Something like this happened to me at Whole Foods HQ. My job consisted of reading tickets and creating/making changes to Active Directory records and a bunch of in-house ordering tools. I doubled my productivity by writing a javascript app that helped me turn the ticket requests into powershell commands. No more clicky-clicky in the AD panels. I got the huge backlog nearly caught up, so we were nearly fulfilling tickets in real-time. I say “we” since it was a team of two contractors. Guess who they suddenly marched out at lunchtime on a Thursday?
The funny thing was, what I had open on my PC at work was (mostly) just a web page with the entry form iframed on it. The app itself was hosted on my server at home (just a blob of javascript). I watched them repeatedly launch and download my tool for a couple of weeks (I’d generously shared it around), and then slapped an .htaccess file on the directory. I developed that sucker on my own time after work, it was MINE. They gave up a couple weeks later, poor bastadges.
All the people commenting above about “professionalism” can stuff it. Corporations will give you NO gratitude for helping them make money!
Corporations will give you NO gratitude for helping them make money!
In my previous job the sacking was uncanny. I closed my last jira ticket. My boss got the notification and asked me into a meeting with HR. I was out the door in half an hour.
You should have read the article (if you can call it that on reddit).
At no point is he going "what did I do ?"
He is very clear about it. If anything, he’s more "damn, got found out!.
The question within the article is: “What DO I do now?”
Sounds like your typical stupid company, filled with asshole coworkers (“Hey, I’ve been 6 years here scratching my balls, while you work!”), idiotic management (“Hey, I’ve somebody here scratching his balls for 6 years and never got a clue!”) …
And I bet you, plenty of corporate propaganda inside about how “amazing” and “client driven” and “success-oriented” and bla bla bla they are.
Yeah, but no. Yeah, there is an issue with how those at the pinnacle of the industrial entertainment complex get disproportionate rewards, especially compared to those on the lower slopes. But no, a “three-minute song” takes a lot longer to make than the time it takes you to consume it. Someone has to write the lyrics, someone else often has to write the music, they have to get a band to play it, they have to rehearse it, a producer has to do their recording magic to turn it into something you want to listen to — or a myriad of agents, A&R people, roadies, etc have to get the band out on a stage where people can hear the music live. And they all have to learn how to do their thing so that you get music that affects you instead of cacophony for three minutes.
You don’t pay for the three minutes, you pay for the time it takes them to learn to affect you in three minutes. Like the punchline to the old joke goes, “Knocking the dent out with one hit: $0.50. Learning how to do it with one hit: $199.50.”
That’s on the level of “Dog bites man”; it’s something we’ve been doing since the internet was a campfire we gathered around at night where we swapped gossip, told jokes, discussed what happened that day, and told tall stories about the strongest guy in the world, or the most handsome, or the laziest. We tell stories as though they’re true, and we discuss them as though they’re true. And sometimes they are true, and sometimes they’re not. It doesn’t matter, because what we’re actually doing is talking about ourselves.
Not quite in the same league but in my last job as a all round sysadmin and gofer I automated everything I could. When I left (amicably on both sides) they never bothered hiring anyone to replace me, my boss could easily absorb what was left of my workload into his.
Imagine how much work I wasn’t doing in my last year or so there.
yeah, as a developer, I need to call BS on this. Maybe he was hired as a software developer, but if he was able to automate his job and do nothing for 6 years, he was either running batch jobs or supporting some sort of software that never needed updating, but perhaps an occasional entry in the database or re-install or re-start.
First off, it isn’t that easy to automate building of code. Some of the bits of code that are common across many apps have already been “automated”, and many developers already use them.
Second, code I wrote 6 years ago, I wrote once. Now I write code to solve different problems. If I am still writing the same code with, perhaps some values changed, well, then I’ve written crappy, redundant code, and don’t deserve to find another job as a developer. If this is what he’s been doing, he doesn’t deserve praise for automating the creation of poorly developed code.
There’s a stark difference between trust and accountability. There is an interdependent relationship between trust and accountability in the workplace, any workplace.
These managers relied entirely on trust and automated accountability without oversight. As for whether he abused that trust, given that management had a specific task and that task was executed adequately, this is not the case.
They were treating him like a poorly managed contractor, and he treated them as a gig that paid by the task with the added stipulation of presence onsite.
The employee had no ambitions for more, so did not seek more. There is no requirement for ambition mentioned.
The management did not attempt or wish to attempt to engage the employee more than they did, for the many reasons that management typically has to do so.
This is just a boring, amicable relationship that reached it’s end.
And the employees claim that they don’t know what to do next is just hogwash. 6 years of LoL and they have enough in-game capital to get by for awhile, and enough drive to not have to work to find something that will let them slack well in their off-time.
To some degree, but if it can remain the same for 6 years in a product’s life cycle without changes, that doesn’t sound like much is changing with the product.
If we persist in the view that the dividends from robots’ increased productivity should accrue to robot owners, we’ll definitely come to a future where there aren’t enough owners of robots to buy all the things that robots make.
Sounds like the crime of this developer is not allowing the dividends from his robots to accrue upward. I mean, that is the expectation, but I wonder if everyone is aware that this is the decision we’re making?
Here’s how this should go. I used to be the Lab/R&D Manager for a small HVAC manufacturer. We hired this youngish design engineer who’d had about 10 different jobs in the previous 10 years. I wasn’t enthusiastic about him, but our Engineering Manager was, so he hired him. Within a few months, the guy had automated a good portion of his job. Rather than keeping quiet about it and doing less work, he went to our boss and said, “Hey, I automated this part of the job.” Our boss said, “Wow, that’s pretty cool. Can you implement that for the other engineers.” Fast forward 2 years, and he’s no longer a design engineer. Instead, he’s the IT Manager for the whole company. And he’s still there 10 years later.
