing". Your position actually incentivizes
| employees to work as slowly as possible as long as they
| meet the letter of their employment contract.
| neom wrote:
| "Hey folks, I'm going to implement this script, I'm
| concerned in doing so, you will just fire me and keep the
| script, I enjoy my job and working with you all, is there
| a way we can find additional tasks for me to do in the
| business" is a fine conversation to have with your
| manager, sure.. you don't have to, but in my humble
| opinion, then pretending you're not stealing from the
| company knowing what you know, is questionable at best.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| ok, lets go with that. What happens when the manager says
| "yes, implement the script and then we are going to fire
| you". What if Op refuses to implement the script then and
| just quits? A logical employee with rational self
| interest would never have that conversation because they
| know it likely ends with their termination. So in reality
| your proposal actually leads to the employee never
| implementing or recommending the script for fear of
| losing their job and the employer continuing to suffer as
| the prior manual process leads to missed deadlines. Your
| suggestion can only end with a lose / lose scenario. This
| is a prisoners dilemma where OP is incentivized not to
| discuss his solution with the employer and is really his
| only rational option.
| neom wrote:
| Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at
| the script and explain it, and then get an intern to run
| it once a week. If the script isn't written, I now know I
| can hire a consultant to write the script once. Sounds
| like a win for me.
|
| Except that's not how it would play out in one of my
| orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution, if
| they're not excited about ANY other work in my business
| at all, I'm not sure they are a good fit for my business.
| As big boy buffet said. Price is what you pay, but value
| is what you get, the terms of that deal should be pretty
| clear imo.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I've read through this thread and you're doing a pretty
| poor job of convincing me the employee should speak up.
|
| The employee has two choices:
|
| 1. Say nothing and keep collecting a paycheck.
|
| 2. Speak up about the script and start a conversation
| that has the possibility of leading towards termination.
|
| It's a pretty big no-brainer for what they should do.
| neom wrote:
| The employee can do as they please, in fact I'm not even
| saying I disagree with the employee. I'm saying to call
| it win-win is patently false if it's being kept a secret,
| they cannot know it's win-win while also lie about it.
| Everyone else is using my comment as a way to make a dig
| a capitalism, fine, no problem... but as the system is
| structure, what the redditor said is not true, it is not
| necessary win win.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at
| the script" This is exactly why the employee is
| incentivized not to tell his employer. whether he
| voluntarily discloses how the script works or not there
| is a pretty good chance he loses his job as soon as he
| reveals its existence even if management is thrilled
| about it and tells him what a great job he has done.
|
| "in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a
| solution" Its a law firm, what is OP going to do abandon
| tech and become a paralegal?
|
| Your arguments are all very much ignoring the point of
| how every facet of this situation incentivizes OP not to
| tell management and that the most likely outcome of
| telling them is that they lose their job while the
| company benefits from OP's work and slashes a 90k salary.
| You are ignoring that OP as a rational actor can only
| take 1 of 3 actions. 1. Create the script and don't tell
| management. This is a win / win. Company gets its
| documents processed on time and OP keeps his job. 2.
| Don't create the script. Lose / Don't Win. Documents
| continue to be processed behind schedule but OP keeps his
| job but does hours of slow manual labor. 3. OP
| voluntarily gives company his script. Win / Lose. Company
| gets their documents processed on time, and saves 90k in
| salary. OP loses his job.
|
| Option 1 is the only option where both parties win.
| neom wrote:
| I understand the situation. I take real issue with them
| poster taking it upon themselves to make the decision
| it's win win, you don't, that's fine. :)
|
| I don't not see your perspective, I do, I just don't
| agree they can say it's win win given the facts. Had they
| posted the whole thing and ended with "so I told the
| company and they laughed and now I get paid to do
| nothing, win win" I'd never have commented. I see why
| they can say it's a win all around, I just don't agree it
| truly is, in my opinion further negotiation should happen
| to test it, however for the reasons discussed
| exhaustively, that isn't advantageous so won't happen, so
| I don't think we can truly say it's a win-win, they are
| working on asymmetric information! :)
|
| re: give up and become a paralegal, no: there may very
| well be other scripts to be written.
|
| I'm going for a bike ride now.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Fair enough, I hope you have a good ride. Appreciated the
| conversation. All the best.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Oh no, won't someone think of the businesses?
| neom wrote:
| Depends on if you care about other people I suppose. The West
| subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move society
| forward, so yes, till that changes, do think of the business
| imo.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| You're conflating different things. The business doesn't
| really care about the person. The west as a whole
| subscribing to capitalism does not then lead to the things
| you are saying "if you care about other people". There is
| no logic there.
| neom wrote:
| There is a stock market, people invest in business.
| People use those investments to put their kids through
| schools. Profits are distributed to employees in coops,
| those funds are used to buy things from other people, etc
| etc etc etc etc, this moves society forward per the
| capitalistic philosophy. One individual not being
| forthcoming with the truth in a system like that, creates
| inefficiencies in the system, and has ripple effects
| across the whole system. Butterfly effect.
|
| Business is just an implementation of a philosophy, it
| doesn't care about you, but the idea of business is to
| care for all, that is the theory and why we use the
| system. Sadly, it's gotten extremely fucked up over the
| last 100 years, and we end up with people on reddit doing
| stuff like this. Capitalism is broken, absolutely, but
| the redditer is still being intellectually dishonest
| about the win-win situation.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Depends on if you care about other people I suppose.
|
| Oh no! Will someone PLEASE think about the multi-
| millionaire CEOs?
|
| > The West subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move
| society forward
|
| People might claim this, but it's a bullshit bad-faith
| claim.
|
| Capitalism exists for one sole purpose: Create profit.
| Capitalists will happily destroy the planet if it makes
| their ticker symbol go up.
| antihero wrote:
| The business _does not care about you_. _The business_ is
| fundamentally a sociopathic entity. Only a fool would
| _care_ about that, unless you have a personal connection to
| the shareholders.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Is that not a failure of whoever is tasked with finding
| efficiencies? Seems like the employee should be given their job
| :).
| typon wrote:
| And when a company makes surplus profit from its employees'
| labour and doesn't compensate them for it accordingly, is that
| also considered theft?
| neom wrote:
| No. That is in fact not how the law works at all.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "By staying silent he is denying the business the ability
| to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing
| for the business."
|
| That's not how the law works either. If employee A, B and C
| all have different processes to do the same task and
| employee A is faster than the other 2, employee A is not
| stealing and neither are the other 2.
| neom wrote:
| I don't know what jurisdiction you're referring to, here
| in Canada what he did would likely be illegal, and the
| other instance would not. I don't know of a locality
| where what typon said is illegal. It's not difficult to
| get creative when pursuing theft of company time, and
| here I doubt you'd even need to get that creative. I'm an
| EIR at a law firm so I will ask and report back.
| antihero wrote:
| It's illegal to fulfil your job obligations creatively?
| neom wrote:
| It can be, yes.
| willcipriano wrote:
| What law are you referring to?
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| Shouldn't whoever is tasked with finding such inefficiencies
| realize that a simple script could be written to replace the
| process of manually transferring files to and from cloud
| storage?
| neom wrote:
| That is not how teams work. I recommend this book to learn
| more on how teams work: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Teams-
| Creating-High-Performanc...
| tamiral wrote:
| I have this book and haven't read it yet... but will start
| it! thanks for the reminder.
| neom wrote:
| Extremely boring, but I recommend persisting to the end.
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| People are unable to realize a script can be written
| because that's "not how teams work"? I'm very confused at
| what you're trying to say.
| neom wrote:
| Imperfect analogies so please read between the lines....:
| Take a finance team, you have a group of specialists who
| don't really know what each other do, FP&A vs BM&A or
| Investor relations. However, they don't need to know what
| each other do because they can trust the person next to
| them to say, hey.. payroll is now automated, I have extra
| time now, what should I work on to improve things, is it
| fair to take advantage of that in a team simply because
| one person isn't an expert? If you know someones job is
| to do something, say.. buy servers, but you know they
| don't know anything about servers, only how to finance
| them, should you exploit that for your self gain? If
| there is a person who's job it is to optimize, but the
| system is obfuscated, is that fair to the team? OP said
| it's win win, that is intellectually dishonest, it is not
| win win. that's my real point.
| [deleted]
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 - read this and then see if
| you still care at all about business efficiency
| antihero wrote:
| And what exactly does he owe them? The company exists to enrich
| the owners by extracting wealth from his work.
| dkarl wrote:
| 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.
| sebringj wrote:
| 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.
| verall wrote:
| I'm sorry that happened as I'm sure the API took a solid amount
| of work, but you've got to admit that's hilarious.
| sebringj wrote:
| The full story is actually a lot worse but yah it is pretty
| dumb.
| mkl95 wrote:
| For 5 months, I had a gig that involved upgrading a large CRM
| app. After a few weeks of yak shaving and planning, I had
| automated most of my tasks. It was a 6 month contract, but by the
| 3rd month it was basically finished. A few weeks after that, I
| was bored out of my mind. One day my manager called me out about
| "not working enough hours". 2 weeks later I was making more money
| at a more stable job.
| genmud wrote:
| Story time:
|
| 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.
| marktangotango wrote:
| Although these reads more than a bit contrived, I actually
| believe the gist of it. I once worked in such a "acquired for
| the product that won't be invested in and let die"
| companies/subsidiary and something like this did happen for the
| entire org. I joined after it'd been going on for about 20
| years and they had a hiring spurt because someone got the idea
| to "modernize". The modernization effort ended when that exec
| left, and the company and it's products languished for several
| more years. Eventually the acquiring company was acquired and
| the new owner was super focused on margins and cut a lot of
| people. So yeah, it does happen.
| mihcsab wrote:
| tbh, something similar happened to me too. I took over a sysadmin
| job, multiple servers. They had a lot of problems in the backend,
| because of bad configs, sometimes they spent days resolving the
| same issues on multiple servers, without trying to fix the root
| causes. I just took the time and went through the configs and
| corrected them. Also made some simple scripts that do the same
| thing that they did manually. No one knows how much is changed in
| the background, so they don't bother me with how much I actually
| work with the administration, they just know they used to spend
| hours with problems before, now nothing really comes up, maybe
| one problem every two months. Now my job with them is just
| generating monthly health reports, spending five minutes looking
| through the logs, making the invoices and being available when
| something doesn't work.
|
| 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.
| thrownaway564 wrote:
| Easier way - attend all the "allyship" and DEI meetings instead
| of doing your job. If confronted say "challenging white supremacy
| is everyones job!" and insist they should "do the work"
|
| Join Zoom. Use a heart or snaps emoji in the first five minutes.
| Turn off camera. Leetcode.
| null_object wrote:
| 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_ "
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Which is why, like most things posted on that subreddit (and
| online communities in general) should be approached with a
| bunch of skepticism.
|
| The post reeks of "yeah, that happened" vibes.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I really do think it happened. Just look at the explosion of
| no-code tools that handle this sort of tedious work for small
| businesses. The caveat is that once the owner figures out
| they can automate this person's work, that person will be out
| of a job.
| wobblybubble wrote:
| Why does there need to be passion project? He could study
| philosophy or do whatever that one can do in an office by
| oneself.
| lemmiwinks wrote:
| Why woudn't studying philosophy _not_ a passion project?
| wobblybubble wrote:
| It could be.
|
| But this is Hacker News so it often means something hacker-
| related.
| dymk wrote:
| Random philosophy stuff is like the #2 most common type
| of article submitted here
| wobblybubble wrote:
| Is it the #2 most common passion project here though.
| froaway4job wrote:
| Wow. I need to step my game up...
|
| 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!
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| I've done this as well, multiple swe jobs, I also did not find
| ways to automate. Just trying to get a little something done
| every day to report in the stand ups is what I did. Most teams
| are so low performing it was easy. Every so often a new manager
| would come along and make my life hell then I'd have to move
| on.
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| 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.
| rcthompson wrote:
| I think it's actually a bit more subtle than that. The post
| says the law firm "wanted [them] to be the only person with
| admin access to the Cloud, everyone else would be limited to
| view only". I wonder if their job is, more than anything else,
| to be the person who is legally on the hook if anything goes
| wrong, because they're the only one with write access.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Assuming the story is true, they're preying on ignorance.
| You're describing normal employment and service contracting.
| The law firm has a huge misconception about the complexity of
| the task and the human labor required for normal and
| exceptional operations. Even the spreadsheet sanity checking
| could probably be automated. This is a few thousand dollars of
| consultant time to setup, and maybe a few thousand/year to
| maintain.
| Shamii wrote:
| Sounds very very boring to me.
|
| 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.
| zero102 wrote:
| I was for a few years in college a data entry clerk making
| $12.50/hr. It was effectively copy/pasting with some extra
| clicks and being a computer science student at the time I wrote
| an excel connector that did ~80% of my job. It only required me
| to intervene on especially hard data entry stuff (lots of math
| or formulas). There really was no benefit to tell anyone I did
| this. Not because I _wanted_ to be lazy but it would just mean
| more data entry and not what I wanted to do (automating other
| people 's stuff).
|
| There's loads of these BS jobs out there especially when numpty
| salesmen are involved. It was relatively soul crushing because
| it didn't really afford me any extra time to do school work
| (cube farm yay) but I was able to basically zone out and make
| money, or stash some homework problems and work them while
| appearing to stare intently at the screen. I don't harbor any
| ill will towards them though unlike most of these /r/antiwork
| losers. They were friendly to me and it was just the culture
| there that "if it isn't done manually then we dont need a
| person to do it".
|
| I ended up getting a couple raises and only left when I got my
| first real SWE job. I got in touch with them recently and there
| are still some scripts running some important IT processes I
| wrote many, many years ago running today.
| lizknope wrote:
| I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before
| I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but
| then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying
| and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how
| to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They
| had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could
| do it in a minute (it was a slow machine)
|
| Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a
| mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at
| a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for
| their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a
| "file upload" feature and I figured out the format.
|
| I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA
| ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus
| 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data
| to the format the mainframe needed.
|
| I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's
| info in the daily Lotus 123 update files.
|
| All of this should have been done in a database but I had
| just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about
| databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about
| computers in the first place.
|
| Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a
| glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software
| companies the next summer.
| [deleted]
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| > When his gig is up he has nothing to show and is stuck were
| he was when taking that job.
|
| The right answer is "start finding a second job, now." Make
| $180k for 8 hours and 10 minutes of your life! Or
| alternatively, keep on keeping on and market yourself as a
| legal document management automation specialist when you
| bounce.
|
| > Also can't imagine doing nothing and feeling not being needed
| or not making a real difference.
|
| I have a wife and kids to help me feel needed, and a garden
| that needs tending when I want to feel myself making a
| difference. Work is work. 90% of jobs are filled to the gills
| with bureaucracy and designed to ensure the average employee
| does very little and accomplishes nothing. Might as well enjoy
| it when they make it easy to enjoy.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Hahah, I love that top comment though:
|
| > Think of your wages as a subscription service to your
| automation program lol. Big companies love subscription services,
| right?
|
| spot on, hahah
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Great engineers try to automate their way out of a job. It would
| seem like their employer would reward them for using a little
| ingenuity. Why wouldn't he just come clean about it?
| antihero wrote:
| What exactly do they have to gain from that?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| If his employer learned they didn't need to pay him for 40
| hours a week, why would they maintain his employment?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why would he be rewarded? They would likely try to save that
| $90k by replacing him, or give him a lot more work with very
| little increase in comp.
|
| If there's anything I've learned in 10 years, you keep your
| mouth shut when things are easy because if you speak up they
| screw you with more work and the same (or nearly so) pay.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| This is a very cynical way of looking at things. And maybe
| rightly so given your experience. Every job I've ever had
| though there's never been a shortage of work - the few
| examples that I can recall of whenever one of my engineers
| frees up a significant amount of time I gave them harder
| things to do and a recommended a raise (Im a lead not a
| people manager) to go along with it.
| hogrider wrote:
| It's just game theory. No one would vote for more work for
| themselves and no extra pay unless you were weirdly
| indoctrinated by your employer.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My company will give you more work. Just no raise or
| promotion to go with it. I honestly don't see most
| companies giving raises with additional work.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Using "cynical" in looking at the job market when compared
| to potential abuses is a very boomerish thing.
|
| Us millenials and zoomers see how this society is played
| out. You work hard for a company - you get more work for
| same pay.
|
| They demand 2 weeks notice but have no issue in hauling
| your ass out with no severance on a term.
|
| Managers promise increases and you get 2% , or 1/3 of
| inflation.
|
| Companies' recruiters target their own employees for their
| own jobs at $20k more than they're making. And new people
| (without experience) get more than the experienced ones.
|
| Health insurance costs more and more each year, all the
| while covering less and less.
|
| And the harassment. Damn, the harassment.
|
| And you, individually, cannot do much of anything regarding
| the company when negotiating grievances. Unions can, but
| tech people have this poisonous mindset that they can
| somehow do better than a union.
|
| So yes, I am /r/antiwork . I've lived through enough of
| stupid shit. And we're done with it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not anti-work. I'm just anti-work for exploitive
| jerks. I have no problem working hard for myself
| (projects, chores, improvements, etc).
|
| I think we both just realize that the rewards are simply
| not commensurate with effort in most cases. Executive and
| management pay goes up, yet they are just overhead, not
| production. So essentially they have to take advantage of
| the value produced by their worker for themselves. We
| recognize this and are unmotivated.
| delecti wrote:
| Because he doesn't care about the job being done, but only
| about getting paid for the results. It's like admitting someone
| already owns a goose that lays golden eggs when you can instead
| sell them the eggs.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Why, its a law firm, not a tech company, there are no other
| jobs for him to do. By giving them the script he would
| literally "automate himself out of a job". What would be the
| incentive to keep him?
| 99_00 wrote:
| A small lawfirm that doesn't have its own IT department doesn't
| have engineering opportunities
| brodouevencode wrote:
| That's fair, but his boss would almost gladly ask him what
| else could be automated. It would be a winning prop for both.
| jpindar wrote:
| He wouldn't get any imaginary internet points for _that_.
| manishsharan wrote:
| I work in enterprise architecture and the most annoying part of
| my job is telling dev teams to comply with policies and best
| practices, which are fully documented and yet ignored. I would
| love to have AI solution that could review a uml or a design
| document or a terraform script and write out responses.
| uberdru wrote:
| Look at it this way. The script that you wrote is worth $90K/year
| to this firm.
| binarytox1n wrote:
| 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.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| _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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It makes it easy to play games with journalistic integrity if
| you have a beef with a local paper and want them to get egg
| on their face. Then again, this is not unique to the internet
| --only easier. It was a major plot point in the final season
| of The Wire.
| Kluny wrote:
| Yeah, it's trash and you're almost always better off just
| reading the original story (if you haven't already, since it
| was probably on the front page of a major subreddit).
| Aissen wrote:
| Even if that were true, no harm done...
|
| 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.
| dave5104 wrote:
| > What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ?
|
| 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/
| vlunkr wrote:
| The harm done is that impressionable young people on
| /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting
| paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.
| hyprmynd wrote:
| What a terrible dream, especially since most games are just
| jobs now.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ah, hackernews, the anti-antiwork. There are many things I
| come to HN for, but looking for a healthy work culture is
| not one of them.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I try automating as much as I can at my current job. Probably
| out of laziness, but also because it leads to less room for
| error, and I feel much more mentally stimulating when trying
| to figure out how to automate something
| nlh wrote:
| 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.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| That actually rang fairly true to me as some of the law
| offices I interacted with (consultant) did so as they did
| some sort of fractional billing to the clients for internal
| IT time.
|
| 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.
| rhino369 wrote:
| If the firm was billing his time, he'd have to create a
| billing log. You generally can't get away with billing for
| IT. But you can bill for "litigation support" which is the
| intersection of IT and litigation. Though its much more
| involved than just uploading files to an FTP.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Depends how shady the firm is :-)
|
| Also for probably any litigation that is IT related you
| could probably get away with a lot more
| rhino369 wrote:
| Firms navigate this by making the employees fill out
| their own billing entries. If OP is filling out
| fraudulent billing entries then that would explain why
| nobody is checking up on him. If he's billed out, his
| real work output is billed-hours.
| OJFord wrote:
| No reason (to need, in this situation) for the automated
| program to run faster than a human. The right hours
| billed to a human instead of the human's computer is..
| not quite so fraudulent?
| decebalus1 wrote:
| I disagree. Yes, 'clocking in' is not a frequent process for
| IT people but it heavily depends on the company. My first job
| was for a company that billed its clients based on hours.
| Even if it was pretty much ridiculous for us (IT crowd) to do
| so, we did clock in just like everyone else, so that our
| billing department had a more 'accurate' representation of
| how much we worked for that client, even if our work was
| pretty much shared across all clients.
|
| 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.
| fesoliveira wrote:
| FWIW he mentions that there is no IT department in the firm,
| and that he works under administration.
| rhino369 wrote:
| This is the actual red flag. A mid-size firm simply
| couldn't function without IT. They could outsource it to a
| contractor, but, in that case, they'd never then hire
| someone for 90k to do one small IT task.
|
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You'd be surprised. I interviewed at a multi-million
| dollar firm and there were two IT people there for the
| whole firm.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Two is infinitely more than zero.
| withinboredom wrote:
| My point was that they may not even be big enough for
| one. "Plug and play" might be good enough for now (a
| shared drive means someone is around though, someone had
| to set it up).
| rhino369 wrote:
| There are definitely small firms that rely on the young
| paralegal who is a self taught super user. But that sort
| of firm wouldn't pay someone 90k for doing a small part
| of all IT.
|
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm still skeptical. I was hired at ridiculous rates once
| ($2k an hour) to validate DKIM signatures by a small time
| firm. 90k to be "on call" and validate things seems
| totally reasonable even from a small firm.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Courts don't actually require you to check hashes like
| the OP claims. They do remarkably little evidence
| authentication unless the opposing party contests the
| evidence. Digital evidence is by default produced to the
| other side by low quality TIFF files.
|
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Nailed why I was hired. :)
| DennisP wrote:
| And he's working from home, so "clock in" basically means
| logging in.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| I've never seen an IT company in North America use that.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I had a job that tried to implement a time logging system.
| Most of IT just _didn 't_. Eventually they explained to us
| that the payroll guy uses that to cut the checks, and it's a
| _huge_ pain in their ass if we don 't use the system. They
| compromised by asking us to log in and out _at least once
| each pay period_. That was fine, and we did.
|
| But they really did try to get us to go whole hog on it at
| first.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| $90K just to move some files from one folder to another seems
| high too. Either the job involves more than what's he saying,
| or it's simply fake.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law
| firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire
| someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern
| or something, this is not skilled work.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| It's easy to overstate the technical difficulty of lots
| of basic IT work, especially if people are tech
| illiterate.
|
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| On the other side: the business can clearly afford it, so
| the value he brings is entirely justified from a
| commercial perspective. The fact that they can find
| cheaper alternatives on the IT market is a different
| issue.
|
| 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?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This is basically why I do not automatically discount the
| story as fake. I have certainly been a part of groups
| that had a wide range of technical skills. It is an odd
| experience, but it forces you to think about your
| audience ( and document everything like you would for
| your parent ).
|
| 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| how to value IT work-- yup
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I used to get 60k and have no work to do for months at a
| time. "Forgotten employee" situations are certainly real.
| arethuza wrote:
| I knew a chap who left where I used to work to go to a
| large UK bank at high end contracting rates.
|
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| Going along with the original story, I could go either way
| on this. On the one hand, paying someone $40k to do it,
| probably involves more supervision and turnover, and a
| chance of someone making a mistake. And then you get to
| tell your million dollar client: "We lost our case because
| our semi-skilled clerk misplaced a file and we have no IT
| department."
|
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| I had a software engineering job where I clocked in and time
| was tracked. Pretty good deal for people who tend to overwork
| themselves.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| I did as well. My company ran a 36 hour hackathon. By law,
| hours 8-12 were 1.5x time and hours 13+ were 2x time. It
| was basically an extra paycheck.
| gruez wrote:
| Your company ran a paid hackathon? Were you able to do
| whatever you want? Or was it a crunch to get a project
| launched?
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Yep, paid hackathon, but participation was voluntary.
| There were a few limitations:
|
| * 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.
| bckr wrote:
| How many incidents did those nice new features cause?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| In Austria (and I think in Germany it's the same), for most
| jobs, including IT, employees must track their working time
| for legal reasons, so I had to clock in and out via a
| device at the entrance like a factory worker, to prove to
| HR, accounting and the bureaucratic government institutions
| in charge of taxing me, that I'm indeed at my workplace
| 8h/day.
|
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _for companies and governments to realize people working
| in tech and other sectors can be just as productive_
|
| 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.
| Xylakant wrote:
| > and I think in Germany it's the same
|
| 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.)
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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")
| Xylakant wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| phillc73 wrote:
| I can confirm this is the case in Austria. However, my
| experience is mostly using a computerised system via the
| company Intranet. There's an option to use an access card
| and touch it to a login pad at the office entrance, but I
| can also work from home, logging the time via the
| Intranet based system. I don't get paid overtime, but I
| do receive time off in lieu of excess hours worked.
| cptskippy wrote:
| This is how a lot of small businesses operate, and Law Firms
| are small in terms of staff. Everyone tracks their hours,
| even if their hours aren't billable.
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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).
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dnautics wrote:
| wait did you use to work where I work? We fixed this, haha.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| This exchange has been the long drawn out version of:
|
| > > 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.
| bargle0 wrote:
| "Number 22!"
|
| "We don't say that one anymore. You're going to have to
| leave."
| lolc wrote:
| "Number 73!"
|
| 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!"
| buran77 wrote:
| The story is most likely made up and one of the last
| clarifications strongly hints at it:
|
| > 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.
| getoj wrote:
| > But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the
| story despite the process being fairly unique?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I know sysadmins that did very similar things to what the
| author is doing and spent their time in the office playing
| videogames.
|
| It's not that unreal.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I also agree that it's not only happened, but it's probably
| not that rare. Before most businesses were automated to the
| point where this is possible, I had an engineering job where
| for at least two years, I may as well have not shown up. I
| spent all my time reading magazines and doing pet projects
| because there wasn't anything else for me to do but answer
| the phone if a customer had a question. I could have easily
| taken on another job in the mean time if remote work was a
| thing back then.
|
| 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.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| bluedays wrote:
| this tbh. As someone who lived in Missouri for a couple years
| it was astounding how many things weren't automated.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| robinduckett wrote:
| The key hint for me was "the type of script people put on
| GitHub with a $5 price tag" :)
| withinboredom wrote:
| Have you never seen a readme with a donate button?
| futharkshill wrote:
| On a gist?
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Very strange phenomenon.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| TriNetra wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > So, yes it's possible IMO,
|
| 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.
| tikhonj wrote:
| I mean, if I were running a small business and needed to run
| my own Mailman instance, I would pay those prices--or even
| substantially more!--in a heartbeat. And I'm technical enough
| that I _could_ manage Mailman myself.
|
| It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you
| were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.
| yung_steezy wrote:
| I also think companies pay to have their totally-not-
| astroturfed subreddit featured on the frontpage such as
| /r/tinder
| cgriswald wrote:
| It might be true, or not.
|
| 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.
| supperburg wrote:
| What is the point of karma farming?
| decebalus1 wrote:
| Accounts with high karma are sold for all sorts of purposes,
| for marketing campaigns (reddit is a cesspool of
| astroturfing) all the way to political campaigns.
|
| https://quantummarketer.com/buy-reddit-accounts/
| Gigachad wrote:
| People will list out lots of practical reasons but I suspect
| the main one is that the number on your profile going up
| makes people feel good. As well as the temporary fame every
| time they make a popular post. Same reason people post
| dangerous stunts on tiktok despite gaining nothing monetary
| from it.
| loceng wrote:
| 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.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| Send them an invoice.
|
| 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.
| hogrider wrote:
| 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.
| zffr wrote:
| 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.
| me_me_me wrote:
| There was that famous story of a guy who stop showing up to
| work and got caught years later for stealing from his company
| by not working and getting wages.
|
| Its sort of similar situation.
| twox2 wrote:
| A lot of industries, despite being "tech", are still just
| using computers to "push paper". That means a true technical
| person can often automate these jobs. It's real and it does
| happen. The thing is... most people like that are not content
| doing that and then fucking around all day. I've been in this
| position. I've shared my automation with the team I was on
| and the manager I had, and I got a raise. I did this at more
| than one company when I worked in operational roles, since
| then I'm more engineering focused so less opportunities to do
| so.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, just consider all the places where PDFs are still
| used instead of a more computer-appropriate format (fixed
| layout is generally not needed, sometimes even not for
| printing, and is sometimes even an hindrance, and (m)HTML
| can be used as a standalone file too...)
| twox2 wrote:
| Most opportunities are definitely data-entry oriented.
| For example, making a report in a spreadsheet and then
| having to feed some of those fields into some kind of
| form in a web-based UI, or vice versa.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Same here - my first real job involved putting reports
| together by collecting/combining data from various sources.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Melatonic wrote:
| Sounds like your friend is a hell of a lot more honest than
| that guy who took on multiple sysadmin positions and then
| automated almost everything and for the remainder hired
| multiple overseas contractors to do the rest
| [deleted]
| tharne wrote:
| My guess is that a great many of these stories are true. I've
| seen more than one instance at large companies where a job
| either was, or easily could be, mostly replaced by a series
| of Excel Macros.
| andrew_ wrote:
| A very good friend of mine has done almost the same thing
| (except he works from home for different reasons). He's done
| this with three companies in the 10 years I've known him.
| It's not fiction - this kind of thing is completely doable
| with the tools we have available now, and the antiquated
| thinking that many offices are still run by.
| svachalek wrote:
| 20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so
| many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received
| that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of
| my teams that were basically just template generators.
| Another table, write code with all the new columns and types.
|
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Tech workers tend to under-estimate the impact that trivial
| automation can have on other industries. My partner 10x or
| more their efficiency with some simple Office macro copy-
| pasta from the search results of "how do I <do thing> in
| word"
| AeroNotix wrote:
| When I worked at HP over a decade ago it was literally my job
| to walk into a department and find processes that were
| automatable, implement whatever program or automation was
| necessary and gtfo.
|
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yup. That reminds me of a time when a co-worker in another
| department (technical but not software) told me that the
| people she managed had to do a very tedious task extracting
| and cross-correlating data from files that my project
| produced. They were sometimes spending 4+ hours each day
| doing it.
|
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A good way to make friends too.
| macintux wrote:
| Not the people whose jobs likely went away as a result,
| however.
| runevault wrote:
| It depends on the company. My day job can reduce required
| headcount for the work we handle. Some companies use that
| excuse to lower headcount, but in cases where valuable
| employees are involved they get moved to other jobs where
| their knowledge can add value while not doing the boring
| and repetitive tasks.
| munk-a wrote:
| You'd be surprised how often that isn't the outcome. It
| definitely does happen, but a lot of the time the company
| is left with a task that's now automated and an employee
| that's received a ton of training on the business
| systems. There are almost always other products that
| sales wants to push that there simply wasn't the
| bandwidth for before...
|
| 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).
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| Had something similar at a larger company I worked at!
| There was this team that was tasked with automating stuff
| from the other teams. And then they got split up and
| individuals were sprinkled around the company. I guess it
| was sorta like embedded devops in a way because they were
| supposed to spread that "automate stuff" mindset.
|
| 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!"
| arethuza wrote:
| 2 jobs ago I had a management level position ("Head of
| Architecture") for a decent sized engineering
| multinational.
|
| 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!
| AeroNotix wrote:
| This is partly why I miss it, sometimes. The work itself
| is largely pretty easy to do and the impact can be huge.
| Not just in a time-saving way, but to the people involved
| and ultimately the company.
|
| 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.
| readams wrote:
| Anti work seems to be very much like incels but for jobs.
| Extremely unhealthy and counterproductive approaches upvoted
| highly.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I wonder what's the dynamic that leads to this. Same with
| some localized cultural phenomena here that peddle "silver
| water" as cure for many illnesses. Or some news channels
| giving quite odd health advice...
| mikkelam wrote:
| Another take: Antiwork is a much needed uprising in america
| for low paid workers to finally stand together and stop
| dealing with an unfair system.
|
| Hopefully it trickles into the real world, before it is
| stopped
| vsareto wrote:
| They're plainly against any work at all right now. If they
| shift towards better working conditions and pay, then
| great.
| alecbz wrote:
| That subreddit's a mixed bag from what I remember.
|
| 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.
| droptablemain wrote:
| That's the general gist as I recall. A lot of people who
| aren't structurally opposed to work but are opposed to
| their relationship with production as workers.
| Gigachad wrote:
| If you take a look now, the sub is in a pretty poor
| state. It's full of almost certainly fake stories and
| what seem to be actual children. A lot of the demands /
| proposals posted are extremely counterproductive or not
| useful. And I assume the actual elite thrive on the fact
| that the general public don't actually know what they
| need and instead waste time calling for nonsensical
| change.
| The-Bus wrote:
| Those complaints have been raised for the last two
| decades and weren't heard.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| There's a guy named Josh Fluke on YouTube who may qualify as
| antiwork to you. I find him very very reasonable and a bit
| dangerous for pulling off the wool over the young
| generation's eyes. I mean dangerous for the corporate and the
| myths corporations have built to lure and abuse workers.
| borvo wrote:
| hmm does he make any money from his youtube channel?
| matsemann wrote:
| Don't be like this: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-
| should-improve-society-som...
| K7PJP wrote:
| It's anti-work, not anti-money.
| tsol wrote:
| I think the point is it's easy to be critical of work if
| you can make money without working. But for most people,
| doing menial work is a necessity in order to earn a
| living. If he has to deal with the consequences of not
| working I'd be inclined to take him more seriously, but
| fact of the matter is no one really wants to be homeless
| on principal
| themodelplumber wrote:
| 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.
| Kluny wrote:
| 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).
| ecf wrote:
| And people wonder why a lot of those in the IT field have a hard
| time being respected.
| fcb92019 wrote:
| jacquesm wrote:
| Reminiscent of the best of 'Max Klein' aka Mark Essien. So likely
| fiction.
| webmaven wrote:
| I think stories like this are read more widely than a lot of
| folks in forums such as HN suppose (often forwarded via email),
| and provide additional motivation for workplace surveillance
| solutions.
|
| 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.
| wombat-man wrote:
| 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.
| padobson wrote:
| _This is like the dream._
|
| If eight hours a day of free time is the only thing separating
| you from your dream, then there must be SOME way to adjust the
| math of your life to get that for at least a period long enough
| to learn the instrument or train for a new job or both.
|
| Reducing your monthly expenses by 1/12 means you could take a
| full month off and get a jump start on the training you want.
| You could also add overtime or a part time job and increase
| your income by 1/12 and then take two months off. Think of it
| like buying your freedom.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| That math gets a lot harder when you have a family.
| antihero wrote:
| Eight hours of free-time AND eight hours extra mental energy.
| wombat-man wrote:
| yeah it's not just the time. I am kinda tired at the end of
| the day. Certainly too tired to whole heartedly take on a
| non-trival side project. I need 'non productive' activities
| like meeting up with friends or some kind of recreation.
| wobblybubble wrote:
| "The only thing"--only half of all weekdays if one follows
| the in-bed-for-eight hours recommendation. And you of course
| have to eat and groom yourself outside of those hours.
|
| I'm not saying that you are wrong. But it seems weird to
| dismiss a whopping 40 hours a week as a seemingly small
| thing.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I'm in a good place now. But if I were getting paid
| essentially for free, I might just take on another job. But
| given his current job is $90k, I'd maybe start thinking about
| shooting for a higher paying remote gig.
|
| Instrument mastery is a much longer process as far as I can
| tell. Takes years.
| andrewcarter wrote:
| I learned to play the fiddle the past two years working from
| home during Xcode's abysmal compile times. Sadly my new M1 max
| whatever has solved that problem, ha!
| my_usernam3 wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
|
| Truth be told I'm a sucker for an enterprise software
| position with long compile time.
| jstx1 wrote:
| In my experience it gets boring very quickly. In my case I
| hadn't automated anything, the company was just bad at
| utilizing their staff and they were happy to keep me on the
| payroll doing next to nothing. It resulted in my worrying about
| skills deteriorating and being more depressed than usual.
| mlindner wrote:
| /r/antiwork is a horrible cess pool of bad articles that makes
| you feel worse about yourself. Highly advise against the click.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| I had a prior job out of college where I automated the vast
| majority of the technical position I was in. It was a combination
| sys admin and data validation role for the government -- not
| really my interest, but it was after the economy melted down and
| finding a proper programming job was tough. Over the span of
| about a year, I had a set of scripts, batch jobs, and other forms
| of OS/database level automation that made most of the manual
| tasks we had obsolete.
|
| 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.
| comprev wrote:
| I have automated a "release engineer" out of a job. Yea, the
| irony is strong.
| fcb92019 wrote:
| nicklaf wrote:
| This story reminds me of a junior developer named Mac [0]:
|
| _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
| smm11 wrote:
| I worked at a Big Important Place, and two or three times a day
| I'd shut down an online transaction system, back up a file, move
| a new file into place, then bring the online transaction system
| back up. Took maybe two minutes.
|
| 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.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Some of these firms literally give their associate attorneys
| $400K bonuses (on top of a 200-300K salary). I wouldn't feel bad
| about it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I automated the most time-consuming tasks of my job about a year
| after I joined the company.
|
| 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.
| gumbotron wrote:
| tibbar wrote:
| As a company it can be really hard to assess whether your
| problems require permanent employees or whether a contractor
| could just come in and give you a button to click. Sometimes you
| actually know about the second option, but the process is so
| important that you want someone technical to monitor the results
| of clicking the button everyday. Because if the button stops
| working, or does the wrong thing and you don't know, the results
| are disastrous. So his employer might actually prefer this
| arrangement to having him just give them the script and walk
| away.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| Melatonic wrote:
| 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.
| eterevsky wrote:
| He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be
| responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the
| same thing.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and
| understand the situation?
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because humans are irrational. It's the butts in seats
| mentality vs results. The business should be bringing in
| experts to regularly work out what parts of their process
| are slow and to streamline them. There is no incentive for
| an individual not in this role to make their lives harder.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize
| to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would
| employees agree to their salary if they fully understood
| how much of the value they create is pocketed at various
| other levels of the org?
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| This. He's being paid to be responsible for the system. If he
| can do that successfully a few minutes a day. Cool. If his
| employer still sees value. It's all good.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's really on the business to have some kind of continual
| improvement process that looks at everyone's workflow and
| works out where the time/resource wastage is. If the
| company wanted to save money on these things they have get
| someone to identify that a lot of time is spent on "manual"
| work which could be streamlined.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I hope he read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
| hogrider wrote:
| This one is the text book definition of fall guy as a
| service. Anything goew wrong, it's his head, that's why the
| pay him.
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to
| provide real value to anyone_
|
| Plenty of people get value out of the modern economy. There are
| always outliers, and OP is a Spiders Georg.
| patrickk wrote:
| 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.
|
| I've also seen worse waste in other industries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary
| ironmagma wrote:
| Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you'd be able
| to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could
| cut it down, yet you can't scale down the number of jobs
| dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and
| you can't hire half a person if there's only half a
| workload).
|
| A similar thing could be said of bloated code.
| Riseed wrote:
| > you can't hire half a person if there's only half a
| workload
|
| True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full
| workload that's made up of fractional workloads.
| mirkules wrote:
| I know nothing about luggage transit, and any idea of a
| solution for lost luggage I could come up with is more
| likely naive than not.
|
| Could you define why lost luggage is an unsolvable problem?
| What makes it so difficult?
| gernb wrote:
| probably not relevant but one time my mid-trip flight
| landed late. I ran to the connecting flight and made it
| on board but my luggage did not. I did get it the next
| day so the system worked but it just points out a
| complication I hadn't personally considered before.
| 5bolts wrote:
| logistics.. its amazing that MORE luggage isn't lost on a
| daily basis. I traveled every week for 10 years, lost my
| bag maybe 4 times? usually around a holiday where the
| airports are burdened with extra people (and 75% of those
| lost bags were out of O'Hare... )
|
| sure it seems simple take a bag put it in a tube, take it
| off the tube give it back to the person.. but man,
| probably 30 people touched that bag in that process,
| countless conveyer belts, several trucks.. add in TSA and
| it doubles the handling
| ironmagma wrote:
| There's also significant fanout and sometimes very short
| layovers. One plane might have luggage that goes to five
| other planes. Also, the vehicles that transport the
| luggage are not airtight, so bags can fall out of them.
| This isn't to mention human error in the scanning process
| (forgetting to scan something, scanning a bag and then
| not moving it, etc.).
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Isn't this more of a box-ticker? OP created a permanent
| solution; at this point, however, he himself is not doing
| anything useful:
|
| > _box tickers, who create the appearance that something
| useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey
| administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate
| compliance officers, quality service managers;_
| topaz0 wrote:
| Hired as a duct-taper, he turned himself into a box-ticker
| by doing this automation.
| repomies69 wrote:
| > This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness
| of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value
| to anyone.
|
| Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real
| value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no
| medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and
| 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time.
|
| Anyway, can you pass the bong plz
| lolc wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > 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.
| CodeyWhizzBang wrote:
| The reality is, their core business is law. They probably
| don't hugely care about IT as long as it works.
|
| The most likely thing, if they found out, is they'd give him
| some other IT stuff to do as well to fill his time (which he
| may also be able to automate). I doubt they'd want to fire
| him - as long as the task is being done appropriately.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Maybe, but unlikely.
|
| They want someone to be available to fix/update and perhaps
| do other things too. Part of your salary as support staff is
| _being there_ when they need you.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, if this is something that is integral to their work,
| they'd still need to pay someone to be able to respond
| within X amount of minutes in case something goes tits up
| even if they got the script in their hands.
|
| They could probably do that for less than 90k/year, but
| it's still gonna cost them.
| bena wrote:
| It was literally developed for them. He even explains that he
| has no intention of selling it because it is pretty much
| custom to the one place.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| There are some interesting corner cases. For instance say
| he purchased the script from a third party? Is that
| different than if he wrote it on his off hours?
| bena wrote:
| The problem here is intent. His intention was to write a
| script for his job.
|
| He can't hire himself to do his own job. Which is what he
| would effectively be doing by claiming he wrote it "off
| hours". The very act of writing that script put him "on
| hours". Now, was it unpaid work? That's a different
| story. Although since he's also technically not doing
| work during work hours, one could call it a wash.
|
| If he bought the script, then the company likely needs to
| reimburse him the cost of that, because its materials for
| the job. But he wouldn't want to make that request,
| because then the jig is up.
|
| But then again, we aren't playing "what ifs". There are
| concrete elements to his story. He did write the script.
| It is explicitly for this company. It won't work for any
| other company without large modifications. The non-
| portability and exclusivity of this script means it was
| written for the express purpose of doing this thing for
| this company.
|
| And let's be completely fair here, he cobbled this thing
| together from StackOverflow snippets. If he's ever found
| out and fired, even if he takes his script, they're
| probably looking at a day or two to replicate this work.
|
| The real question for him is would it be worth it? The
| firm would be minimally affected and could, in turn, make
| things incredibly difficult for him. This is a law firm.
| This is what they do. The cost of suing him is
| negligible, because they already do so much of the work
| normally. We're really talking about the additional court
| and filing fees. Whereas, he'd have to retain a lawyer
| himself. Who would then bill him for all the work they'd
| do.
|
| Consider, they were paying him $90k to copy files. They
| have that kind of money to throw at the problem. Do you
| really want to become a problem?
| paganel wrote:
| 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".
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| wobblybubble wrote:
| > Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on
| a different plane to people who can't.
|
| This is what I believe sometimes.
|
| Then I look at all the pitfalls of shell scripts and how the
| time investments on automation tasks just balloon... then not
| so much. :)
|
| But if people have a different experience with that then I
| don't doubt it.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| YMMV, but I'm 100% in agreement with GP about programming
| being the new literacy. I quit my old SWE job to run a bloody
| eBay store and am raking it in because I'm competing against
| people who can't program.
|
| The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the
| problem but getting people with domain expertise literate
| enough to write some hacky Python scripts.
|
| This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms
| of productivity.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is exactly right. People who are actual programmers
| are like poets, essayists, or authors in the original
| literacy. They have a title that actually says "person is
| literate".
|
| But there were always great poets and authors. The big win
| was that you got a bureaucrat class with their own domain
| titles who could use writing to get things done.
|
| Likewise if the boss in the original article had been
| taught how to hack some scripts together, they wouldn't
| need to hire the author for $90k.
| rustyboy wrote:
| I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people
| in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge
| success.
|
| Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security
| controls, high availability... blah blah blah.
|
| We're at the point where most people can find low hanging
| fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my
| experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do
| everything else.
| geocrasher wrote:
| When I was in high school (early 90's) I was a TA in drivers ed
| for a period. I also took the class the period before it. My
| job? Enter grades into the computer and run it for the teacher
| so he didn't have to. When I asked him about what grades to put
| in for myself he said "Just give yourself A's". So I did. Also
| aced the DMV written and drivers test 100%. But that's besides
| the point. I had the knowledge, so I didn't have to work the
| same as other kids. Been that way ever since!
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Love the poster's ingenuity and hate his attitude, and the
| antiwork subreeddit.
|
| 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).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| >$90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for
| this person's retirement
|
| uhhh... what? that's almost double the average US salary
|
| >Life isn't even close to fair and some societies and people
| understand how to work with that better than others do.
|
| "Life isn't fair" is not an argument against striving for
| fairness. My understanding of the antiwork people is that they
| think they're being more productive than what they're being
| paid for, and often being treated poorly along the way. There's
| data backing that up, and it doesn't seem ridiculous to try and
| recapture some of that.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| Meh,plenty of deluded kids there, but the core idea is
| basically true. Nobody is arguing against work per se (most
| healthy humans like to do stuff), they are arguing about the
| XXI century version of soulless indentured service many jobs
| are. Productivity exploded in the last 50 years and yet the
| people are still running the same thread-mill for even less
| benefits so I dont blame anybody who gives the middle-finger to
| the corporate world and try to find an alternative.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| The amount you need in retirement is roughly proportional to
| how much you spend while working, so that if you save 15% of
| your gross salary throughout your career and invest it in
| stock, you should be able to retire by 65 and maintain a
| similar lifestyle in retirement to what you lived while
| working. The salary is not what matters, it is the savings
| rate.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "$90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money for
| this person's retirement, particularly if they encounter major
| expenses."
|
| This simply isn't true in most areas. You can live a modest
| lifestyle and have a very good chance of retirement at a
| "normal" retirement age (60-65). The median US software dev
| makes about $110k and is one of the more highly compensated
| jobs. I make about the same as the poster, and I'm actually in
| decent shape for retirement, even with a family.
|
| On the second point I sort of agree. Why not take a second job
| and make more?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The side-hustle culture is a cancer. > delivering additional
| value for his employer for which he must insist on additional
| compensation
|
| Good luck with that.
|
| /r/antiwork is a societal response to this exact sentiment. "Oh
| make a decent amount more than the national average and still
| cant afford to retire? Simple, monetize what little free time
| you have left!"
|
| No, the requirement for a side-hustle is due to the decades of
| upper management and C-levels taking advantage of employees and
| leading the stagnation of wages.
|
| The solution to a systemic issue is a systemic solution. The
| personal responsibility solutions are just a distraction.
|
| Good on the op for getting back some of his time.
| mbg721 wrote:
| A traditional side-hustle wouldn't be for the same employer
| (or any at all).
| vsareto wrote:
| >and the antiwork subreddit
|
| I thought r/antiwork was really about calling out abusive
| employers and guiding us to better work/life relationship, but
| it is actually against all work in any form. Meaning, if your
| house catches fire, it's up to you to put it out - they don't
| want anyone employed as professional firefighters who might
| actually know WTF they're doing. Medical problems? Fix it
| yourself. There's no paramedics to respond, no surgeons to fix
| you, no pharmacists for drugs, no nurses/techs for recovery.
|
| If it was a movement about fixing worker conditions (a
| submarine advertisement for unions, if you will), it'd actually
| be a good movement. But right now, it's positioning itself as
| just an angry outcry forum that apparently wants the planet to
| be ruled by anarchy and extreme independence.
|
| What a waste of potential. If you don't believe me, try asking
| them what the good industries are that have good work/life
| balance. The answers you'll get boil down to "there are no good
| jobs at all".
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I think it's a movement about fixing work conditions and
| somewhat aggressive towards corporations and their practices.
| Taking it to an extreme may be a push to kill off the
| movement.
| Miner49er wrote:
| HN really lives in a some sort of wealthy bubble. $90k is
| plenty of money to save for retirement in most of the country.
| If it's not, then the majority of people in the US will never
| be able to retire.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Yeah, for reference the median _household_ income in the US
| is under $70k. Of course cost of living depends a lot on the
| locality, but 90k as a single person goes pretty far anywhere
| other than the Bay Area, NYC, or a few other expensive hubs.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| OP doesn't realize that 87% of the US population (being one
| of the richest in the world) makes less than $90k.
|
| That means that by his view 9 persons out of 10 won't be able
| to retire. Which I actually believe is true.
|
| The irony of admitting this while at the same time praising
| this system with statements like
|
| >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".
|
| What kind of growth are we seeing? Why should we have a
| positive attitude about work, when it's just a mean of
| transfering wealth upwards?
| mech987 wrote:
| Why is work just a means of transferring wealth upwards?
| pietrovismara wrote:
| That's what it has become in an economic system that
| failed at its only task, ensuring proper distribution of
| resources. Most jobs serve only the purpose of making a
| restricted group of people richer, while stealing the
| workers' time on earth and often worsening society.
|
| Edit: if you think that's not true, you live in a bubble.
| Try some of the jobs the majority of the population has
| to put up with, then we can talk again.
| mbg721 wrote:
| It's not enough to save for retirement in the US, and that
| "majority will never be able to retire" is a reality in any
| of the 50 states. We just haven't had it hit the fan yet.
|
| Edit: I read that as $90k total, to be dispensed over the
| remaining years. I agree that $90k per year indeed ought to
| be plenty.
| bigyellow wrote:
| Real inflation is like 20% in the US; none of us are
| retiring any time soon.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| You're right, but inflation continues to outpace wages, so
| without some, albeit extreme, push from the workers' side, this
| will continue to get worse.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| $90,000 per year is more than enough to max your 401k, an IRA,
| and live anywhere that isn't a coastal city.
| serverholic wrote:
| Nobody asks to be born and society is setup to extract as much
| as possible from you until you die. Fuck society, fuck
| humanity, fuck productivity, and fuck work. It can all burn for
| all I care.
|
| I'm saving as much money as I can to escape wage slavery then
| just coasting the rest of my life without living another
| productive second.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > I'm saving as much money as I can to escape wage slavery
| then just coasting the rest of my life without living another
| productive second.
|
| In the meantime, don't forget to steal as much as you can
| (https://repeaterbooks.com/product/steal-as-much-as-you-
| can-h...).
| leetcrew wrote:
| > $90,000 per year isn't likely to generate enough money
|
| what? $90k is plenty for a frugal person to have a reasonable
| retirement. they're not gonna be able to do it at 35, but mid
| fifties is very viable.
| efsavage wrote:
| 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.
| TravelTechGuy wrote:
| re: the performance review: don't know about your work place,
| but the first quarterly review I got at [insert name of large
| known company], my manger sat me down and explained she is
| budgeted a certain amount of bonus points for her 5 team
| members, and required to "grade on a curve". Hence, 1 team
| member will be "above average", 3 will be "average", and one
| "below average" every quarter. And for fairness, she rotates
| the names. I was deemed "below average" since it was my first
| quarter, but the good news, she said, is when she nominates me
| for "average" next quarter, she'd add a "shows improvement"
| comment to it!
|
| Bare in mind, real actual money was tied to this stupid scheme,
| and you had to spend at least 2 hours writing a document
| explaining what you've done for the company, the team and the
| product, to justify your "averageness".
|
| I lasted 3 quarters in that social experiment. And I'll laugh
| in the face of corporate recruiters till the day I die.
| duxup wrote:
| I worked at a company that operated like that. Each manager
| could only put in so many high marks.
|
| Company had something like 5000 employees.
|
| I felt good that I often got the highest mark, but others
| were doing well too, they deserved more.
|
| I finally asked my boss, he told me.
|
| "I figured out that other being told in an email how to award
| perf reviews... nobody checks... so I give everyone the
| highest reward."
| sokoloff wrote:
| Managers who just give everyone the highest rating are
| generally the _reason_ that these forced curve policies are
| created.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That doesn't mean the managers are wrong.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That is definitely (and self-evidently) true! Of all
| managers who rate everyone on their team as having
| achieved the highest performance standard, what fraction
| of those cases do you think are subjectively "correct"?
| In my experience, it's way, way, way under half.
|
| Further, it's rare for the managers giving the 100% top
| performance evaluation to individuals to be leading
| groups with high overall accomplishment/delivery.
| (Occam's Razor suggests that it's evidence of poor
| leadership to be squandering the ability and
| contributions of all these high-performers.)
| Msw242 wrote:
| Upper and middle management might be aware but every system
| needs a release valve. E.g. you can't have juries without
| the risk of jury nullification.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I've been on the other side of it.
|
| I hated it but I had to pick the X best in the team. You
| should have reported your manager to HR.
| noizejoy wrote:
| As someone who's worked and managed in that type of
| environment and later left that world to start small
| companies, I was very glad, that this corporate insanity made
| it possible to hire great individuals away from big
| corporations.
| another_story wrote:
| I did something similar as a summer intern back in the late
| 90s, but instead I got a permanent job offer at a rate 3x my
| intern wage. Then, a few years later when the dotcom bust hit,
| I became a bartender.
| forinti wrote:
| How can someone who "manages" not see the value in your work?
|
| It seems some people have a religious view of work: it is
| valuable only if you are toiling and pushing yourself.
| sam_goody wrote:
| A Tale of Two Programmers should be required reading. Very
| relevant.
|
| https://knowstuffs.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/the-parable-of-t...
| fersho311 wrote:
| That's a bit sad, the way you told the story sound like you
| didn't make the place better even though you could have.
| Tushon wrote:
| How is that your conclusion? OP had a number of things that
| were improved in-scope of his role, specifically cited this
| was before offsite version control, and that his replacement
| somehow deleted things.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| are you kidding? he totally made the place better. did his
| job infinitely better than the job description required and
| what did he get for all his trouble? a big slap in the face
| from his boss. of course he left and took his skills with
| him. most companies just don't know how to recognize and
| appreciate above average skills/productivity, this is sadly a
| recurrent feature of many work places.
| allenu wrote:
| It sounded like their workplace essentially eliminated any
| incentive to go beyond expectations after their job was
| redefined.
| rackjack wrote:
| Not really his problem.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I think people are misunderstanding your comment.
|
| If I'm reading correctly, you're saying that it's sad that
| their hard work went to waste.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| It sounds like they did make the place better, and the
| company stiffed them and they left and then things were no
| longer better.
| taberiand wrote:
| Just once I would like to read one of these stories where the
| conclusion is "and the company rewarded me with a large bonus
| and a paid two weeks of leave, and when I came back they had
| lined up some training and a project plan for me to stabilise
| what I had built and automate as much of the drudgery as
| possible"
| nefitty wrote:
| I tried to force this at a company I was at. I was like a
| robot, automating as much as possible, anything and
| everything I touched. Spreadsheets, data loading, surveys,
| analytics, daily reports. I even built a chrome extension
| to improve a cash transfer approval workflow.
|
| Weirdly enough, the director that forced me out had been a
| programmer in a past life. All he could see of me was that
| I was a cost center on his spreadsheet. He never sat down
| with me to ask what I did all day. He'd see me in a corner
| of the office wired in and I guess he assumed I was
| watching cartoons or something.
|
| Fuck 'em. I left and I'm sure dozens of systems I had built
| and maintained broke, just by virtue of my company email
| address being shut down. I did try my best to document what
| I could and onboard others. There's only so much you can do
| in two weeks when you have to start with explaining what
| Firebase and Google Apps Script is to multiple people.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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
| oneoff786 wrote:
| +1 for sikuli. Very nice little tool that makes it very easy to
| do something that would otherwise require a lot of specific
| knowledge
| patrickk wrote:
| AutoHotKey and Pulover's Macro Creator[1] (which spits out
| AHK scrips from mouse and keyboard input) can do a similar
| job in a windows environment, and can trivially click on UI
| elements on the screen via PixelSearch. It runs lightning
| fast too, and is simple to learn.
|
| I've used it to automate simple web games for shits and
| giggles.
|
| [1] https://www.macrocreator.com/screenshots/
| Veen wrote:
| Keyboard Maestro can do similar on the Mac with the "Find
| Image on Screen" and "Click on Found Image" actions. You
| can do some fairly sophisticated GUI automations with its
| image, OCR, button clicking, JavaScript, and menu actions.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| A cross-platform fork of Sikuli is at
| http://www.sikulix.com/ using Java, Python and OpenCV for
| automation.
|
| PyAutoGui is another nice option -
| https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - cross
| platform Python module for keyboard and mouse automation
| with some support for taking and analysing screenshots.
| yosito wrote:
| If you have the ability to automate your job, you could probably
| sell the automation itself for 4-5x the amount you get paid to
| manually do the job.
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
|
| 2. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-
| cookbook-4th...
|
| 3. https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-
| Lunche...
| fartcannon wrote:
| As someone who definitely agrees that people shouldn't have to
| work in poor conditions, I still cant help but feel that the
| anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated. Does anyone else get
| that feeling?
| gruez wrote:
| >I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit
| seems coordinated.
|
| What sounds off to you? It seems pretty straightforward how the
| "fake posts" can arise out of uncoordinated behavior. Antiwork
| discusses various grievances that reddit's demographics has
| (capitalism, under/un-employment, poor working conditions).
| Readers are more likely to engage with topics that they're
| passionate about, so the subreddit becomes a great place to
| farm karma/upvotes, and content creators happily oblige.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I don't think so. Humans are pretty good at keeping in sync
| with one another. This story and most on antiwork are likely
| fake and people are just keeping in sync to play reddits upvote
| game.
| nthot wrote:
| I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over
| the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't
| have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of
| subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with
| that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less
| that this is being coordinated by an external actor.
|
| The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be
| amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.
|
| I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about
| reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about
| a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product
| and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a
| larger budget could do.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
| fartcannon wrote:
| Some of the manipulation seems obvious. Some of it less so. I
| always felt like some kind ublock origin style plugin that
| highlights or removes known instances of
| PR/manipulation/propanda would be helpful. Perhaps an AI
| trained on press releases from big corps and governments that
| performs authorship identification for a start. 'The writing
| style in this post are an 80% match for a press release by
| <government body> linked below'. Kind of like those websites
| that try to identify fake product reviews.
|
| Theres a high chance that would probably get gamed, too, I
| guess.
| steve76 wrote:
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Previous discussion about a similar situation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
| detcader wrote:
| I once saw a presentation from a man who build entire products
| this way. He automates hiring contractor devs based on their
| review scores, sends them to a huge Trello board that they use to
| self-onboard and then take on tasks, and automatically tracks of
| their progress by Trello cards completed and amount of code
| written.
|
| 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
| kevingadd wrote:
| Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long
| time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated
| me, I got transferred to what was effectively a punishment team -
| officially I was hired as a game designer and then officially
| moved to the programming department, but then I was moved onto
| "cinematics", which meant setting up shots, camera transitions,
| and dialogue timing. Naturally I had zero qualifications to do
| this. Another person moved onto the punishment team was a QA
| tester that a lead had actively tried to block hiring. The
| supposed justification for this was that cinematics were behind
| schedule (this did seem to be true, at least).
|
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| genmud wrote:
| Hey everyone, look at this guy! With his moral compass and
| stuff. Ain't never gonna get your own space rocket with that
| attitude.
|
| All jokes aside, being trustworthy/ethical pays dividends over
| the course of peoples lifetime and will often times reward you
| in surprising ways.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Haha. Absolutely, that has been my experience in and out of
| work.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, you're a great person, and a terrible consultant
|
| https://despair.com/products/consulting
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I think the r/antiwork mindset of "no loyalty, no social
| connections, no extra effort, no two-weeks notice, work only
| work the wage" only applies when you're working for a job that
| treats you like shit. If you have a half-decent employer you
| should provide some loyalty and extra effort when necessary or
| you're a garbage employee. If you have a good career and you
| get a bad employer you can just leave.
|
| The context with r/antiwork is that many of these people are in
| extremely toxic workplaces but need money because they're very
| poor. It's a free-for-all, "take advantage of" or "be taken
| advantage of". And that most of the submissions are probably
| fake dystopia rage-bait.
| LanceH wrote:
| It seems to be axiomatic there that all employers deserve
| this treatment. Literally, "all", there is no wiggle room for
| any company or manager.
|
| My concern is the bleedover into /r/jobs where I like to
| answer with advice on how to handle a
| situation/search/interview.
| duderific wrote:
| > The key difference might be that I enjoy my work and this guy
| doesn't, really.
|
| He probably enjoyed it while he was working on the scripts, but
| once he was done, there wasn't anything much else to do, so he
| moved on to doing stuff he likes to do, while getting paid.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I love these threads.
|
| 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.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Same.
|
| I'm a systems engineer. I will always automate if it makes
| sense. And depending on how the environment is, I may or may
| not tell others about it.
|
| I think of automation like a box of tools. On journeyman jobs,
| the tools are yours. You paid for them, and you have use of
| them as you see fit. I think of automation the same.
|
| You're not buying my tools - you're buying my skills that bring
| my tools. You quit paying, you quit getting work. In no world
| do you get my tools.
| bena wrote:
| To those saying this can't be true, while it may be exaggerated,
| I can believe the core of it.
|
| 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.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Ugh that subreddit is just a cesspool. Most of the stories are
| fake and it attracts the bottom feeders of society.
|
| 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.
| brimble wrote:
| > People need work to feel fulfilled.
|
| I, too, worry about the idle rich and think we should do
| something to help them find work.
| vangelis wrote:
| Work, as they say, makes you free.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| Vast majority of rich are not idle and live very active life.
| While they may not do work as you understand it, they do
| philanthropy, investment, etc. Few if any just stay home to
| watch TV - which is equivalent of automating work and not
| telling anyone.
| brimble wrote:
| Oh. So making them not dependent on losing 8 hours of their
| work per weekday to a boss, and giving them freedom to do
| what they like in that time, _isn 't_ making their lives
| worse? But if the same state is achieved by a poor person
| then...?
|
| I would agree that also not needing to be available for a
| boss _at all_ , even "just in case something goes wrong",
| is better, but that doesn't seem to be the argument.
| Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to do
| much of your waking hours is morally or psychologically
| harmful. Which obviously becomes absurd when we apply it to
| rich people. Which is my point. Why's it fine for one group
| and something to worry about with another?
|
| [EDIT] More directly, I'm wary any time I encounter "be
| careful with that freedom, poor people, it might be bad for
| you, and I'm not sure we can trust you to do the right
| thing with it! Rich people, carry on as you were, you're
| all fine and need no oversight or pointers, obviously." as
| an argument.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Dude you're a fool if you don't think rich people put in
| hours and hours of work. They're almost never not
| working. Their entire lives typically revolve around work
| and nothing else.
|
| You might have a point if you're talking trust fund
| babies but those people are miserable because they do
| nothing. They're not happy. The vast majority of wealth
| is not handed down.
|
| >Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to
| do much of your waking hours is morally or
| psychologically harmful.
|
| Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD
| WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is
| stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've
| got news for you. No one is going to just give you this
| freedom, nor should they because it would then be
| meaningless.
|
| I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and
| lacking in any real world experience. You need to grow up
| and realize that almost nothing in life that's easily
| obtained is worth a shit.
| brimble wrote:
| > Dude you're a fool if you don't think rich people put
| in hours and hours of work. They're almost never not
| working. Their entire lives typically revolve around work
| and nothing else.
|
| This is most people, rich or not. The rich just don't
| _have to_ do work they aren 't _enthusiastically
| choosing_ to do. The ~50% of normal folks ' work that
| they're not paid to do--property maintenance, the boring
| kind of shopping, cooking, driving themselves and others
| around, fighting with insurance, keeping a schedule and
| making appointments, cleaning, childcare, et c.--are,
| tellingly, the kind of work that rich folks typically pay
| others to do for them. What remains is work that is done
| _purely_ by choice. Not only no boss, but no _personal_
| work that isn 't done by choice. That's the difference.
| The "idle" poor still have more work _imposed_ on them--
| work they cannot avoid doing--than the "idle" rich, by a
| long shot.
|
| So again: rich folks can have little to no work _imposed_
| on them (and in fact _pay_ to avoid nearly all such
| imposition) and that 's fine, but if poor people are in
| the situation of having merely _a substantial part_ , but
| nowhere near all, of their required-work burden removed,
| that may be a _bad thing_ for them and we should worry?
| That seems odd. My "idle rich" quip has you responding
| as if I've attacked something sacred, because, as you
| state, most of those folks stay plenty busy, but if
| that's the case, what's the motivation for worrying about
| poor people not being able to do the same?
|
| It's also the case that having lots of money means being
| able to turn hobbies into "work", and maybe even money-
| making ventures, without ever having to do the parts you
| don't want to. That looks an _awful lot_ like play, even
| if it 's producing an income. Which, to be clear, I think
| is _fine_. Shit, that 's exactly where I, and probably
| most people, want to be. The part where I get lost is
| when poor people gaining a fraction of that freedom is
| worrisome.
|
| > Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY
| HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no
| one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be
| work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give
| you this freedom, nor should they because it would then
| be meaningless.
|
| Where, exactly, the fuck, did I claim that getting rich
| if you're not already rich is not, typically, very hard
| work?
|
| > I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive,
| and lacking in any real world experience.
|
| This is perhaps the most appropriate time I've ever
| employed this: I'm rubber, you're glue.
|
| [EDIT] Are we using very different definitions of rich,
| perhaps? I find this exchange baffling enough that I'm
| beginning to wonder if we're operating from entirely
| different terms. I wouldn't consider anyone who'd suffer
| a large drop in quality of life if they decided to stop
| working for several normally-work-aged years, to be rich.
| That's what I mean by rich. Not an entrepreneur with a
| whopping mid-seven-figures in the bank, or the owner of a
| modestly successful local chain of stores, or anything
| like that. People who hang out at expensive parts of the
| "Med" and ski the Alps annually, despite living in the
| US, who could afford a very nice new car _every month_ if
| they decided that 's what they wanted, keep a personal
| staff on payroll, and, crucially, who _don 't need to
| work_ to keep doing that kind of thing indefinitely, are
| rich. Fussell's "upper" and "top-out-of-sight", not his
| "upper-middle" (who may do much of the above, but can't
| keep doing it without continuing to work) and certainly
| not anything lower than that.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| > _People need work to feel fulfilled._
|
| While you're likely to get skewered for this line, I think it's
| because of a mismatch in vocabulary that is being ignored. The
| "work" in antiwork is usually referring to paid employment, but
| it seems that you're using it more akin to fulfilling
| accomplishment. I agree with you on the whole that people need
| to feel that they are making a positive impact on their
| surroundings to feel satisfaction.
|
| Maybe that comes from paid employment, or volunteer work, or
| hobbies, or social interactions. A street preacher, a stay at
| home parent, an ancient cave painter, a bricklayer, and a
| software architect might all feel equally satisfied by their
| work, irrespective of the value placed on that work by their
| society.
|
| In fact, I would argue that the (professed) goals of antiwork
| _are_ aligned with your view -- people should be free to pursue
| the work they personally find the most fulfilling, rather than
| the most profitable.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| >The "work" in antiwork is usually referring to paid
| employment,
|
| Except it's not, the posts also reflect this.
|
| "A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious
| about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free
| life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want
| personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles."
| ravedave5 wrote:
| "People need work to feel fulfilled." I never thought I'd see
| Stockholm syndrome in the wild.
| lezojeda wrote:
| Are you kidnapped or held against your will by your employer?
| ravedave5 wrote:
| Are you able to keep a shelter over your head and food in
| your belly without work?
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Huh? Are you expecting others to take care of your needs
| while you do nothing?
|
| At what time in history has this ever been an option. You
| would be dead in a ditch with this attitude for most of
| our history. Maybe you need to go out into the woods and
| survive without help to force an attitude change.
|
| You have a skewed since of reality egged on by a society
| that's let you survive off of doing basically nothing and
| yet you still complain. The problem here is that you
| believe all of the stuff to keep you alive just magically
| appears without anyone doing any work.
| zero102 wrote:
| They do. You do, I do, everyone does.
|
| You're maliciously interpreting OP to imply that "slaving
| over a hot keyboard" is the only way to feel fulfilled.
|
| Whether you are an employee, company owner, gardener,
| woodworker, whatever you are being fulfilled by "working".
| Applying yourself willfully and deliberately to a problem. If
| you are not being fulfilled you find something else. Or, like
| most people, you realize _working for someone_ won 't be
| fulfilling, so you instead seek fulfillment in _work_ that
| you enjoy - such as your hobbies.
|
| This equating of _employment_ with _slavery_ by the
| /r/antiwork types is why the subreddit is quickly becoming
| the butt of every joke. Yes, it's not uncommon your
| _profession_ is unfulfilling. Most well adjusted people
| derive fulfillment from _work_ outside of their profession.
| antihero wrote:
| How is working a job that you know is completely mind-numbing
| and pointless to enrich some other person meaningful in any
| way?
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Reading comprehension. You neglected to pay attention to most
| of my comment.
|
| Who is forcing you work a mind-numbing job?
|
| Do you want everyone else to pay for you to do nothing? Do
| what you want, but don't expect others to donate what they've
| earned to your finger painting or whatever it is you think
| you should do to be fulfilled daily. This idea that everyone
| will just suddenly become creative happy geniuses as soon as
| "mind-numbing" work is alleviated is false.
| [deleted]
| TedShiller wrote:
| I know friends who work at (Big Tech Company) who literally make
| $500k/year on paper and they don't do anything.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Wishing you healing Mike. I'm burned out myself at my current
| job and not sure if I'll ever get that excitement or passion
| back in my life.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I watched a similar thing happen once. A greybeard was brought
| in to whip things into shape. He did so. Automated everything
| and made 100+ linux boxes run like a top. New owners came in,
| and they weren't the nice kind. He got stressed out and had a
| heart attack and was gone for several weeks. Things hummed
| along while he was gone, and his perceived value went down
| because things "ran just fine without him", ignoring that it
| was _because_ of him.
|
| They ended up firing him and giving me his responsibilities,
| which was a laugh because he and I had drastically different
| jobs, and he was far more experienced and capable in system
| administration and automation than I was. I too left less than
| a year later.
| trilinearnz wrote:
| That's a very sad story. I hope he's doing well now, if he's
| still around.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I had a similar job. Probably 1 hour of real work per day. It
| was awesome at first. Quickly I started to hate it. I spend all
| day dicking around so when I went home I had already done all
| of my hobbies. I imagine that if I had that job now instead of
| in my early 20's I would be able to fill that time with more
| interesting things and/or family time. But I left that job
| because I feared I was losing any skills I had and eventually
| the gig would be up and I'd be forced to scramble to find
| another job.
|
| These types of gigs are often a blessing and a curse.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Ah, I can relate to that story. It reminded me of a position
| I held many years ago.
|
| Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the
| mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only
| realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else
| there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my
| leadership chain.
|
| There were a bunch of different phases during my time there
| that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack
| off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby
| relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work"
| phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the
| office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML
| documentation passed W3C validation after that), the
| "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy"
| phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase,
| and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot"
| phase.
|
| I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it
| seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I
| decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net
| negative for me.
| yibg wrote:
| I have a some what similar stint. Worked at a start that got
| acquired by big co for the product and customers, although not
| the product my team was responsible for. Our product got
| quickly put on maintenance mode with promises to rewrite the
| whole thing at some point.
|
| So by that point I had been working there for a year and some,
| knew the system pretty well and we had pretty much nothing to
| do. No new features, very few bugs due to little change in the
| product.
|
| I'd show up to work at 10, leave for lunch for 2+ hours, and
| leave the office at 4. And even then I was mostly surfing the
| web and chatting with friends most of the day. The rest of the
| team and my manager knew, but they also knew there was actually
| no work. We'd all go play badminton before lunch some times and
| so there were 3 hours periods where no one was around.
|
| Was pretty nice at first. Steady pay, no responsibilities or
| stress. But quickly got really boring. And since it was my
| first job out of school, not very good for learning and growth.
| Ironically the slow pace also really dampened by motivation to
| look for another job, so I hung around probably a year longer
| than I should have.
| dansiemens wrote:
| > 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
|
| I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die.
| They don't really understand the technology that their jobs are
| bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-
| go.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got
| fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers
| will not thank them for making their job easier with better
| tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was,
| let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no
| incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is
| to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.
| mediaman wrote:
| Agreed - accountants are a unique breed. They do a fair
| amount of basic numeric analysis and rote work that is of the
| sort that is beneficial to automation. But they're often very
| averse to technology, often stop learning any new tools early
| on in their career, and tend to stick to the methods they
| learned as juniors, even many years later.
|
| That's a broad brush, and is certainly unfair to and untrue
| of some accountants. Some are Excel gods and can VBA it up
| with the best of them, and would have been productive
| software engineers in another life. But it's surprisingly
| true for much of the profession.
| baby-yoda wrote:
| at an internship in college (large consumer electronics company)
| one of my daily tasks was to take an export from the ERP system,
| format it in a specific way, save it to a shared drive and email
| to a few different people. it was really repetitive, fairly
| simplistic and the report from the ERP was very consistent.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| We had a team that we were making look bad, and their solution
| to this problem was to complain about every procedure we
| weren't following exactly.
|
| One of the ones I was more sympathetic to was developer docs.
| We had docs, but not where and in the official file format as
| required. After dorking around with jcite for a couple weeks I
| was able to clean up our integration tests enough to work as
| examples for the docs, and the rest was just rearranging wiki
| pages into a different set of files.
|
| By the time I was done, I had an almost compliant version of
| the doc that took our tech writer one hour per release to fix
| up the company footers and some formatting issues. The rest was
| handled by a CI/CD job.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| FWIW I read this awhile ago or some version of it but I have
| absolutely automated a job or an entire department's job away
| with scripts.
|
| 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.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Except you just told the whole world and just like the fools that
| are bragging about their "overwork" on reddit, they're doing so
| against their own interests. These kinds of things end up on the
| front page of the BBC under the "work life" section which your
| boss may inevitably see, then get a wild idea that his/her
| employees must be doing the same, and start a crusade to end it.
| Pro tip: if something is meant to be kept a secret, don't spread
| it online. This goes for job automation, multiple jobs, favorite
| camping spots, etc.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Assuming for the moment that this is a true story, IMO if the
| person is "clocking in" and getting paid by the hour, then this
| is dishonest and perhaps criminal.
|
| If the person is paid a salary then it's fine. Salaried employees
| are paid to get a job done, not for their time.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| pcurve wrote:
| $90k/year he/she is getting paid is so little money to a law firm
| that they wouldn't care anyway if they found out.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| > For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off
|
| Laughed out loud at this.
| trembonator wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-19 23:01 UTC)