Although a lot of people stress that we should work smarter and not harder, that mentality tends to depend on the kind of job you’re doing.
After all, if someone pulls up with a $7,000 order while you’re working at McDonald’s, there aren’t enough clever tricks in the world to prevent you from running yourself ragged that day.
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But if you’re working an office job — and especially if you’re working it from home — there’s a pretty good chance that some of your coworkers have found a way to do an annoying task in half the time. And if you’re lucky enough to make friends with them, they might let you in on some of their secrets.
That said, some tricks of the trade are a little too valuable not to keep to yourself and that’s why one man is only sharing the fact that his job essentially does itself with total strangers.
When a Reddit user with a throwaway account appeared in the site’s r/antiwork community and said he automated his job a year ago without telling anyone, it was hard not to pay attention.
As he explained in his post , he was hired at a mid-size law firm at $90,000 a year to do a job that sounded much more labor-intensive than it turned out to be.
That firm gets thousands of digital documents and photos on a daily basis that serve as evidence in various trials. And since the firm’s staff was struggling to keep up after the idea came down to transfer these files from their local drives to the Cloud and verify their authenticity, the IT worker was hired specifically to do this.
However, he soon discovered that this work didn’t take eight hours each day and that became especially true once he started working from home.
Once that happened, it only took him a week to write, debug and streamline a script that scanned these drives for new files. This script would then identify them, transfer them to the Cloud, and then confirm that they hadn’t been tampered with.
Since that described his entire job, all he really had to do was clock in and then check the logs towards the end of the day to ensure his script was working as intended.
In his words, “I’m only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day.”
And while the script is basic enough, he intentionally left out some steps in his code to ensure that nobody who could expose him finds the Reddit post.
But whatever its final form is, it means that in-between clocking in and this safety check, the man can essentially spend his days playing video games and pursuing his unspecified passion project.
These circumstances led him to feel guilty for a while, as he felt as though he was ripping the law firm off. And since his boss is nice, it’s not even like there’s a spite aspect to any of this.
But eventually, he convinced himself that as long as everyone’s happy with his work, there’s no harm done.
As he put it, “I’m doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life.”
And while he figured that he could just disable the script if anyone tried to get rid of him because he’s running it on his own personal equipment, he was advised against doing that due to potential legal complications.
After all, his employers might not be good enough with computers to notice what he’s doing, but they likely know the law in ways he doesn’t.
Still, this system seems to be working for him to an enviable degree for the time being.
h/t: Reddit | Throwaway59724
