Nina learned a valuable lesson that day: never show your boss how much time you actually need to produce results.
Make the job as easy as you can for yourself, and TELL NO ONE!
I had odd side tasks at a few previous jobs that while I couldn’t automate them per se, I created some combination of spreadsheets and parameter-driven drawings/models that greatly reduced the time and all but eliminated errors.
The first time I did something like that, I was young and dumb and showed my boss and their management team. As a reward, I was given a ton more work and expected to do it all in less time, even though what I’d created was only applicable to about 10% of it. Then when I couldn’t meet that workload, I was berated and had my “helper” spreadsheet and drawing made fun of in a meeting.
After that I made a similar sheet to help on a different task and only told a coworker friend…who then proceeded to tell management about it and take credit for making it. Karma being a bitch, though, he was just given more work to make up for that efficiency as well, and a few months later some of the variables changed and he was totally unable to fix the built in formulae to account for it, so it was basically useless to him, but he still had the work.
After that I just never told a soul about anything like that until maybe if I was leaving the job.
At my very last job before my current one, I had developed a 3D model that accepted a string of about 30 parameters and, as long as there were no conflicts, spit out a model that was 95% of the way to complete for maybe 60% of my normal workload, and as long as it was successful, it came with an associated drawing template that also auto-populated most of my work there…so basically taking a little bit over half my normal work and making it at least 75% faster. A game changer.
I sat on that shit for the last 9 months I worked there, using it, improving it, adding features on my own time, troubleshooting issues, etc. Said nothing to my boss or my one other coworker until literally the day I gave my notice. I figured it’d help my coworker handle the increased workload until they hired my replacement (but didn’t want that asshole to get credit for my work) so I showed both him and my boss at the same time.
At first, both acted unimpressed and uninterested. After a few days though, my coworker was using it and quickly they realized the value. Instead of thanking me and asking how it worked and could be improved, they just told me “Use the time you have left to improve this to work on every possible variant of the type of part it works on, and also develop an equivalent for the (totally different) type of part your coworker makes. Have it done before your last day.”
I had like 4 days left.
So I literally just said, “No, not going to do that. It took me months to get this one where it is, and it’s stable and works on most cases. Trying to add that much to it in 4 days might break it. There’s just not enough time, so no, I’m going to finish my backlog of work and clean up my desk area for the next few days and that will be it.”
“If you want me to develop something like that, here is my consulting rate. Yes, I know it’s more than 5x my currently hourly rate. I can have a contract put together for you by my last day.”
My dad does this with Banks and The Military. He charges anyone else a mere $300 an hour for his expertise, but if you’re a bank or part of the military industrial complex his rate automatically quadruples. They pay it too. He’s one of the only people left that is FLUENT in COBOL
Honestly it sounds like the management there lacked the vision to truly appreciate the gift you gave them.
They could harness such a tool for years to come, but it sounds like it was a small department anyway so who knows
Yup. yup, you should enjoy your free time. And send the email right before the deadline
Words to live by
Sign of a shit manager/boss, usually.
Good boss who sees this will go “oh thank God now you have your time freed up to do that thing you’ve been telling me we really need to get around to doing”, cuz there’s always at least like, 5 to 10 of those on the backlog anyways.
Seriously this.
Been in the industry for going on 15 years. Never happened the way this comic makes it out to be.
There is always work to be done. That employee ends up being a tech lead or IC and promoted.
Companies don’t fire a whole team. They’ll find ways to maximize that solution that automates a lot of work. Oh, you can automate a DB? Can you automate more things or train others to do the same?
And the whole team gets better and more creative work. I’ve watched my team evolve over and over. Ive jumped to a bunch of companies and continue seeing it happen.
It’s hard enough getting good devs, so unless you work at a shit company, many hire real slow and often don’t fire devs unless they’re real bad apples.
And finally - Who the fuck wants to spend 8 hours making SQL queries manually? If your 40 hour job can be automated with a script, you’re going to be unemployable regardless.
Yes, this is completely unrealistic. No tenured IT professional is just going to announce that they’ve doubled workflow efficiency overnight. They’ll slow play the improvements until it becomes absolutely necessary to reveal them, and then act like they’ve been putting in extra work when in reality they’ve been spending 6 hours a day writing new Quake 3 mods.
As they should. These people don’t care about us.
No sometimes the bosses are told, because rather than having someone sit on nights for 2+ weeks doing tedious shit in production, a worker/dev/whatever would rather say “I think I might a solution that can automate this”. I’ve done it, seen it happen, collected attaboys, moved on to the next problem that’s screaming for a better solution, etc
But Of course I do agree with you completely, if you automate your tasks, better to keep that on the downlow for your own mental wellness :)
There are no good bosses.
The system is shit.
If they really needed to get around to doing that, the boss would’ve already hired another employee to do that task.
Not doing so implies that paying someone just for that task wouldn’t be worth it.
That does not change when a worker becomes available from somewhere else.
If they really needed to get around to doing that, the boss would’ve already hired another employee to do that task.
This one made me laugh pretty hard, very great joke hahahaha
(Almost always, no, no one was hired to do the thing, its been on the backlog for a year now but everyone is way too busy to do it)
If the boss has no problem keeping it on the backlog forever, then apparently it isn’t an issue worth dealing with.
Boy I sure wish that was the case.
See the thing is, typically your boss hires specialists for tasks, because your boss doesnt know how to do it themself. In a large company your boss typically knows how to run the business and some form of problem domain the business cares about.
Your boss probably doesnt know how to manage something like a scaled database or your kuberetes cluster running on AWS… thats what he hired Steve to handle, because Steve went to school for several years to learn how to do that.
As a result, Steve knows how important is to do, but Steve can’t just willy nilly do whatever he wants, he needs approval to go and do it.
This puts you in the situation where the Boss, who has no clue how works, is in charge of making the call of whether Steve is allowed to go spend a few days doing
Steve can sit and explain in great length and detail how incredibly important is, but at the end of the day its the Boss’s call if it actually happens. And the Boss, who has no clue how the fuck works, can absolutely (and VERY often does) make the call to decide that , despite being important, is not as important as , purely because doesnt directly put money in the company’s pocket, and does.
Even though Steve knows that failing to do will have a lot worse long term implications that might result in the company suddenly not having any more to do, because it shit the bed and everything stopped working, or perhaps a failure to comply with will long term cost the company a fuck tonne of money.
Or long term a failure to do will just result in Steve leaving the company because he doesn’t want to be responsible for people dying or important info being exposed or some other shit like that.
But yeah, in an ideal world, the Boss would trust Steve when Steve tells him is super fucking important, and he’d let Steve go do it because he trusts Steve.
But very often, Boss’s dont give a shit unless directly makes them money and enables them to buy their fourth house.
If you do find yourself a Boss that trusts their Steve’s though… You cherish those bosses and stick with them, they are rare but the best.
You cherish those bosses and stick with them
Until you get fired because Nina automated your job
You missed the part where the employee was the one saying it was important, not the boss. And a lot of those tasks aren’t things you can just hand off to a new person, anyway - e.g., tech debt on software.
My job never wanted to fire people. They just made working conditions so poor that people quit.
In the US this is called constructive dismissal. It’s a tactic used by employers to get away with firing someone but not getting hit by unemployment insurance payments.
The good news for workers is, it still counts as being fired and you still qualify for unemployment if you “quit” under these conditions.
This is what most places I’ve been at did even when I was the newbie in the OP
“Oh, you helped us with some basic IT knowledge and can do even more for us later if we keep you and don’t treat you like shit? How about I get 6in or less from your face and scream so loudly that your ears ring a little when I’m done?”
I would punch that person in the face, justifiably.
I’m 6’4" and this dude was taller and bigger than me + ex-hockey and still regularly coached and taught said sport
As much as he would have deserved it, I’m 100% certain I’d have lost that fight
I instead quit on the spot and reported that place to corporate (who straight up told me I was the one in the wrong) as well as OSHA and a few others for various reasons like not having ladders on their docks despite 3 different people falling in and nearly drowning in 1 month
I see, I see. Weird, the biggest guys are often gentle. Understandable to not retaliate, but totally right to report them.
That’s assault. Record that next time and get yourself a settlement.
So I actually reached out to a lawyer with a couple other employees over this guy and his wife (they also illegally evicted a couple of people and did some other shit) and the guy worked with us for like a month before disappearing from the face of the earth
If I wasn’t so busy going to job interviews that never call me back I might have time to find a new lawyer for this but as for now it’s on the backburner
Next time they do that, get a hammer, and wreck his fucking mouth.
Abusing your employees should hurt in ways doctors can’t fix.
Or don’t, if you’re a stable human being.
I guess the username checks out though…?
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Never give more than 70%
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The thing is, you can just use whatever resources you don’t need for your job in some place where the principle you mentioned applies.
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I spend 50% on things that make my life less annoying while at work. That might be research that is vaguely related to work but entertaining to me or it might be writing automation tools so I can work less. I have never given someone else my full effort. Except my spouse of course.
This is an interesting perspective. I’ve seen both sides of the coin. I’ve personally had hard work pay off significantly and at the same time it is what I wanted to do personally to challenge myself. I didn’t have to.
I’ve also seen incredibly hard workers lied to and promised things only later to be told did you get it in writing?
It is hard to have your perspective when the job is menial, imo. Not a ton of personal growth as a garbage man or general laborer.
Nice, Cradle in the wild. I’m two books down currently
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I don’t find this comic funny. Too real.
never do more work than you need to. only do enough work to not get fired.
Cute cartoon (*♡∀♡).
Can we please make this a meme-free space?
Aren’t y’all happy that this happened? It resulted in less work.
For the person now jobless, sure.
And an increased efficiency. Having an automated system instead of a person entering data into tables manually means data processing is done faster, serving the customer better. There’s a reason humanity didn’t stay with tribalism and industrialized instead.
That reason is capitalism, which sows division in favour of profit for a small number of people.
So you want us to return to pre-industrialism? I am anti-capitalist and anti-work, but that does not exempt one from having to stay with reality. My comment being downvoted just shows that this sub is apparently full of morons that only know they dislike work, but don’t know the actual arguments for why.
Lololol this fucking sub 🤦♂️
You imagine the most insane shit.
Imagine? This is real life.
Whatever you say 🤷♂️🤦♂️🤣
I guess we’re simultaneously in 3% unemployment and employers are at the same time firing effective employees all day.
You’re watching in real-time as middle managers fire as much as half their staff using ridiculous “return to the office” policies (when wfh had productivity up, saved employees money, and reduced pollution) just to save their own jobs and those of their commercial real estate landlords. Employees are already being replaced with AI.
If you don’t think that bosses would just fire people and replace them with automation then you really must be the most dense motherfucker in America. Stop defining your self-worth by how hard you work, it’s just what your bosses want to turn you into a slave they can exploit while you never criticize the ever increasing problems with a system that doesn’t give a single solitary shit about you.
Lolol that’s one company. Median tenure in the US is about 4 years depending on who you ask.
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Do you think getting fired means you don’t need a new job? Those people getting fired still have bills to pay. They’re just finding new jobs.
And you think companies are firing the efficient employees from employer to employer while keeping a sub 3% rate? The median tenure in the states is about 4 years. What you are claiming just isn’t mathematically possible
Then show me the failed calculation
“Efficient employee” is corpo speak for “abused and compliant worker”. Of course they wouldn’t fire the people that give them the most results for the least in return.
Edit: I do work 40 hours/week and it’s bullshit. I don’t reply to corporate shills
Blah blah. Blah blah, go walk dogs if you can’t be brothered to put in a decent 40 hours.
I think all the stuff that gets to the “front page” of lemmy from this community is actually all correct but idk why anyones first reaction to this would be antiwork. You still want people to work because ai cant program well enough today. I dont really understand the antiwork movement right now, maybe in 20 years.
The anti work movement is really 2 things. You’ve got the “I want to work as little as I can” group who no matter the circumstances would do just that. Shove 10 people in a house that work part time with a big garden types. And you’ve got the “my hours and pay need to reflect increases in efficiency and decreases in amount of work I need to do”. Both unify in hating work. And both are useful to the cultural milieu, the former more like the hippies who dropped out of society and the latter like the people who demanded the 40 hour work week
Ok but that means most sane people arent antiwork but just want work reforms if im right. And it confuses like minded people(like me).
You aren’t entirely wrong but also the difference winds up in perspective. Work reform seeks to change work, usually through cooperation. You can compare it to a liberal union like the teamsters. Antiwork seeks to remove work’s status as the main focus of a significant chunk of our lives. It can be more easily compared to a radical union like the IWW. Both can probably settle on a compromise that they’re both comfortable with, but how they relate to folks like bosses and those who drop out is going to be different.
And I wouldn’t call those who minimize their labor insane but rather differently prioritized. Many are doing productive things with their time but not of the monetized or monetizable variety, just personal projects. Or they want to live like they’re retired. Or whatever. I can’t judge that urge because while it’s not how I want to live personally I do see something admirable and increasingly necessary in a lifestyle that trades ability to consume for time
