<story><title>Kid Automates Work, Is Fired, Hired Back, Automates Business</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eggbrain</author><text>For those of you who want the short version of his story, the OP wrote a password-protected program on company time that automated his data entry, and because he was so accurate, was getting most of the bonus money meant for the rest of his group (without anyone knowing he was automating it). He told his boss, who fired him, but then the boss and manager asked for the password to the program. OP refused, called up the boss&apos;s boss, OP was brought in to talk, and given a new job as a software engineer.&lt;p&gt;He negotiated for a salary as good as what he was making before (with bonuses), and negotiated for all the other employees who would be fired from data-entry to get other jobs in the company. OP&apos;s original scumbag boss gets fired, all the old data-entry employees/friends are better off, OP gets amazing new job.&lt;p&gt;Now that being said, perhaps I&apos;m skeptical, pessimistic, or just being negative, but this story seems too perfect. Clever employee gets huge promotion, and negotiates for all of his coworkers to be better off as well. Scumbag boss who fires employee gets fired himself. All within the span of a month.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn&apos;t give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn&apos;t just sue him for not giving up company property.</text></comment>
<story><title>Kid Automates Work, Is Fired, Hired Back, Automates Business</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggy2011</author><text>I have a similar story which I posted on HN before, here is the repost:&lt;p&gt;A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database.&lt;p&gt;There were a few more steps that I don&apos;t quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing &quot;human&quot; required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice.&lt;p&gt;A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0.&lt;p&gt;Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work.&lt;p&gt;Now in this office they tracked people&apos;s productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors.&lt;p&gt;So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat.&lt;p&gt;&quot;You are cheating your stats!&quot; was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn&apos;t be &quot;unfair&quot; if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily &quot;scored&quot; the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal.&lt;p&gt;No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was &quot;cheating&quot;. They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way.&lt;p&gt;Of course I offered to forfeit any &quot;prize&quot; I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!</text></comment>