I didn't automate my job, I just did a good enough job that things stopped breaking, and I had less and less to every day. Eventually I'd just show up, make rounds, wait for things to break, make rounds again after lunch, wait until quitting time.
I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change.
So, in the end I was being paid to show up, mostly. I lived in constant fear of getting fired, and in the end the job was outsourced out of existence. Good on them, bad for me.
That job slowly crushed my soul. I haven't recovered, a decade later.
I watched a similar thing happen once. A greybeard was brought in to whip things into shape. He did so. Automated everything and made 100+ linux boxes run like a top. New owners came in, and they weren't the nice kind. He got stressed out and had a heart attack and was gone for several weeks. Things hummed along while he was gone, and his perceived value went down because things "ran just fine without him", ignoring that it was because of him.
They ended up firing him and giving me his responsibilities, which was a laugh because he and I had drastically different jobs, and he was far more experienced and capable in system administration and automation than I was. I too left less than a year later.
I had a similar job. Probably 1 hour of real work per day. It was awesome at first. Quickly I started to hate it. I spend all day dicking around so when I went home I had already done all of my hobbies. I imagine that if I had that job now instead of in my early 20's I would be able to fill that time with more interesting things and/or family time. But I left that job because I feared I was losing any skills I had and eventually the gig would be up and I'd be forced to scramble to find another job.
These types of gigs are often a blessing and a curse.
Ah, I can relate to that story. It reminded me of a position I held many years ago.
Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my leadership chain.
There were a bunch of different phases during my time there that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work" phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML documentation passed W3C validation after that), the "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy" phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase, and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot" phase.
I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net negative for me.
I have a some what similar stint. Worked at a start that got acquired by big co for the product and customers, although not the product my team was responsible for. Our product got quickly put on maintenance mode with promises to rewrite the whole thing at some point.
So by that point I had been working there for a year and some, knew the system pretty well and we had pretty much nothing to do. No new features, very few bugs due to little change in the product.
I'd show up to work at 10, leave for lunch for 2+ hours, and leave the office at 4. And even then I was mostly surfing the web and chatting with friends most of the day. The rest of the team and my manager knew, but they also knew there was actually no work. We'd all go play badminton before lunch some times and so there were 3 hours periods where no one was around.
Was pretty nice at first. Steady pay, no responsibilities or stress. But quickly got really boring. And since it was my first job out of school, not very good for learning and growth. Ironically the slow pace also really dampened by motivation to look for another job, so I hung around probably a year longer than I should have.
I'm still in my first "real" job, almost 6 years later, and while it's not quite as lax as what you describe your comment made me realize that the slow pace is probably a big factor in my own lack of motivation to look for something else. It's awful easy to get comfy.
> I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change
I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die. They don’t really understand the technology that their jobs are bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-go.
Agreed - accountants are a unique breed. They do a fair amount of basic numeric analysis and rote work that is of the sort that is beneficial to automation. But they're often very averse to technology, often stop learning any new tools early on in their career, and tend to stick to the methods they learned as juniors, even many years later.
That's a broad brush, and is certainly unfair to and untrue of some accountants. Some are Excel gods and can VBA it up with the best of them, and would have been productive software engineers in another life. But it's surprisingly true for much of the profession.
Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers will not thank them for making their job easier with better tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was, let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.
I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change.
So, in the end I was being paid to show up, mostly. I lived in constant fear of getting fired, and in the end the job was outsourced out of existence. Good on them, bad for me.
That job slowly crushed my soul. I haven't recovered, a decade later.