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.
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 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
It depends on the boss is the real answer.
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.
Automatism 😂
Never make yourself too useful only useful enough to be promoted. I tell a lot of people this story but it's because it was a huge mistake I made too early in my career. I was on a small development team and after a few years I had gotten really good at my job. So I was handed one of the biggest software redesigns we had ever done it was software which tied into how we made a lot of our money. Well in about 2 years I knew that system inside and out. Well the time came where I had a chance to interview for a higher position and I went through the interview and in the middle of the interview I was asked how I would handle the current work when I was promoted. I walked them through all the steps I would take to transition out of my role into the new one and turning over my knowledge to someone else. Well immediately after explaining myself I knew I wasn't getting the promotion. I could literally see it on their faces that they were unhappy I wasn't willing to continue working on the system at the same time. Well I didn't get hired so I found another company almost doubled my salary and left. Last I heard they had hired someone and that person left in less than 9 months and are back to searching for someone else. I was irreplaceable which made me ineligible for growth opportunities.
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?
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.
Welcome to reddit - please enjoy your stay in this cesspool of apathy
"Edit: im not mad. dont go on the internet and say i got mad"
You're the guy who keeps making the YouTube UI worse, aren't you?
Being relentlessly productive for the sake of productivity is a fucking plague.
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'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.
"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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
“Well done! The owners will pocket this savings in payroll and pay me a fat bonus! You now get to do someone else’s job for no additional compensation. Your scripts are now company property.”
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.
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.
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
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.
But those better jobs would probably be the kind that ask you shit during the interview like "If two geese stood 3m apart in 15 cm of standing water that flows at 1.2 m/h towards goose A, how would you write a script in COBOL to sort their feathers by length in log(o) time?"
I'd rather be overqualified, underpaid, and relaxed, than in a constant competition against myself and my colleagues.
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
And will keep doing that their whole life, while complaining about others that earn more and have careers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I second the other dude, if your company is not locked in with power platform: first thanks the heavens and second go for python.
The tricky thing with python is figuring out how to run scripts in the cloud and on a schedule. It's more straightforward with Power Automate.
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).
What are these superior tools? Setting up a dashboard with plotly or something is much more work than using PowerBI.
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
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)
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.
that's the dream
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.
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
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.
We wonder why white collar jobs are going to disappear because of AI in the near future
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.
As a programmer, I often think I should just get an admin like job on the side I can just automate to death
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't you tell anyone? I know you get more free time but if you impress your manager it could help your career more? Maybe I am just young and naive.
Yeah, that's not how it works lol.
The prize for good work, is more work!
Generally in a corporate setting, it's much more important to give the impression that you do great work, rather than actually going above and beyond.
That’s how you go from less work to more work with the same pay
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Makes you reeeeeeally consider a second full time job when one of them is cake Like this.
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.