IT Guy Gets Paid 90K For A Job That He Does For Only 10 Minutes After Writing A Script That Automated His Entire Work
One of Reddit's most popular sub is r/antiwork. It's a forum dedicated to discussing quitting your job, how to do it, and venting work-related struggles.
A post from user u/Throwaway59724 recently went viral. The IT professional titled the post with, "I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone."
In it, OP (original poster) discussed how he wrote a script to do all the heavy lifting of his job for him. The posting has since amassed more than 80 thousand upvotes and more than 5 thousand comments.
According to OP he saw a similar post in the subreddit and decided to share his own. OP works for a mid-sized law firm as an IT specialist who handles all the evidence the firm needs for trials.
They were migrating all of their evidence into a cloud-based system and they decided that OP would be the only one with admin access to it while others would be limited to viewing capacity.
The job sounded fine to OP but it didn't take him long to figure out that this was the only task they expected him to do for his entire workday. This forced OP to pretend like he's busy with his work while in the office.
Then the pandemic hit.
They asked if it's possible for OP to securely work from home. OP said sure and set up his remote workstation at home and that's when he began tinkering with a script to automate his work.
In about a week, OP wrote, debugged, and perfected a script that did all of his tasks for him. According to OP, the script did this:
"It essentially scans the on-site drive for any new files, generates hash values for them, transfers them to the Cloud, then generates hash values again for fidelity (in court you have to prove digital evidence hasn't been tampered with)."
This is how OP's workday looks — he clocks in for his 8-hour shift then plays video games or does whatever he wants, and at the end of the day, he checks if everything ran smoothly then clocks out. He's only actively at the desk for about 10 minutes and he's been doing this for a year.
OP makes $90k a year.
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He shared that he felt guilty for a while for making his job easier.
At first, he felt as if he was ripping off the law firm. But after a while, he said that as long as everyone's happy with his quality of work, there's truly no harm done.
OP is doing what he's hired to do, he does the job in a timely manner, and he gets to enjoy his life. According to OP, he is also running the script using his own device and if the firm decides to fire him, he will also get rid of the script.
This secures his job; they fire him, they lose the script, and the job it automates. OP's full post can be read below.
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OP posted additional information for all the questions he was receiving
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OP made a tedious task the law firm was struggling with a lot more efficient
To be clear, OP is not a lazy person and imagine doing this while working in a law firm
For those interested, here's the basics of what OP did. Nothing too specific.
OP said his code is worth nothing under other situations. It's only valuable specific to his job.
Another edit for clarifications
OP made it sound easy but he's only able to find a "shortcut" to his job because of his expertise in his field.
As for the risk of being featured in a publication, OP is not worried.
This is the way
A lawyer tried to ease OP's guilt by saying this:
Technically, OP is doing everything in his job description excellently
OP needs to reframe his thinking because they are paying for his expertise
Our hero is very candid about his hard work
The comment below hit the nail right on the head
OP is paid the big bucks because he is the only one who can do what he does and with such finesse
It's capitalism's fault that people are expected to work this much
Other redditors wanted in on OP's secret recipe
While others are already doing it or about to do it in their own jobs. Honestly, good for you!
This is what technology was supposed to accomplish
I think we all are
If you're highly skilled and you can make your work more efficient then that's to your benefit
We're all proud and a little envious of OP for having the know-how to do this. OP made it sound so easy but unless you have the intelligence or experience, it's not so easy to recognize what can be done better to make your job easier.
Aside from all that, hats off to OP and to other professionals who are outsmarting their jobs. "Work smart, not hard," has never been this relevant or true.
