I don’t understand. Techies are sometimes all about gaming their ways out of the panopticon.
But being “smart enough” to, say, automate your own job and wait around six years for anyone to notice? Hello? Panopticon calling. The thing that’s supposed to get you out is what keeps you in.
I’d bet the mortgage he suffers from a DSM-V impairment. My heart goes out to him.
I’m all about working hard to be lazy. This is a bit beyond the pale though.
“Ah haven’t got a job any more,” said Bud. “Canned.”
Paul was amazed. “Really? What on earth for? Moral turpitude? What about the gadget you invented for—”
“Thet’s it,” said Bud with an eerie mixture of pride and remorse. “Works. Does a fine job.” He smiled sheepishly. “Does it a whole lot better than Ah did it.”
—Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano
Nah until the balance of power between employee and employer is even remotely restored to something equitable, I say trust the employer about as much as you trust the police. Both can do practically anything they want to you and have the law behind their side.
Also, you say he should be fired for not actively doing work, but he was doing work. The work his tools were doing were the product of HIS labor. If they fucked up, you bet he’d be accountable. If the company fires him and keeps his tools, then they are cheating him out of the product of his labor and keeping it all for themselves.
Now I’m betting the tools weren’t exactly as effective as his active work, but what if he were to keep his pay and cut back to 1 day a week?
That’s agency life a lot of the time. What separates the wheat from the chaff is what you do with that down time. I’m super lucky to live in a city who’s library system offers us unlimited access to Safari book and Lynda. So I take advantage of that, knowing full well the next week might feature some 16 hour days.
my ex works a coding/ testing job and he was super tempted to do this. he and the rest of the department have automated everything else, even their office taco tuesday orders and delivery.
My take on this is: the work that this person is performing has a certain value to the company. Clearly, since they’re willing to pay him to do the work, it’s worth the amount of money that he is getting paid to do it.
Now, obviously, any company is going to try to pay less for the work if they can get away with it, but if they can’t figure out that this work can be automated easily, then the manager should be fired for not seeing that this guy’s work is this easy to automate.
Of course, the manager can, and should, be able to change a person’s workload within their job description. So, since this guy can no longer program, I have no problem with him being fired, but I don’t think they should have any hard feelings about him doing exactly the job they were paying him to do, in a more efficient manner than they expected.
I’ve felt that way too but whenever I finish one hurdle, I see the next one in front of me and, whoops, new thing to obsess about until I’ve fixed that. Maybe I’ve just never had a job that could be feasibly completely automated.
Hey thanks Dad.
[quote=“aluchko, post:7, topic:79369”]Instead he made himself useless[/quote]I reckon if the time ever comes that they need to tweak their system and his automation tool breaks, he’ll discover he made himself “essential”. Or at least that’s one potential outcome.
Just gunna say, intellectual property law has effectively allowed people who have “worked once, reaped many” to survive for decades on the basis of one three-minute song, a sitcom script, or a questionable “business process” patent - this is just one case where a working stiff managed to automate his own income in the same way those other “creative classes” have been doing for years.
Possibly but according to the post it was a start up that succeeded, more than likely he’d be promoted.
No idea what happened on the management side or how much he was lying but quite possibly.
I understand the power balance, I’ve had an employer screw me out of salary before. It doesn’t mean people have a general right to lie to their employers about the work they’re doing. It’s just basic ethics.
He was doing work for 8 months. After that he was literally playing games.
So the guy who lied about what he was doing and literally did nothing but play games for 5 years is the real victim?
Doubtful. If the tool breaks they’ll hire someone they trust to fix it and properly document it. They’re not going to rehire who spent half a decade lying to them.
It’s an interesting issue, but he needs to fuck off for describing his future plans of “taking a vacation”.
The problems to solve are the fun and fulfillment.
That’s not how software development works, though. You can get rid of some contract/temp QA but you’ll never automate yourself out of a gig.
No, that’s not how it works. Companies are supposed to make a fuckton of money off your efforts and pay you a proportional pittance. That’s how you capitalism.
In all seriousness though, the fault lies almost entirely if not solely with the company for having no system for managing workflow and auditing processes. This guy could have done this for six months and shown off his automation and still been a hero and the company would have been none the wiser. The buck stops with leadership, and middle management’s immunity from consequences in this case (assuming nothing happened to them) is a sign that the company got what it deserved. And I would believe you if you told me that no one in middle management got in any real trouble here.
Would they fuck, they’d have automated it and made him redundant.
Coder here. I got sacked from a boring job in 2012. It was pretty bad for a while but I am better off now. He should have resigned after two years. He had some great successes behind him. Boredom kills.
The story should be titled: “Somebody anonymously posts an elaborate story on the internet. Others discuss it as if it’s true.”
