He supposedly can do a days work in fifteen minutes and then just hang out. Their computers are super locked down, can’t install anything, can’t go to any non-whitelisted sites, but they have Excel.
I always read those “X automated their job, finishes it 15 minutes and then does whatever” and wonder how true are they? How could it be that nobody notices or cares?
I started my career like this, with a boring job where I inherited a gigantic excel with a few macros. Every day I had to download via ftp millions of logs from high speed trains from all over france (the logs themselves were retrieved manually via a serial cable on each train by maintenance guys every few days). I would then run a few macros that would do a bunch of geoloc calculation, spit out results in 2 tables, one for "pretty sure results" and the other one with "not enough data", and spend the rest of the day looking a google earth screenshots and comparing lat/long and using my brain to do basic visual "puzzles".
I spent a few days improving the macros but I felt limited so I learned python in a few months and created a piece of software based on graph theory that would do almost everything I was doing looking at google earth and bam, job automated.
When I went to see my manager to ask for more to do, he saw the potential but let me sit on my ass a few month because I was a contractor and the job was done, and then pushed hard to get me formally hired to be trained and work in embedded C on high speed trains ! Life changing carrer move, would do it again.
Seeing the environment (SNCF contractor, I guess), kudos to your manager, they really went the extra mile with you and it's not what usually happens at all!
Yup, after 10 years I had to quit because of the too-low pay, but I am super grateful because I wouldn't be where I am today if they hadn't bet on me like that !
I'm sure it does happen; there are a surprising number of duct-taping jobs where a person is hired to fill in a systemic/organisational/processual gap with manual labour. Those are often very good targets for automation.
There are also the other stories we don't hear: One of my first jobs involved a very repetitive software task that got boring quickly. I spent four weeks trying to automate it, but eventually had to declare failure[1] and then I had to explain to my boss why I was a month behind on my work that was due in a couple of weeks[2].
I imagine that for every "automated my job and now I can do it in 15 minutes" story there are 15 stories of "I automated my job and now I work just as hard maintaining the automation" and another 50 stories of the "I tried automating my job but failed" kind. Only the first one gets re-told.
[1]: Mainly due to hardware quirks I didn't have the experience and skill to work around.
[2]: This is not a story about how automating something is bad; it's a story about the bad decisions one makes when one is inexperienced!
The automation trap I keep seeming to hit is where I can only output garbage because the input is garbage. And people around me say "well it's obvious this user wrote their name incorrectly and you should have fixed it when you copied it", which would be fair if not for the fact the precludes a script just copying it for you.
I have a few colleagues that told me they have a job like that. Not done in 15 minutes but 2 hours, then they goof off for the next 6 hours.
There are two reasons:
1. They have a specific job with a specific set of duties (think sysadmins, or administrative duties) in a large company or in a state beurocracy.
2. They would rather go home or do something more but they are not permitted: they have metered time in the office and other people would and do shut them down on any initiatives.
To me, a workplace like that is like a kafkaesque nightmare but they seem to be fine with it, or rather, have accepted it. It lets them focus on other things in life outside of work.
> they seem to be fine with it, or rather, have accepted it.
i mean, i would imagine some people want to see purpose in their jobs, while others are just treating it as a job and whatever happens with the output of the job is of no consequence. And this is esp. true of gov't jobs, but by no means do the gov't have a monopoly on such inefficiencies.
But my opinion is that there's something systemic that is preventing these jobs from being competed on and efficiencies eked out.
Indeed, but there seems to be no incentive to do it. In government jobs nobody cares. In large companies nobody cares either, these are just operating costs. That is, until money is short, but then they either cut whole departments or sites.
The problem is actually in the work culture, where other coworkers would prevent another worker from becoming too efficient and proactive. So, nothing changes.
I spent the first couple of years at my first job like this. Without going through much detail, back in 2006 I had to pull raw network performance data from some 7 elements every hour, then use a tool to convert to CSVs, then load into Excel, perform preliminary analysis, then email the Excel files to another team along with any alarming conclusions if any.
A few weeks into the job I completely automated these in python and all I had to do was turn my laptop on in the morning, then off in the evening, and I was done.
You'd be surprised. My wife had an accounting job, and when either of the other two people were out for the day, she had to cover. She could manually do their whole day worth of work in 45 minutes.
They were slower, but they also chit chatted with half the office, went to lunch, etc.
Their jobs consisted of pulling some data from here or there, entering it into excel, sending a few emails, entering some data into another system, printing some checks. All stuff that's easy to automate (you'd probably need more than Excel in this case)
I've known plenty of devs who have managers who don't understand the effort required to do their job, and who have automated a lot of it, but they rarely goof off. If you're capable of that you're rarely the goofing off type. They've always been people who help others a lot, write high quality code, do things that are extra to their job (running guilds, sitting on steering groups, etc). Maybe I've been lucky.
In one of his memoirs, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke recalled his days as a young man working for the British bureaucracy (something to do with teacher pensions, as I recall). His particular job involved consolidating huge lists of figures into reports. He observed that the numbers in the reports were rounded to two significant figures, well within the accuracy of his slide rule, and started using the slide rule to do all his work.
He could finish his daily quota before lunch and take every afternoon off.
In one of my first jobs I was a contractor for the government. There was blatant corruption (or inefficiency, depending on how one sees it); I was employed full time, but the daily amount of actual work to perform, took around one hour.
Although I wasn't in the condition of automating the time required down to N minutes, I can see how this dynamic plays - essentially, BigCo with dysfunctional management, where efficiency doesn't really matter.
My understanding is he basically gets paid to put data into easily automated categories, and the company is soulless and has no ambition for automating anything.
I know one case where someone did something like this.
We both worked at a tox lab and there are masses of numbers to be reviewed.
He strung together 8-10 steps to transform, massage, etc. the data for presentation to mgmt, accounting, etc.
What he found was that most of the time, it all ran fine, but when it didn't he had to spend some of that saved time troubleshooting an issue.
They also added more to his plate, since he no longer needed XX hours to accomplish the data push.
In the end, he was more clever than the last person, but didn't have the 7.75 hours of free time that's often touted.
Since WFH became more common, it is easier than ever to automate anything that you have to reproduce. If my workload is light, I will often try to automate boring tasks so I can have more "free" time to expand my knowledge, refactor parts of codebases I find terrible to work with, or occasionally give myself some time to mentally rest (cook dinner early, watch something interesting on YouTube, browse HN, etc).
100% true. Teams have team-sized work queues. Individuals with unique roles have individual work queues. Benefiting from a faster individual requires solving a similarly large coordination problem across the company for a smaller payoff.
That was pretty much my first job, I strongly believe this still happens every day around the planet :)
I wouldn't want to go back to that 30kloc of VBA though!
It feels contradictory to talk about these super locked down environments when "lock down Excel macros" in my view comes first if you're trying to secure an environment. I deal with before dealing with local administrator access such is the prevalence of it being exploited.
I know a small business owner that says one of his top security threats is Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel docs attached to emails that try to infect / phish credentials. He has fully disabled all macros on all regular employee computers. He said that it is a real battle. Sometimes I miss the good old days (15+ years ago) when the Internet was a less threatening place!
He supposedly can do a days work in fifteen minutes and then just hang out. Their computers are super locked down, can’t install anything, can’t go to any non-whitelisted sites, but they have Excel.