ProgrammerHumor
expertInVba
Discussion
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.
Im sorry but that is neither news worthy nor cool. Whats cool is seeing your friend online on steam on a monday workday and it is playing a stupid game in its working hours. This is cool
I'm invisible for a reason, Jim
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.
"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?
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".
"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 mean, it's totally fine if you have no ambition and are satisfied with the salary and responsabilities you're given.
If you want achieve something in your career, this might not be the most appropriate approach though.
Edit : I don't care about the downvotes, keep them coming. You guys can keep your shitty attitude and complain your entire life. It's your problem, not mine.
Except performance doesn’t lead to promotion in most cases. It generally leads to increased work and responsibilities with no rise in compensation
It does if you work somewhere with a decent budget and an actual promo structure in place. Half of my promos were basically just ticking checkboxes and providing evidence for everything I've done. Laughably easy.
Of course now the budget is gone so I don't work all that hard anymore.
Yeah. Some people even get stuck in the position they're in because they are so efficient and "indispensable" that managers have no intention of letting them move up the ladder.
Most people don’t move up the ladder on achievement but by talking about achievement.
Yes. If anything by automating their tasks and making sure they are always on time they are bound to go up sooner rather than later. If OP showed the automatism their boss/es wouldn't allow them to go up, too useful of a pawn
wouldn't allow them to go up
Their boss would take credit, and a fat bonus, and OP would be made redundant
This is exactly the issue. People saying this guy should tell his boss are expecting him to be rewarded for his ingenuity. In reality, he might get rewarded in the short term but he's most likely to lose his job or cause others to lose their job. That's how the real world works.
It depends on the boss is the real answer.
Automatism 😂
You can indeed BS your way to the top but I also experienced reward for the extra value I brought my employer. Both can be true.
It really depends on who is above you. And how they rose to where they are. I feel like the BSers have a tendency not to promote or meaningfully reward people that could expose them.
out of touch employer type of take
From the view of anyone above you, if you're doing more work for the same pay in the same position for years, including speeding up workflow for no cost to the company without asking for compensation.
Other than being kind to your workers, why tf would you ever give someone more money or a promotion. If you want a position or money out of this it would probably have to be discussed beforehand.
Either way I wouldn't be surprised if you could just tell another job you automated ages old systems, made things faster/easier and earn more money than any raise or promotion the original would give.
Why? I can still say "Oh, I automated all of my job duties using x and y" in an interview, and promotions happen by switching companies.
And if my boss is happy, then my reference will be good, so I've got equal chances of advancing if I tell them or not.
lol, lmao even. the only thing finishing your work early gets you is a pat on the back and more work for the same salary. maybe with the extra work come new responsibilities but did I mention you still get the same salary?
That's not my experience. You're working for the wrong employer.
First of all, improving things in the workplace doesn't give you a better salary anymore, bud. Leaving the place does. Looking busy while you're actually learning new skills that you can put on your resume will get you a pay raise far, far faster than trying to prove yourself in the job you already have would. You might get some extra "responsibilities", but it will rarely be reflected in your paycheck. Adding on to that, most peoples' ambitions in the workplace start and end at their paycheck. Capitalism hasnt exactly been serving us well for the past few decades, so that boomer mentality isn't going to be changing hearts and minds.
Also, I have a question: we all know that employers want to get the most out of their employees while giving them the lowest wages and benefits as possible. I dont think anyone here would disagree with that fact, and some wouldnt even see it as a problem. So how come that's accepted by people like you as "its just business", but when that attitude is reflected back around by the employees, its suddenly a problem? Just curious.
If you want to be like a corporation, at least think like a corporation. If they wanted you to increase corporate earnings through higher productivity, they would have incentivized you to do so like they do with execs.
Literally what matters to corporations is money. If you ask a corporation to do something and give them money for it, they aren't going to give you anything extra for free. If you want something extra, you give them more money. So why should you give them anything more than what they paid you for unless they offer you more money in exchange?
That depends on your company, your boss and so much more than just " If you work hard, you will climb ". I am close to having 3 titles this year and I haven't gotten a single raise outside my yearly one. All the while, other people are sucking ass and threating with quitting and they are getting raises.
You want a raise? Make sure you are unreplaceable and then threat them with quitting.
People have way too much hate for people who provide their salary. Don't be assholes
Of course the company should care, because paying for a full time employee that only works an hour a day is a waste of resources.
Edit: I see from the downvotes that this is a bad and unpopular take, sorry.
think of the shareholders :(
No, no, that's an employee who only works an hour a day, *and knows how the automation scripts work*
They're not paying you to hit the machine with the hammer. They're paying you to know where to hit it with the hammer.
Not “the automation scripts”, but “her secret automation scripts” - scripts that no one else can support or improve.
To me, this depends on trust - I probably care significantly more about my coworkers than the company. If I can trust that, say, the automation I've done is not going to get a bunch of people laid off, I'll share it. If not, well, unless I'm getting some benefit from "increasing shareholder value", I'm continuing to competently perform the job duties assigned to me, by completing tasks in the time allotted to them.
I'll even do it with a smile. Well, sort of a crazed grin. But, eh, genuine happiness *in this economy?*
Well, they didnt pay her to create scripts in the first place. They paid her to cover her responsibilities, and she's doing it with scripts. If you want someone to care about maintenance and scaleability with those scripts, thats an entirely new job position and salary.
That’s true, and I see I’m in the wrong and out of touch in my thinking here.
Or exploit.
Paying for time instead of skill and experience, or even just results, is so antiquated.
My employer and I reached an agreement about which specific tasks I should complete for a fixed salary. If I'm able to perform my tasks in half the time he allotted to me, there are two choices: give me double the money and double the work or be fine with a job well done and move on with your micro management. Simple as
I don't even bother to look busy or stay the whole 40 hours a week. I got my shit done, I'm leaving and enjoying life. You want to further your career with diligence and long hours, go ahead, have fun
Scamming corporations is what makes life worth living
If they were willing to pay for the task to be done manually --- automating it would essentially be earning them the amount they have been paying you.
SOMEONE is earning the profit from that automated task. Why should it not be the person who actually automated it? Is ownership of capital truly something you think is more deserving?
The owner wouldn't pay X, if they didnt get Y (which is ATLEAST as high as X) in return. Now that it's automated, they get Y in return, without needing to even pay X.
And what reward does the automater get? A new task where they get paid X. So the company can make Y
So now the company is paying X and getting 2Y in return. Thanks to your automation. And you get nothing.
Ideally it should be some sort of split. But it never is.
So instead people hide it and do what capital owners already do. Except these people achieved their income flow by being skilled - not just by being someone whose skill set is having money.
Except.... its prolly really demoralizing... like try not doing anything for three hours.... don't comment, you scab.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Bear in mind most people on this sub are uni students or hobbiests
"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.
You are not. The “I’m just here for the money” is absolutely my least favorite type of developer to work with.
It's not about the money, it's about the ever increasing scope. Now that you proved this can be done in 1h, you're expected to do it in 1h. But when your script breaks or whatever, you're now late and punished to do it in the previously acceptable amount of time.
I'd gladly improve as much as I can but I don't want to takeover the scope of everything I touch.
This is the reason that now is a great time for a startup.
Old, stale businesses don't know how to automate or don't realise that their staff have automated their jobs.
Startups will automate the jobs from the start, save millions in salaries and be able to undercut the older businesses.p
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
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.
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
rule 1 of automating your job is inserting delays into the script if you want it to replace you.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Ambitious people need to date ambitious people. The un-ambitious people get exhausted by the constant hustle.
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.
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
Or get a promotion at the current company for doing so well. JK, they will never promote you for this.
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 she could get a second office job.
This is possible if your job is literally being a monkey
I would love to see this “automation” lol, probably used a sum function or somethinb
"Only people who care about their work are fuming at this!" FTFY
They care about their job, otherwise they wouldn’t have learned the processes deeply enough to be able to fully automate them.
So if you have a company where all workers automate their job away and then just expect a paycheck without doing anything else you would just let it be like this? Do you not see any problems with that company? Or are you so deep in the unionist and socialist views where you cannot even fathom the perspective of the management and owners?
They are happy enough to pay that rate for that work to get done. There are only problems with the company if that rate was too high in the first place, but then that problem is with management and ownership anyway.
You are completely dissasociated. Did you ever work in a smaller company where you feel at least a tiny ownership of it success, or were it always large corporates where you were an insignificant part of the whole process?
Do you think a company would succeed in a market where it's employees did exactly what they were told, clocked in 8h, and left home? I am not saying work overtime, or slave yourself away, but just I don't know automate as much as you can and then move on to do different things when you have free time.
Yes lmao if everyone has automated everything they are supposed to do and they do any other work after that not only they deserve their paychecks but also a raise
"They do any other work" are we talking about the same tweet, or did you skip the part where she said she spend the time doing nothing?
Ok
But imo they would still deserve their full paychecks but not a raise, if they do nothing else
Why do you think doing nothing is bad if they do all work that are given to them
It might be unethical, maybe, to not tell the company that they can be more efficient. But to make the company more efficient is not the job of the random employee in the first place.
Again you are fully in the mindset of a big corpo that doesn't give a crap about their employees and would not even notice if you got fired probably. For those: hell yeah go for it!
For smaller companies or teams that need growth to survive, or are tiny enough where one employee doing nothing would hurt them a lot it's probably still up to management to keep people motivated and if their job is automated find them something else to do, but so it should be on the employee imo (this one is probably most controversial).
but you weren't talking about the tweet, you were talking about a hypothetical scenario where all employees were able to fully automate their job. If you were a smart employer you could have automated their job in the first place, so yes, you deserve to pay them their wages.
🧠?
Rat
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...
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.
if you can automate your job in a weekend, you are doing grunts work.
And will keep doing that their whole life, while complaining about others that earn more and have careers
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
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 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
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.
Over employment is also not really a doable thing in the EU.
Why not?
Employment laws blocking how much you can work. It's also very common (in Sweden atleast) for your regular contract blocking you from having a second job.
It can be done but then you are just doing b2b contracting but that can become very complicated if you get caught.
In my case specifically (Spain). When you get hired you get registered in the social security platform. You are legally able to have different jobs. But it won't really be a secret. The new employer will know you are already in the ssytem under a different employer. And the other employer (I think) gets notified when you're registered under a different employer (in case there was a problem with them "deregistering" you. So it can be done, but it's hard to do that and leave it as as secret
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
If I could read, I'd be offended
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 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.
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?
Could also use that time for self improvement so you're not forever stuck in those jobs, but whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
VBA's official motto:
Making things possible that you probably shouldn't be doing in the first place
Had a coworker do something very similar to this, and when management found out they were fired on the spot. They could have updated management and been given other processes to optimize and gotten promoted and built a career, instead they went the small minded approach and now are struggling to find work.
I don't understand why people consider this a flex. Cool, you automated some mundane tasks. Now you waste time that can be spent improving your skills or earning a promotion. Your entire job was to do manual tasks in excel, there should be plenty of room to grow.
Except 99% of the time it isn't worth it because companies don't value you either way.
I am not sacrificing years of my blood, sweat and tears to "climb the corporate ladder", only to be "rewarded" with a measly 10% salary boost and a 300% increase in workload and responsibilities.
Fuck that! If corporate wants to play dirty, so will I.
This was maybe viable 30-40 years ago. Today, companies have just perfected the art of "penny pinching". They don't give a fuck about you, they just want to extract much "value" from you as humanly possible.
This idea of a "climbing the corporate ladder" that they try to sell you is a scam and only benefits those that reach the top, everybody else gets fucked, and to reach the top you have to fuck over others. Pick your poison.
If you already have a position and salary that you are happy with, the only winning move is not to play.
EDIT: For the record, my comment doesn't apply to "grunt work" as shown in this post (there it is more logical to try to grow). I am talking about "higher-end" jobs. There is a point of diminishing returns.
I don't need them to value me like it's a reward. If I'm constantly improving, I can have requirements that the person who 'watched movies for 9 months on my phone' can't. People like that then whine that other people are getting promotions instead of them.
Besides I'll die of boredom.
Honestly? You didn’t cheat the system — you became the system. 👏
Seems like a job that’s vulnerable to being replaced by AI. What was the job and what kind of work are you doing now?
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.
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 mutual agree to. That's just how markets with.
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.
In capitalism, higher productivity often makes things worse for the workers, not better.
Crazy how much manual work is still floating around that could be automated.
Your friend is a fucking idiot for telling management he did that.
this is a prime example that automation wont remove jobs
just remove sub-jobs that could be done by a trained monkey
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.
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.
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.
Valuable once.
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.
More than that. These are the basic white collar tasks that will unfortunately disappear in this decade eventually.