He Automated His 40-Hour Data Engineering Job into 15 Minutes a Day—Then Received a Promotion for “Exceptional Speed”
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Let’s be honest, even if you absolutely love your job – which plenty of people do – you’re probably sometimes keen to find ways to make it easier. Because the way that we live our lives, working full time and then trying to catch up on everything else around work, is exhausting and barely sustainable. So when we work super hard during the day and then still try to function fully on evenings and weekends? It’s burnout central around here.
So the guy in this story worked smart and, in every job role he’s been in, has found ways to automate parts of his job to maximise his time and make his working life as straightforward as possible. And it is clearly working for him, as previous workplaces have adopted his automated working methods as standard and thanked him for all his hard work. But eventually he got a little jaded and in this recent job? His automation has remained with him.
Read on to find out what work looks like for him now.
AITA for automating my job and getting paid while doing basically nothing?
In my career I have always automated any tasks I could. At first I would automate the tasks, share my work and progress with the team get praised – and about a week later it feels all but forgotten and soon I would get new work to replace it.
People would continue to use the tools I make, but I never saw any real benefits in terms of promotion or bonuses for my work.
Eventually I stopped sharing my automation and just used any new tools for myself. This resulted in my work day going from six hours of work to about one.
For my past two jobs I never mention automation so my bosses technically never had the chance to give me bonuses or the like and I just used my saved time to relax instead of getting new work piled on.
Let’s see how this is working out in his new job.
A couple months ago I started a new job which is work from home, and I have automated my job to the point where I do maybe three hours of work a week.
The rest of my time at home is spent watching TV, playing games and just chilling basically. But when my friend who I game with during my work day (he works afternoon/evenings) found all this out he said I was basically stealing from my job.
My thought process is that my work gets done and I have not received any complaints from my boss, so who cares if I get it done in three hours or forty hours?
Am I wrong for not sharing my tools that I feel are under-appreciated and apparently stealing from the company?
AITA?
Honestly, this is where the saying “work smarter, not harder” applies.
If he wanted to be promoted and work his way up the company, this would not be the way to do it.
But he’s not really harming anyone, since the work is being done – presumably accurately too – so perhaps his ingenuity is serving him well here.
Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.
This person thought that, while it was kind of deceptive, he wasn’t technically doing anything wrong.
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While others thought that this was a bonus of being salaried.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who gets problematic overtime changes reversed by pointing out how it will harm the company’s bottom line.
And others had first-hand experience that suggested he wasn’t wrong for looking out for himself first.
Sure his employers might think that he’s working a full working week, and might be annoyed if they found out that he wasn’t. But short of calling him at random times or him not answering video calls, they’re not likely to actually find out – after all, the work is being done and the fact that he’s not being pulled up on it suggests that it’s being done to a high standard too. So even though he is being a little deceptive, it’s hard to argue that he’s actually doing anything wrong. After all the work, to which they ascribe the full time salary, is being completed perfectly well.
It’s sad that through his time in the workplace he’s learned that the automation that he builds is praised but doesn’t actually lead to any other accolades to him – besides being given further work and everyone else’s jobs being made easier. Perhaps he could continue to be charitable in saving everyone else time, but after a point of being generally snubbed he has clearly realised that the only person looking out for him is him – and this is clearly good for his time and wellbeing, so why not?
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