Can’t automate anything if your budget is cut to the bone.
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I find it fascinating that even a small sample reveals that entire teams of people possibly do nothing but send around Excel files all day. I wonder if anyone who receives the files actually uses them for a meaningful purpose. It makes me grateful that my own job has a very diverse set of responsibilities and tasks.
Love this! Fist bump and pump to you guys!
Secretly I did the same. I didn’t tell anyone the recipe or the details. It was for my benefit. Did I reinvent the wheel? No, I just stopped doing monotonous work and tweaked things for my advantage and benefit.
I was sick of the constant Excel spreadsheets being emailed or put on the shared drive. Why are we still using Excel? What is this, 1995?
I got fed up. I dreaded Sunday nights. I could barely make it thru the week to Wednesday. What was I looking forward to, another hohum measly raise of 2% year after year? To be told there was no budget for raises other than merit raises?!?!! After I busted my butt to make magic with nothing. I stopped giving away my ideas and the tools I created. To watch under qualified mo–ns get promoted and get huge raises and move up the ranks and steal credit for my work was the breaking point.
I started job searching. Every day I deleted something off the shared drive and my personal drive and took something home from my desk.
Within 3 months nothing was on my desk except a pen cup holder, a blank notepad and 3 glass cubes for 5, 10 and 15 years of service. I could have smashed myself in the head with those cubes daily from the torture.
I started interviewing here, there, everywhere. Kept a low profile, smiled and chuckled through it all. Laughing inside knowing that these dumb fuxx have no idea what’s coming. It’s all a farce. I reallocated and rebalanced my 401k. Got rid of every single WF stock and stock match. Sold around $66 a share in2018. Just dumped it.
When the time came to leave, I ran. Funny, everything in my folders and shared drives were all blank documents and source errors when opened. I made sure I made a copy every time I created one on the server, but always left them blank, then deleted the originals over time, slowly, methodically.
I got panicked texts and calls from my former manager and a few colleagues to see if I knew where XYC and 123 could be found. I played the voicemails over and over in front of friends at a fireside chat with beers.
In the end, I don’t regret it. And for those of you that have automated your job, great! Keep your options open and take a page from my playbook.
OP is correct. I have automated my own job "away", but nobody knows it.
My daily tasks formerly took all day, and one particular infrequent task took 3 days of work. I now am able to do it all in less than an hour. My old 3 day task now takes about 15 minutes.
Am I going to tell anyone about it? Heck no.
If they get rid of me, the next person is going to have a tough time of it. But if they offer me a good package to retire, I'll be happy to train my replacement.
Don’t want to scare or frustrate anyone but the truth is any work you are doing in Windows can be automated by using VB/VBA. Any analytical work or report work that you are doing can be automated by using a combination of Python/Java/C and Yes, I mean it. Fully automated. It’s not hard to program or implement these things at all.
I am sorry but it’s true that most of the jobs in the bank can be replaced by automation. It’s nothing fancy.
You're not trying hard enough. Plenty of ways to automate your job away.