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

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_getting_paid_for_doing_nothing_is_over/

by account-5 • 5 years ago

72 22 5 years ago

old.reddit.com

mkmk• 5 years ago

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

jrumbut• 5 years ago

Just paying a clerk eliminates the risk of a software development project blowing out the budget or alienating customers used to the convenience of ordering by email.

If whatever that company does is meaningful the poster contributed the same as anyone else.

randombits0• 5 years ago

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

livinginfear• 5 years ago

At risk of being downvoted, I'm automatically very skeptical of any story I see on Reddit. I pretty much just instantly assume it's some kind of weird lie for online clout. The site culture there is very strange.

account-52• 5 years ago

I certainly wouldn't downvote you, even if I could, I'm skeptical of everything. Best way to be.

dqv• 5 years ago

I can remember telling tons of lies on Reddit when I was a teenager, so I think your skepticism is valid.

ThunderSizzle• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if there's any real unpaid actors non-bots on reddit anymore. I think they need to constantly pump it with bots and fake data to make it appear there's plenty of others...

account-52• 5 years ago

I took it at face value. Whilst I can and do code in autohotkey I have done similar things with it but not on the scale this story goes into. I posted because if it was real fair play to the person.

naikrovek• 5 years ago

some people are responsible with their money and make enough to allow that responsibility to occur.

not many anymore, but some.

lolsal• 5 years ago

Your BS detector tripped because of a bias you have about who has two months of salary saved up?

Other alarm bells should be going off for you.

kelseyfrog• 5 years ago

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

elzbardico• 5 years ago

Looks like what happened in the end. He was laid off because a new system made his job obsolete.

ravedave5• 5 years ago

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

Arrath• 5 years ago

What an excellent response to finding such a case.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

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

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

Noumenon72• 5 years ago

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

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

908B64B197• 5 years ago

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

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

perrygeo• 5 years ago

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

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

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

Havoc• 5 years ago

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

lulzury• 5 years ago

They developed a new system, and gave access to the customers directly.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

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

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

Related Stories