ProgrammerHumor
expertInVba
Discussion
did something similar once and my boss "punished" me by ordering me to stop, so I simply never made a front end for my unusable command line tool. when the time came for me to train someone on it the process was about 34 steps long
rule 1 of automating your job is inserting delays into the script if you want it to replace you.
Hardcode a check that your user account is still active, or a code that is sent to you by email.
(don't do this it's probably cause for termination lol)
Not just cause for termination, but probably for a lawsuit as well. Most companies make you sign a contract that says anything you produce for them is their intellectual property. So if you write a script that fails to function after you get fired (or worse, deletes itself), they might consider that corporate sabotage.
Also never write any of the automation code when you are on the clock.
If your salaried they can still argue the own the work but if you're hourly they definitely cannot.
There has been cases of people using company time on a side business and then the company sued and successfully got all of the assets that that person created for their side business arguing that they own the rights to it since they were made while they were working for them.
I write automation code on the clock all the time, they're gonna have to pay if they want that documented though.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your last line, but I wouldn't even bother training the new person to use whatever tools I made. Any issues arising from it would fall on your lap, and you were "ordered" to stop anyway.
I really didn't mind - the guy I was training basically needed to understand how to write the script from scratch to actually apply it (without following the steps), so I was effectively just teaching someone basic programming. I didn't really have to bastardize my work at all
Why would you tell your boss?
To impress him and get a better hike? See boss what I did, I automated this task.
Sorry there is no room in this years budget for a raise.
But here is some extra tasks that your position will be handling from now on
That was actually more like what it was, I wanted to learn how to do more things so I could automate those too. I just had a really strong work ethic.
I no longer have anywhere near the work ethic I used to, for a number of reasons that are generally related to ignorant, malicious, and/or ungrateful people in leadership.
They wear us all down eventually. I'm just trying to convince the kids that working harder than everyone else seldom gets you any more than everyone else.
I don't think OC necessary told the boss, the boss could've been shoulder surfing.
Boss asked how the task was going, I told him that it's like mostly automated and I could even make a frontend for it if I can use some of the time I saved to practice frontend programming. Boss behaved like a moron, and created a lose-lose-lose situation out of thin air
This is the way. Automate, but obscure. There should never, unless you're paid for it, be a way that they can run the job automation.
Never tell anyone you've automated shit. Look BUSY and CONCERNED. Go full "No boss delivery to this client is long and painful, mini 2 mandays" .
No I don't have a long bash command in my bashrc that does all of it when I type "uwu"
I did exactly this but spent the time learning JS and Python instead of watching movies. Biggest career boost so far.
To be fair, when I say "Automate everything", in my career this has never resulted in 9 months of doing absolutely nothing, usually it's just allowing me to do tasks that would be boring and take 2 hours to be done in a few minutes
You're right. It was a lucky coincidence in my case. I was in the office of my company but worked solely for the client on a one-person project. Then, both my boss and the guy responsible for me at the client were replaced. The new guys were both under the impression that the other one respectively would manage me and since the tasks were always done right on time and I constantly looked busy, nobody had a reason to look into it.
Seems like a dream. I imagine all the stuff I could accomplish at work without management and a thousand unnecessary meetings. I'm pretty self driven so I could easily manage to be productive without a manager.
Yeah it's pretty rare to find a job that can be entirely automated away just because nowadays most people have quite a few responsibilities that aren't all data wrangling already. Being a typist has already been pretty much automated away.
uwu
snort
The consequences of not giving employees any form of recognition or profit share and thus no motivation to improve upon the company
Never reveal the magic behind the curtain.
We lie to eachother, we know it, we choose to keep it like that because we don't want to let up.
"be unproductive, actively try to avoid improving anything in your workplace"
100 upvotes, no discussion
Am I the only one for whom this statement is controversial?
"unproductive"
The work's getting done ain't it? The company shouldn't care if ops doing it manually or not, neither should you.
And as for "avoiding improving anything" op wasn't hired to upgrade the place, they were hired to do their job, which is exactly what they're doing.
I'm not a developer person se. But as I got older it became much more clear that this perspective relies entirely on your past experiences and current employer. Both working hard pays off and working hard does not pay off are true. It just depends who you are working for.
If the company compensates me for automating my job then I’ll do it. Atm almost all companies give you a pizza and more work for that so it would be financially insane to disclose that you are not actually working
you can automate your work? great! heres more work, which we wont compensate you more for doing.
That happened to me yonks ago and I did tell my supervisor who was like "oh really that's cool" and that was it haha. The manager barely even knew what the team did, she was just in meetings all the time. I never figured out what they were talking about. Business is really weird sometimes.
You guys get pizza?
Sure, if we pay for it. Sometimes it's even a "buy stuff for 50 bucks and you get a free small Margarita voucher".
I wish things were different, but you're never rewarded to improve productivity, quite the opposite.
Your compensation won't increase as they increase your scope. The headcount will keep been lowered. And when things break you're the one that's pointed and asked to repair it.
Work is purely transactional. If they already have you doing more than you're paid for they're not going to renegotiate pay in your favor. I'm not saying don't look for improvement or learning opportunities, but know the value of both your work and yourself.
Depends. During Covid it was peak years to double up with a contract and a FT Job. So some watch Netflix some made more money. Some did both with hiring an a 3rd world country dude who is smarter than all of us for a few dollars a day.
Depends who's side you're on.
Owner: loses out on extra productivity of their workers
Worker: may potentially automate his way out of a job where the owner continues to reap the rewards of his efforts while the worker is left with no compensation long term
If the employer was concerned with productivity, they would probably try hiring people to automate things in the first place instead of keeping people on a payroll.
From my personal experience, however, it's rarely as simple as that. You can automate routine stuff, sure, then something changes, they add a new column in the report, new equipment type, switch protocols etc, and you gotta update your shit.
I mean, the company's getting exactly what they asked for at the price they agreed to. It might just be a bad deal for them, since it's possible to automate the task and to not have to pay a person's wage for it, but as an employee it's not necessarily your responsibility to tell them so.
Am I the only one for whom this statement is controversial?
It is not controversial for anyone that worked in a corpo environment before.
You got to watch your back. If you tell the company that you are redundant, they are not going to give you a big raise they are going to fire you.
Edit: word
"you managed to make something that passively does work that produces a profit of X? Have you ever thought of the poor capitalist who could be earning that passive X income instead of you?"
The company already was earning a profit of Y from spending X on your work. Their profit being P = Y - X. If you automate the task and tell them, their profit of Y comes without the expense of X. Meaning their new profit is P+X.
Someone either way is now getting that X. Whether it be the person whose only skill is owning money - or the person who actually did the automation.
Yes I sure as hell hope you are the only one who is thinking the money-having individual is more deserving of that newly created passive income.
not "be unproductive". dont appear lazy to your boss. if the work is getting done, its better they think you're busy and dont try to pile more work on you.
its more productive, really. you have more time without being harassed to do more.
The problem is that if you tell your boss you automated stuff, first they will expect you to maintain it, and second they will give you more work (negating the advantage of automation for you).
So as an employee, automate if you can, but never ever tell your boss about it.
My work is to do X
If X is done, then my work is done. I'll worry about something else when corporate starts treating me like a human being instead of a commodity.
This sub can be an echo chamber for people trying not to work and being 'smart' to avoid work by taking advantage of higher ups that don't know anything. Depending on the situation it might be deserved, but you are also wasting your own potential imo.
Allthough I would love to sit back for 9 months, so this is quite hypocritical.
Bear in mind most people on this sub are uni students or hobbiests
If I'm hired to do the job and I do the job, then the contract is fulfilled, it doesn't matter if I did it in 3 months or 3 hours.
Telling the company makes no sense because they will assign you to something else or fire you, keep your automation, and pocket the savings.
If they hired me to automate a task and I automate it, that's a different story.
I did tell them and ended up as a team lead for automating things across the organization I’m working in. It earned me a promotion and money I save during this effort just looks good on me. Good management will recognize the value of automation and use your talents.
My staff has no idea that I have a bunch of automated stuff to check their work. I wrote stuff that basically checks it all and compiles a report of anything that’s incorrect or glaringly needs to be looked at. Since I wrote the initial that they work on, their selections are locked, so it’s really like a true/false thing where there’s only one right answer. It took at ton of work to set up (hard to describe what I do, but I have to manage over 600 sites for compliance, and they’re all similar but have a few differences). I set them all up generically, then made the key differences for all of them which I can change if needed, and bam. Fool proof system.
They think I’m going over these with a fine tooth comb when in reality I’m watching YouTube
With protestant work ethic, automation of work counts as work, but the subsequent automated work does not count as work.
Or, more accurately, it's no longer your work, it's the machine's work.
This is why you have to keep acting busy, regardless of what you have actually contributed.
sounds smart? Company gets the job done it wants, you get paid.
everybody wins. Only copro rats are fuming at thisl
Everybody wins until corpo finds out.
"we hired you to do this job what you doing?"
"the job?"
"not like that!"
AI about to ruin this cheat code
It's not. They had me try to automate part of a project using their 'internal AI'. It broke shit more.
- I am not a programmer, this hit first page.
You respond to a prediction for the future with an anecdote of the past?
Corporations have already found out. I have been seeing more jobs looking for people to automate tasks. It has mainly come about because of ai but really you don’t need ai unless doing support automations. I got into this space because I was forced to use an automation tool instead of the program I wrote due to client restrictions. However I found it quite enjoyable and have been checking out jobs in that category along with my other skill sets.
>I have been seeing more jobs looking for people to automate task
I mean this is literally the purpose of this industry since computers were invented
copro
amazing typo
I couldn't have made a better joke if I tried :(
But isn't she wasting her talents? If she can hypothetically automate all her office work in a single weekend than she can probably get a better job with good pay elsewhere. Even I will get tired of watching movies after a certain time period during work.
better job with good pay
with harder tasks, more work and higher expectations. Yeah, no thanks, I prefer chilling and not stressing
At which point, you get a second hobby.
One of the things you learn as you get older is you don't need to hyper optimize your life to keep creating time for new stuff... Life is for living, not for gamifying into the most optimized form of yourself for money.
That would require more work and that's quite obviously something she didn't want to do. Some people are happy with simple jobs and simple life, you know.
So what if she does? I'm not the talent police. Who am I to tell her how to live life.
A lot of people including myself would take less work for less pay than more work for more pag
THE most important thing in life is your own time. Nothing else. Wasting away at a job 8h a day until you can barely walk is not how you're supposed to spend it. Find a job that isn't stressful and can support you and automate away. Live. Don't fall into the bullshit that is "work harder get better". Unless your job is literally your hobby, don't treat it as anything other than a necessary waste of time. You could be climbing, swimming, skydiving, petting knagaroos or anything else right now if the world wasn't as fucked as it is.
Or get a promotion at the current company for doing so well. JK, they will never promote you for this.
or she could get a second office job.
My friend did this like 20 years ago. So he worked for some staffing company that would outsource office work for major corporations
The story was two corporations were merging and it was going to take them a while to fully integrate their ERP systems, so I guess the billings/collection system was different then the main erp
His job was basically to enter all the transactions from their billing software to the ERP what involved downloading a few spread sheets, doing some matching and then data entry
Well through some VBA and macros he figured out a way to pretty much automate it , and he could do all the work assigned to him in about 1.5-2 hours
He even told his boss about it, his boss was just like "Well great but the client is paying us a fixed amount for this work, so I guess take a long lunch?"
So he would usually work 2 hours, then go work out, sleep , play video games, for 5 hours then come back to clock out.
Wait what? Instead of manually adding from C1 to C50 I can write =SUM(C1:C50) and excel will do that for me?
Long nested IF statement is the only way, gotta check if the cells are blank to justify summing the cells, don't want to waste processing time on calculating empty cells you big dummy!
=IF(C50 = ISBLANK(SUM(C1:C49, IF(C49 = ISBLANK(SUM(C1:C48))))))
Something like that, with another 48 or so cells, worth of IFs. Definitely won't find a more efficient way to get your work done.
That brings back a blast (or rather horror) from the past, where I got hired to develop a proper desktop application to replace a way too big MS Access thingy, because it reached the maximum database size possible, even though they started using multiple databases at that point and it finally clicked, that that had no future.
Should use =IFS instead at least...
oh its even easier than that you open copilot and say 'add all my cash up' then press the 'suggest a formula' and then 'insert formula', they even have cute icons like a widdle pencil
I've told this before, but:
in my last salary job before self-employment, I discovered that I had inherited a somewhat strange and eventually toxic situation.
I was the new sysadmin, and I found that the analyst and the programmer had the equivalent of "root" access. They would regularly use this to boost the runtime priority of their compiles, leading to frozen screens for the interactive users - data entry, front counter, etc. And that meant lots of phone calls for me to FIX IT. So I'd re-adjust the priority, and they'd boost it again, etc. Yes, it was a toxic mindset on their part. It was taking a significant part of my time to manage it.
When I brought it up with the boss, he sighed and said he wasn't going to rock the boat and that I'd have to deal with it. So I did.
Instead of waiting for phone calls, I wrote a series of programs to monitor the system (it was an IBM AS400), and any process that was running at the "wrong" priority got adjusted back to its right and proper place. I disguised the programs as system-types so they wouldn't stand out amongst the rest of the OS processes.
Now, instead of seeing their stupid grins while they watched me play whack-a-mole with their compile runtime priority, I sat back and watched them puzzle out why their attempts to boost priority were immediately 86'd, while I sat back with my hands behind my head, well away from the keyboard.
Stupid arseholes couldn't figure it out, and I went back to doing actual work.
Reducing compile times is actually really good for programmer efficiency, if this hadn't been back in mainframe times you'd have been doing good to request they get some dedicated compute in exchange for locking them the fuck out of root.
Kids these days have it easy! They got their Pythons embedded right in there with their cells and rows and pivot tables. Why we used to have to set up our own ODBC and schlep it all together with VBScript! You ain’t a real deal programmer until you’ve Dimmed some!
Bro you joke but my web development company uses a fair amount of vb...hadnt seen actual vb since middle school...
Now I kinda like it lol
It’s actually not a bad little language as far as I remember. My first job out of high school was probably writing those ASP pages. I don’t really consider programming in it any worse than Perl or PHP. It’s just… we have Python everywhere now.
My first job in the industry was VB.NET and WPF. The WPF bindings could get a little tedious sometimes if there was logic in setters, etc., but I definitely didn’t hate it. Now the old legacy VB6 stuff was a different story… goto’s everywhere it was the flying spaghetti monster!
if you can automate your job in a weekend, you are doing grunts work.
That's the best for me personally. I do grunt work that pays real well, 0 stress or pressure since it's not mission critical stuff, and I can finish each workday in an hour or so. I used to do more important work in previous companies but that shit was always anxiety inducing. I don't even have KPIs anymore, shit's fucking great
When Covid hit, I "downsized" and moved to the company's software installer team. They really needed someone from the dev team, and I was kinda done with working on the codebase as a whole anyway. It was getting MBA'd to death recently. So...same salary, half the stress? Absolutely.
Such an easy job 80% of the time. It was bringing fresh servers up with AD/IIS/SQL and then running our installers. It was a lot of config and stuff, but mostly mindless when you know these services inside and out. Most of the install was waiting on the database operations. Within a few months, I had the whole thing automated in .NET and Powershell. My interaction went from a few hours of dicking around in Admin Tools, SQL and Reporting Services prompts, to 5 minutes of filling out some textboxes in my app and clicking go. (And calling the client and getting connected of course)
My QoL exploded. Usually, I woke up at 7:59am, and (we the team) talked to the boss for an hour about what installs are done/pending. Then we were on our own. No install until 2pm? Well then not much to do until 2pm. I installed new gutters on the garage that day. By 3pm, the install was going, and I was playing guitar. Install at 8am, finished by 2pm? Out on the motorcycle by 2:30. No install that day? Well... :) House has never been cleaner, hobbies more fulfilled, or fridge as organized and populated. That and the amount of money I saved was ridiculous.
And will keep doing that their whole life, while complaining about others that earn more and have careers
My girlfriend has been using ChatGPT to get help with her scripts for work she isn't meant to do.
I've asked her for 5 years to let me help. This week she finally gave in. 4 bash commands, a python project and two alisas later all her "easy" tasks are done. I've never seen her look more relaxed. I'm not sure how I feel about this but it is nice seeing the stress levels reduced.
it honestly boggles my mind how incapable LLMs are at programming lmao
They're capable, but only if the person using them already knows how to program. Which makes sense. I can give non-tech people on my team step by step instructions on how to do something I consider trivial. They'll still come back like, "this is like another language to me." ...mfr I literally wrote it all in English, you just need to copy/paste some stuff.. and I literally tell you in the instructions "copy this, paste here, press enter."
My wife, who is a physician and very knowledgable when it comes to her field, was trying to use GPT recently, and gave up saying it's useless.. so I read her prompt and wanted to laugh (did not, ofc).. then I wrote out a lengthy and specific prompt, which she thought was a bit excessive until the output was exactly what she needed.
Non-programmers just don't have a very good idea of what they're dealing with when using LLMs.
I don't think they're incapable in such a sense they produce garbage. It's more you really need to understand how to get the best out of them and then also be able to make it work for your problem.
What actually confuses me more is the people using it correct and enhance paragraphs upon paragraphs of written works, I'm dyslexia and ask them to grammar and spell check for me and half the time they remove meaning and paragraphs of my writing. And almost always the stuff it's removing is contextual and has meaning to the subject I wrote about.
It becomes a fine war of mediation
In my first position after my traineeship as a programmer they put into a controlling job where I was getting an excel file twice a week and had to copy paste some numbers from the source into a target sheet and do some very basic calculations.
Second time I was asked to do so I happily went to my boss telling him enthusiastically that I could easily automate this and we could safe a lot of time. He drastically told me not to do so, because they’ve always done it that way.
I refrained from automizing it. Why? Because it was the only thing I got to work on all week and at this time there was nothing like mobile internet and also the company’s internet access was restricted to 100MB (yes Megabyte, not Gigabyte) per month. So pushing numbers around was the only thing I could do all week apart from looking out of the window even after repeatedly asking for more work and maybe even for something that matches my job description. This year was the most boring time of my life.
You know you could've just brought a book, right? :-D
I am very sure that would not have been appreciated. It’s complicated;)
I was running an Ultimate Online Server back then, so I did a lot of conceptual work while sitting in the office. Everybody thought I was busy.
If this really happened, you'd go the route of over employment....
I had 3 weeks to program an epic, finished on week 1. I slowly pushed my PRs over the next 2 weeks while hobbying at home.
Quality of life > money for me, but over employment is not a bad choice indeed
That's a bit different than 9 months of dicking off.
Same boat. Already built the thing I told them would take 4 weeks so I can release it at the same pace everyone else works at. Quality of life is amazing.
THIS
Over employment is also not really a doable thing in the EU.
No because that's a huge pain in the ass and if you're ever caught you lose both jobs.
I'd rather take the easy safe money than deal with all that stress.
Doesn't have to be another full time job.
A lot of these corporate jobs are in-person because it makes management feel like you're working harder. So it's not possible to work 2x jobs
Not sure what the rules are in America but I live in Europe (don't want to say exactly where) and if you do this it's illegal. I actually know someone is getting sued by a former employer for doing exactly this.
Honestly, that sounds horrible. I like movies but having nothing else to do but watch movies for 9h straight would bore me to death. Having too much work to do is shit, but having nothing to do but still being in the office all day is almost as bad.
I feel you. I'm a wire edm machinist. It's great when I have a job that runs for a few hours, but a full shift job (where I set it up and it's cutting for the whole shift without intervention) is almost worse than micro jobs where you set up the part for 15 minutes and cut 5 minutes.
It sounds like she was bored to death either way.
I was in a similar position as the OP and within about 3 months I was begging to be transferred. I was doing about 1 hour of real work a week. The rest of the time I was staring at that 1 hour of work zoned out with YouTube playing in the background. It was torture.
VBA's official motto:
Making things possible that you probably shouldn't be doing in the first place
Valid 😂 The first thing I used VBA for was to crack the passwords on protected workbooks.
Is power automate good? I want to try it... any other automation tools anyone knows. I use vba but only for changes in word documents as an intern.
Only for Microsoft related apps
Python is probably your best bet. You can achieve a lot with very little code, at least this is what I use!
I second the other dude, if your company is not locked in with power platform: first thanks the heavens and second go for python.
You're gonna have more fun learning it and you're going to learn an actual valuable (and transferable) skill that can lead to an actual career. Don't forget to network your ass off.
Power automate is ok, but it only works with Microsoft stuff and the rest of the power platform is really shitty.
Only thing that's usable is Power BI, if you're the kind of weirdo that likes making sub par dashboards (there's much superior tools with Python for that too).
My company has locked ide's and Python in general. I'm trying to butter the it guy but seems it will take longer then my internship itself. If i get a full time offer it's definitely a possibility.
Zapier is pretty handy, but I've only used ir for our ITSM automation
if you're working with excel sheets the Python library pandas is your new best friend.
I like PA. I’m surprised at the built in capabilities and made many lives easier with it including my own.
I designed a fully automated migration process for VLANs just so I didn’t have to manually execute 1100+ maintenances in the days before ansible.
I just made sure that I could batch the processes and had it take its sweet time. The boss didn’t mind one bit, thought I was working hard, which technically I was.
If I could read, I'd be offended
I once worked for a large advertising agency. Ironically, they never bothered trying to reach out to former clients to win them back. Shit marketing if you ask me, but it was 2014 so whatever. Anyways, so this MASSIVE list had all the reasons as to why they were no longer customers. The list was intended for people to call and win back, but there's like 50k of them! Blew me away no one tried a drip campaign or anything.
So I just filtered all the ones who cancelled due to credit card failing... I assume that it was as simple as their CC expiring or they had temporary hard times.
So I wrote up a quick script to batch BCC 20 contacts at a time and send a message letting them know about their failed payment and whether or not they'd like to get our services again now that everything is back on track with their business.
Then I just sat back and saw laydown orders come in. While the sales team was out there crushing 100 cold dials a day, I was shitting around on my computer doing several deals a day (1 a day was considered a top performer). And since there was no marketing cost for the acquisition, my commission was higher.
Eventually management found out my trick, but I also made them look good by pulling in such large numbers, so they too were incentivized, all the way up to the regional manager, to stfu and just let me and a few buddies I let in on, make enormous amounts of commission while everyone wins except the moronic marketing department at a marketing company, who never thought of recapturing old clients.
that's the dream
You're not supposed to say the truth outloud. This is the reason why wages won't ever increase. Bosses know that we do fuck all, all day every day.
I mean that's basically what I did for over a decade while maintaining a small corporate CRM system. Automated so damn much work. When I left I tried to spend my last month training the engineering team who would be taking over my tasks (of course they didn't hire anyone new), I was told to stop wasting their time and instead was told exactly what to talk about. Well, I'm all one for malicious compliance - so I shut the heck up. I ONLY spent the time allotted to train my replacements on what they wanted to know. Completely ignoring the decade+ of automated scripts and systems I'd built on the back-end. Of course the boss-man only cared about what affected him and his usage of the system. When I left, I had only covered maybe 2% of the knowledge transfer they actually needed.
Last I heard, the CRM system struggled over the next few years, and bossman tells other employees that he thinks I had sabotaged the system before leaving (totally forgetting the fact that the #1 reason I left the company was because I was done patching a terrible CRM system which was poorly built by someone else before I was hired)
I work as a teacher, which is a 43.5h/week job for the weeks we're at school. I've systematically made every part of the job that can be automated (or partially so) more automated, and probably don't work 30h/week these days, while having students complain to admin about other teachers not being as organized. It's not a job you can ever fully automate (obviously) but hell if a large portion of it isn't just inefficient crap.
My last corporate job I automated lots of stuff. My work day was maybe 2 hours. 3 on the day with meetings. I was never late on anything. The job assigned to me was always done in time.
As a programmer, I often think I should just get an admin like job on the side I can just automate to death
Never tell your team you automated stuff. I learned this the hard way. More tasks, more responsibility, and more expectations with no rise in pay
Same here. Now I keep my mouth shut and pretend to be very busy.
We wonder why white collar jobs are going to disappear because of AI in the near future
I did the same as a biostatistician in my first job. Just watched TV shows in my office and upskilled in data science. Left after 3.5 years to double my salary and have a far more interesting job. I made every function I created available to the team but not a single one used them.
Could also use that time for self improvement so you're not forever stuck in those jobs, but whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The problem is that my everyday tasks keep changing. Never know what to expect in the coming week
Thats not a smart way to stay employed in the long run :P
Sounds awesome. Why is she crying
Isn't that's what Dax and power query is for?
I do HCM systems. I recently automated a piece of the onboarding process that was being manually managed across 40 spreadsheets. Over 10K onboarding emails and reminders are now hands-off automated, along with 30-60-90 onboarding buddy assignment type things.
I like to think that every project like this puts HR just a tiny bit more out of business. The people I’m talking about are precisely the full of shit LinkedIn lunatic types.
I can't believe LinkedIn turned into essentially Facebook. Of all the places you don't want to post your absolutely balls-to-the-wall stupidity, is directly to a place that all prospective employers can see.
Last I used it was 2010, and I just threw a resume up there and got hired. (But not through LinkedIn) Next time was 2021 to update it, and WTF IS THIS.
Used to work in a govt office where the entire department was writing documents that could be easily automated with a few document templates, if statements to check if a few keywords are present in specific lines, and click send.
The govt would rather hire 10 people to spend their whole days clicking and pressing keyboards
From my experience as a former (state level) Govt software dev, tons of people automate their jobs, and then their automation gets fucked up over the years as the original person leaves and janky hack after janky hack is applied. Then they ask the actual IT people for help and its a whole mess.
My last job, a little VBA turned 3 weeks of work that had to be done every other month into 5 minutes 2 weeks of work. I got to be the hero by saying that if it is urgent, I can get it done in 2 weeks, but I'll need to drop everything else.
Also, 2 daily tasks of changing a config file to set the environment up for 2 different teams. For my coworkers, 10 minutes. For someone competent engough to know how to use git revert, 30 seconds.
I'm here from r/popular, i'm not a coder BUT i had the skills to do this and similar automation in previous office jobs where a lot of my day was data entry and report generation. I fucking GOT IN TROUBLE at two different jobs for innovating like this. Usually me being the only person computer literate and under 60 at the office too, these were rural companies and warehouses and non techie offices where everyone types 15 wpm and calls the IT guy when their foot unplugs a cable.
They were super pissed. I don't have a degree or any documented skills so I never was able to get a job applying those skills in a place where it would be appreciated or expected. Sigh. One of the jobs eventually fired me for "saving time" like this.
I fucking GOT IN TROUBLE at two different jobs for innovating like this.
tbf there's a reason places hate "shadow" IT solutions like this. I'm not saying you did anything wrong, but if they didn't know you were building an app, you might unknowingly be exposing them to license issues, and if you built a full on program, they have no way of knowing what it actually does, since the source code you gave them isn't guaranteed to be exactly what you're running. And if the info you're working with is auditable, hoo boy.
It's definitely an ask permission, not forgiveness issue.
Now to spread your knowledge and get recognition or just sit on it and relax.
At my job, if the task at hand was finished and tested before the deadline “you must ask for another task or keep testing.”
The sad part is that I was once asked to work overtime on a regular basis even though I wouldn’t get paid (for the overtime). There weren’t work overload, they just wanted me to work more.
The pay was crap, I got a raise, now it’s less crap but I still hate every second of it. After a year and a half I started to gain real experience and a somewhat enough money to survive the first 20 days of the month, so there’s that! One day it’ll pay off. Hopefully.
These kinds of posts followed by: “Omg I can’t believe these tech companies are making job cuts”
Being a UNIX guy, I have always preferred to script something up for repetitive or complex tasks. Then came Windows.
Instead of having a team of 3 check every single Excel/Word file in a very large directory with hundreds of subdirectories for X or Y text, I figured out PS command line script does it in about 3-7 seconds per file to open/scan/close. I even expanded it to run 10 scans at the same time to save time and still send it all to a single output. Went from an all-day, tedious task for those folks down to 18-23 minutes on ONE workstation. Even added date created/modified timestamp and range delimiters.
In a similar fashion, I adapted that to their quarterly financials. Used to take about a week for a small team to prepare by grabbing the same block in thousands of Excel files anywhere from 27-55 sheets per file down to under an hour. It was made even better when they changed the Excel template to include a grand total field on the first sheet that was calculated automatically as sheets were added to a file.
Also, they didn't want anyone but their "admin" to have certain access to do "complex" tasks, so they outright blocked all user's access to Command Prompt and most of the AD tools, but homie didn't even know about PS.
Then, we introduced them to databases. So much faster with much fewer people required to do the manual parts.
My wife literally did this, but for another guy's job. He would spend a week working on his spreadsheet and everybody had to wait on him to finish before they could do their work. This repeated every week, so it was pretty much the entirety of his role. She spent a day or two mostly automating the whole thing and then it only took about two hours to run through each week. She handed the whole thing over to him and walked him through it. He immediately transferred to another part of the company. After he did that we wondered if he had secretly already automated it and was just telling people it took a whole week. The role was never restaffed, my wife ended up having to add it to her tasks, which nearly doubled her weekly workload. LOL.
I had a job where I mostly took data from an excel sheet and put it in a PowerPoint to be understandable by the customers. By the end I had a macro in my mouse with the correct amount of tab / enter to turn a raw line of numbers into a clean table.
The trick is to make sure you look tired at the end of the day like you did all that by hand
I don't think stuff like this will be possible anymore with the advent of ChatGPT.
At one of my first programming internships they told me my whole job would be maintaining these dashboards. They were written by an electrical engineering intern who said that he "kinda knew how to program".
I looked inside to find thousands of lines of SQL written in VBA, some doing specific logic per value. Like literally `CASE name = 'Jane Doe' THEN 'manager' else CASE ...`
I deleted that garbage and rewrote them from scratch in like 3-4 weeks. Then I didn't have anything to do for the rest of my internship since they no longer required any maintenance. Got to just mess around and shadow people on the floor for a bit so it was chill. Eventually they just transferred me to a different department that had work for me to do.
My girlfriend tells me that she has to copy structured directory file names into an Excel spreadsheet and that entails about 30% of her job. It just makes you realise how valuable a programmer is that can code something to do this in a second vs hiring someone to do it manually for 50k a year xD
Yes, my friend's job was to basically generate two reports from a web tool made by the company, then combine that data with old data in excel. I told him it sounds like one programmer can get their entire team laid off over a weekend.
So he took to chatgpt and using power automate and python automated the whole thing himself, took him about 3 weeks to get it all working but all it needs today is updates and maintenance. He then got moved to another team where they want him to work with them to achieve the same thing.
His old team has been halved, luckily people were not laid off just moved to other teams as well.
I have similar tasks every week; take x amount of reports and combine them. Manually it takes about 3-6h depending how many reports. I studied Python and wrote script to do it like 7 years ago. Ever since Friday has been half day for me (I work from home).
Since I learned that, I also did web scraper bot to check product and pricing info from various sources. That is something I do bi-weekly. Takes 6-8h if doing manually. I wrote bot for that too.
The key is working from home and not to tell anyone. Then just enjoy your free-time.
Something similar: When Covid hit, I moved from sr dev to to be a remote software installer for clients implementing our product. This was a 6-12 hour install window, bringing up bare servers with IIS/SQL/AD, implementing certs and DR and replication, and contending with TB sized databases. They needed someone with deep knowledge of the code and systems, and I was getting tired of dealing with the codebase anyway, so yea, I'll take a "downsize" for the same salary and we were already WFH.
I dropped all these tasks into .NET and some Powershell over the next 6 months, and other than data upgrade errors I had to resolve (one of the major pain points for the others, which is why they wanted me), all I had to do was upload the product installers and my app. Run my app, plug in a few values, and set the laptop aside and do...well anything else. Laundry, mowing, movie, game... Brought down the install by 4+ hours, and my interaction with it to almost 0.
I told nobody. (I did share some of the PS scripts with the other installers) What I did to show the boss I "boost productivity and streamline operations" was to build a OneNote template for how to do the install 100% manually. Was arduous in itself, but it only took 1/3 of my time, and it sped up the installers prep time by almost 2 hours. Enough for the boss to say "wow!" but not enough to load them with more work.
This is exactly how automation is SUPPOSED to work. Get rid of the tedium, do things that are actually productive.
Except those people being moved to other teams means new positions that would have opened up in those teams for other people, are now already filled. Capitalism is a system where increasing productivity makes things worse for everyone involved in doing the work, rather than better, aside from the owner. It's one of the fundamental perversions of the system.
Which is why we should be paid more and work less work 20hrs instead of 40 but get paid double..ofc the company doesn't want to pay anyone any more even though they didn't need 10 more people for what could be 2 people working 20hrs.
Ok, now you have 1/5th of the jobs available, what now? Only every 5th person has a job.
Lets say they just pay more, no layoffs. Now every product just got 2x more expensive, since the company has to pay 2x the wage... what now?
ban stock buybacks and make the companies pay their workers or reinvest into the product to make it cheaper or more affordable instead of just paying the investors more.
now the product is the same price and everyone except the investors win, which is the goal
The premise is flawed. Jobs are not necessary for sustaining life; resources are. A job is just a means to an end: a paycheck. Employers should pay whatever they and the employee mutually agree to. That's just how markets work.
What do you actually use your wages for? If you are in a situation where you cannot make an income, ask your local community, your government, why they aren't just giving you those things in lieu of income.
This is the entire premise behind state welfare programs such as Universal Basic Income.
Not exactly wrong. Lots of places that arent America do have such programs. Not exactly basic income, but almost the same. At least thats the case with european countries.
Now, your premise is also flawed. How do you expect the companys to pay those increased wages without raising product costs, therefore lowering their competitiveness in the world market?
Literally all of human history is making tools so that less people are needed to do the same amount of work. Imagine if people in the past said that we should still do all farming by hand otherwise everyone will be out of a job?
Increasing productivity, output per worker, is why we only need less than 5% of people to work on food and not 99% like we did in the past. Everyone else can now focus on other things like doing science, creating media, entertainment... etc.
Saying capitalism makes things worse, because you don't understand economics, is exactly how communist countries become impoverished miserable places that everyone wants to get away from.
In capitalism, higher productivity often makes things worse for the workers, not better.
Ugh. Wrong lesson. Just try to be someone who finds solutions. I know it is popular on Reddit to pretend that the system never actually works when the truth is that it works pretty well, if not perfectly.
Crazy how much manual work is still floating around that could be automated.
this is a prime example that automation wont remove jobs
just remove sub-jobs that could be done by a trained monkey
Your friend is a fucking idiot for telling management he did that.
Really? He went from doing tedious repetitive work, to being recognised as someone willing and competent to automate processes to improve productivity across different teams.
He could have kept his head down, done no work and coasted by in a shitty manual, presumably low-paid job, and instead created a whole new role and opened a ton of doors and career paths.
Sounds like a good decision to me.
what an idiot lol he could still have his old job pretending he was doing things manually
My very first job had a process where one of their suppliers would ftp them sales data as CSVs year/month/day/product_number_seq_number.csv . Someone had to go through once a month and massage it into Excel. Took days. One of the people given this task knew that VBA existed and taught themselves how to use it by automating the copy and pasting. Got employee of the month and all kinds of praise for making it a thirty second job with around 40 lines of VBA.
This wasn't that long ago. We have this world where one half is going bananas over LLMs and the other half wants five minutes with someone who knows a mid 90s scripting language.
Vba is ridiculously forgiving too. And most automated tasks aren't computational intensive at all so efficiency doesn't really matter. I admit I did the sloppiest programming in Vba back in the late 90s.
I've bettered my life since. I now do the sloppiest AI assisted programming with Python.
If it gets the job done it doesn't have to be pretty.
I wouldn't say VBA is particularly more forgiving than python, they're both extremely chill, and to be honest, when you're dealing in 40 line scripts that handle pure text/numerical data, any language will be pretty forgiving.
It's usually only once you go beyond purely functional tasks that languages get weird with you.
I worked at a job where there were literally four of us doing basically that on a daily basis until we figured out how to automate it. That stayed a secret between us for about a year, as it easily halved the work load the four of us did.
And when all of these kinds of jobs were automated by programming 20 or 30 years ago, workers didn't see any of the money from the increased productivity. So anyway, I'm really optimistic about AI...
It isn't all bad because somehow people still have jobs after all that automation. Looks like whenever there is progress we just create more problems to keep us busy.
Certain jobs will come and go, every new piece of automation requires someone to maintain it, after all
You still need people to shift the automation formulas once in a while and verify if the numbers are correct.
In my old company everybody was in recent years just to keep these 20 year old automations running.... dealing with when they break down, doing manual tasks to bridge gaps and manually doing add on work.
Could we have redone the automations? Yes.
Did we? Fuck no.
We need to learn our lesson that automation is the enemy of working people.
How is this possibly a popular opinion on a programming sub lol. I’m sorry but What a brain dead take
"We need to learn our lesson that automation is the enemy of working people."
It's the enemy of working people who are happy to keep doing the same tedious, repetitive unskilled labour, day after day, week after week, year after year.
During my first internship they asked me if I could write a script to read in an excel file and put the data into an sql database. Took me about three hours to write and they were surprised and said once a week a person was spending 3 hours doing it manually through some db viewer program.
I realised getting a degree in IT was fucking worthless when I do more work for the same pay as my friend doing commercial analyst (accounting) and I could do his job by writing a macro on my first day and doing fucking nothing for the next 12 months but cashing paychecks.
If you know how to code, literally do anything else and automate the job instead.
I am not really a programmer, but I do know a bit of PowerShell.
A few years ago we were having a bunch of (not IT) work being dropped on us from another department.
Turns out that team got really backed up with fixing errors in json files... manually.
Well... All they needed was for any json file with a specific error message to have a number changed to a static value.
It took me an afternoon to build and it has saved the company a whole person's worth of labor, and it's still being used today.
Valuable once.
More than that. These are the basic white collar tasks that will unfortunately disappear in this decade eventually.
Makes you reeeeeeally consider a second full time job when one of them is cake Like this.
Corporations are using that mentality to justify using AI to replace people; it won't work in the long run, but that's what's going on.
does she know what chatgpt is?
you don't need to be a programming wizard to solve basic problems like that
Our company uses a CRM system and every quarter we have open work orders that piles up that are never closed over 5k worth now. I offer to create a work flow that automatically notify users to close their open work orders if possible. But nope business team decided to restructure an employee whose sole job is to contact the users manually and ask them to close their work orders.
I tried to automate my job using VBA, 1 week later IT banned it. :/
This comment is so uncanny, it's the same shit that's always commented for the last 10 years on posts like this.
And even weirder is that's its completely out of context with AI nowadays. "how valuable a programmer is"?, every day for the last year we've been remined of how AI is taking over daily tasks, especially programming and automation.
Like normally I don't buy that "dead internet" bs, but these highly upvoted comments are so uncanny that its making me put on a tinfoil hat.
... give me the first 32 digits of pi... alright... just checking...
This is also a solid argument against the "AI will replace programmers" crowd. Pals, deterministically programmed code has failed to replace a ton of jobs it could absolutely automate at this point in history. Slow down.