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's boss, OP was brought in to talk, and given a new job as a software engineer.
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's original scumbag boss gets fired, all the old data-entry employees/friends are better off, OP gets amazing new job.
Now that being said, perhaps I'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.
Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
It behooves the company to bring him in for a chat and re-hire him, rather than immediately start a lengthy court process that would cost them money, time, and wouldn't even guarantee anything.
Also, as this is (presumably) in the Netherlands, they don't have the same itchy trigger finger as we do in the States when it comes to filing suits.
Yes, but aren't worker protections stronger over there?
I'm surprised the company's HR didn't notice that there was one worker sucking up all the bonuses. In fact, his manager should've flagged that well before the OP informed him.
...or it makes him post the letter on the internet and makes the company look bad. Amicable solutions frequently make more practical sense than confrontational ones.
This trends pretty far off-topic, but Denmark is an interesting case, in that it's very, very easy to fire someone, but there is a very strong social safety net (we're talking years of unemployment benefits) which creates a pretty distinct environment for hiring and firing.
Contrast that to most of the rest of Europe, where companies are reluctant to hire because it's so difficult to fire people.
Any Danes out there care to elaborate or correct my misunderstanding?
The social security net is indeed very strong in Denmark. If you pay a low monthly fee while being employed, you are entitled to a special unemployment benefit rate for up to two years, which almost corresponds to minimum wage salary (Which in it self is very high, compared to other countries). There are some obligations to actively seek new work and you could be sent on various training sessions, so it's not a complete free ride, but close enough.
I know that at least compared to Germany, it's a lot easier to fire people, legally speaking. I'm not sure if that makes Denmark or Germany the outlier, but probably the former.
Sounds hard to believe. Denmark is in the European Union, and it's EU law that gives lots of employment rights. These laws would have to be in Danish law aswell.
There are some countries (UK, Ireland) that have implemented the bare minimum of EU employment law. There are some that have implemented above and beyond (France). But Denmark wouldn't be able to ignore most of it
In 1994, Denmark modernized a system, which came to be known as "flexicurity," that offered American-style flexibility (layoffs, transitions into new lines of business) coupled with traditional European security. Laid-off workers were offered generous benefits, like 90 percent of their last salary for two years and opportunities to be retrained.
I am a Dane and this makes no sense to me. As far as I know no "benefits" like that are mandated by law. The only thing comparable I know of is during employment your employers notice will grow from 3 months to a max of 6 months (and that is after nine years of employment!). Anything in addition to that has probably been added in individual or union negotiations. Some companies may not require the employee to work during that period but many certainly do.
Edit: I am only talking about individuals. Mass layoff rules are different but I very much doubt they are any worse for the employer.
There are some part of "American style employer flexibility" that they cannot do. e.g. they cannot give people less than 4 weeks paid vacation. They cannot let employers fire people who are gay, etc.
> in that it's very, very easy to fire someone, but there is a very social safety net (we're talking years of unemployment benefits) which creates a pretty distinct environment for hiring and firing.
This seems better for the employers and the employees than what the rest of Europe does.
The password part is a bit silly. You don't even need to do that. Just leave it rough around the edges and give people a technical description of how to use the tool. I've done that accidentally a number of times. It's amazing how many times, people just give up without even trying.
He states thought that the boss who fired him called later to demand the password. A somewhat likely motive for this was so he could utilise the code for himself, fire a bunch of the workers and then claim the credit for the productivity bump and cost savings.
I'd rather not make life easier for such people. What this kid did turned out to be a win.
The only puzzling aspect of this story is why he took the same money back. He has demonstrated value far beyond his pay grade and was hired back at the same compensation as before. Why?
The same base plus the performance-linked bonus he was getting for doing most of the data entry with his program. It came to more than what his old boss was making, so it wasn't just data-entry wages.
This doesn't consider the value he's creating for the company. Apparently, the company was willing to part with that money already (before the improvement) - so clearly they should have offered him more for the automation.
The bonus pool he was drawing from was meant to go to an entire team of people, but 90% of it was going to him. His pay ended up being quite a bit higher than what it should have been.
I wonder if the story would have turned out the same without the password? It seems like the password may have created a mystery that prompted them to want to see what's inside. If it simply worked poorly/not at all without a trained operator, it likely would have been thrown away instead.
> I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
Perhaps the executives of the company weren't knee-jerkingly litigious idiots, and realized that their money would be better spent improving their operational efficiencies than paying their lawyers to acquire a metaphorical bucket of water while the tap from which it came runs permanently dry.
Litigation is expensive, and sane businesspeople don't casually file lawsuits that deliver no strategic value to their companies.
No matter how legally valid the argument may be that the code is company property, the fact remains that the code wasn't the product of 'company time'; it was the product of skill, creativity, and initiative whose benefits the company clearly does not and cannot have without the willing cooperation of this individual. Why make enemies when you can make friends?
> Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
> 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's boss, OP was brought in to talk, and given a new job as a software engineer.
He didn't refuse to give the password to the company, just to his scumbag ex-boss.
Why would they sue him? It would be a huge waste of money for all involved. Instead they could just hire him for a job he was clearly qualified for and then everyone wins.
"...but I was hellbent on refusing to give out the password. Not to be mean/defensive, but the code was not designed for anyone to use, it was very primitive in the way it had to be setup. I didn't want to be liable for someone using it incorrectly."
As somebody from the Netherlands, this makes me skeptical. He's claiming to be Dutch but his legal perspective is American. He also claims to be fired on the spot. There is no such thing in the Netherlands if he had a long term position: it will always be reviewed first by a government institution called Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen or by a judge (there are exceptions for exceptional cases, like if somebody punches somebody else in the face).
I suspect his immediate superior told him he was going to be fired, and when this came to the attention of the senior manager (as it would) is when the discussion about passwords, etc, occurred. So he was never actually fired... just kicked-up a fuss, and saved his ass.
He probably didn't have a long term position. More likely he was hired through a job agency or on a 0 hour contract in which case yes, you can be (effectively) fired on the spot. Same for his supervisor.
A lot of things stink about this story, but this isn't one of them.
and if my memory serves me right, the bonuses were allegedly allocated based on how accurate the data entry job is. Um, how do you validate that without knowing the answer? Conversely, if you have the answer, why do you need data entry monkeys?
Further, if this is a trivial batch script, why don't they grab a random programmer off the street, describe the problem and live happily ever after.
Okay, this is clearly a comment by someone who's never worked a low-tech job. You validate correct data-entry by testing samples.
I worked a job back in high school where they spent months editing Excel spreadsheets full of data only to pass the edits to me as handwritten changes to printed pages. The stacks of spreadsheet pages I was given were meters high.
Since the human-made edits met simple patterns, I was able to write Excel macros to describe and perform them. I finished a week worth of work in one hour. In my case, they saw me reading a book and got irate even though the work was done and correct. I was a contractor, so they just asked me to go home early and collect fewer hours. I got paid less for working faster.
Would the kid's knowledge about how to operate the program (in this case, a password) be considered company property? I don't think many jurisdictions would consider an employee's knowledge the property of the company, unless it was a trade secret- and even then, he would only be restricted from telling others under certain circumstances- I don't think he would be required to spend his own time (he was fired) telling the company how to operate the program. Of course, I am not a lawyer...
Let's say I'm a system administrator in charge of all my company's servers. I find out I'm about to get fired, and I decide to give myself the only admin privileges on these servers (that control databases, production code, etc). I'm then fired -- does the whole company go under because I can willfully refuse to give up the passwords for the admin accounts?
Now granted, the code he refused to give the password to was not at all vital to the company's continued functioning, but I would assume that all work related to the functioning of the company, produced on company time, should be disseminatable. As in, once they fire me, I don't need to tell them how a script works, or what "use the d-factor automization" comment means, but someone should be able to read it, and perhaps with some effort, get an idea of what it does (so that the employee cannot add a keylogger to the system, or some other malevolent purpose).
* I find out I'm about to get fired, and I decide to give myself the only admin privileges on these servers (that control databases, production code, etc). I'm then fired -- does the whole company go under because I can willfully refuse to give up the passwords for the admin accounts?*
They will sue you and since it's likely you can be shown to have acted with malicious intent courts won't be sympathetic.
I did not read the full article- but just did. He did not add the password only after finding out he was being fired (in fact, the way he tells it, he was escorted from the building). I think it would be very difficult to demonstrate malicious intent. But again, I'm not a lawyer :) Or a judge.
15 years ago, when I was working as a firewall engineer and penetration tester, I was asked a few times to crack or reset the passwords of systems where ex administrators refused to hand them over. It was usually very easy to do, because the people refusing to hand over the passwords weren't really that competent in the first place, hence why they got fired.
>I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
That probably would have required escalation to Corporate Counsel and CEO, which would have exposed the fact that the manager fired the kid for doing awesome work and was likely trying to get the password to run the system himself, fire the other data-entry people, and take credit for the amazing efficiency improvements. He probably didn't want the CEO to find out about that, so he couldn't sue.
What are the laws like about things produced on company time anyways? In particular, is it a two way street? In other words, what if they don't want what you produced on company time - are they obligated to take it and find a way to dispose of it?
> Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but
> when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't
> give up the password, I was surprised that the company
> didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.
When I read that part, I realized I'm quite lucky I took a course on the basics of Dutch IP laws, in particular those pertaining to software and digital rights.
If he wrote it on company time, it just means that the copyright of the program belongs to the company.
I'm not aware of any law stating he should give up a password though. Copyright just gives one the rights to reproduce and make public a work. It does not give a copyright-holder the right to demand a copy of the work from whoever has a copy.
I wonder how he passworded it. The exact way might make some difference. I assume it was a scripting language, so I guess he put the script in a passworded ZIP-file that he unpacked every time he needed it? Any other way would be easily circumvented by reading the code.
I agree it is a very strange story. Not very unlikely, just strange. Also strange that nobody else got the idea this data-entry might be automated.
Company time = company property, even in the Netherlands. In fact I don't know of a single country where it's not the case; even more so when talking about developed countries.
"In principle the person/legal entity that has created the work (such as software), is the owner of the copyrights in that work. However, article 7 of the Copyright Act provides
that if the invention is made by an employee, the employer is entitled to the copyrights."
In most countries (I'm not familiar with Dutch law), including the two I've worked with in the EU, the company would most definitely still own the code he wrote using company resources and on company time.
Probably not unless his contract was written in such a way. If for example you wrote a personal email using a company computer while at work, you would still own all the rights to it. Your work contract will specifically say what rights you assign to your employer and the specific works it covers.
Legislation in the UK creates a presumption that unless otherwise stated, first ownership of copyright works created in the course of employment will vest in the employer. So it is up to the written contract to rebut the presumption.
It's worth noting "course of employment" is different from "time at work", as it's defined by the tasks you're hired to do. If the person in this article was in the UK his data-entry contract could well be drafted in such a way that writing a program for the purpose of automating his job would fall outside his specified work duties.
Good point. It does depend on the terms of the contract, but "course of employment" is defined quite widely so if the contract was silent, there would be an arguable case to say the presumption kicked in as the work was done for the benefit of the business, during work hours, and at the company's premises (as far as I'm aware).
Fascinating. I've never thought of this. What is the law in the US? If I e-mail a friend during work hours (or write this comment during lunch), does my company own the rights to this?
If you were hired to do some work, the result is "work for hire" and the copyright resides in the company. If you write software, emails, etc unrelated to your job you would ordinarily retain copyright to those. Cases like the one in the story are rather ambiguous. That's employment agreements almost always elaborate on the topic, saying that, for instance, code you write on company computers or on company time belongs to the company.
How is it best to avoid issues like these without having to get approval by a 3rd party? Is coding it at home and sending it to one's office email address enough for documentation that it was done in non-office time?
It's not even a matter of developing it on non-office hours using non-office equipment. Clauses are usually more broad to stop someone from creating a competing product, even when not on company time. Having built an app designed specifically for company systems, the company would likely have a legal claim against the invention, even if it were developed outside of office hours.
I can see that problem for a situation where the outcome turns into a marketable product. But in these automatization cases it looks more to me like when somebody running a horse-drawn carriages business starts suing an employee for working in his free time on developing a car. The skills by the employee applied to solve the problem seem often unrelated/overqualified for the reason they were hired.
It's probably relevant that the company was in the Netherlands, not in the US. In my experience Dutch companies are much, much more reluctant to sue than American companies. Even though under Dutch law as under American law it would probably come out in their favour (I say probably because his boss fired him for writing the program on company time, if the company afterwards claims that this was work for hire rather than abuse of company time then they may have screwed themselves on the legality of the firing).
I'm also skeptical of such a perfect story, but the company not suing is not such a red flag to me.
I'm guessing he wasn't working in the US (boss speaking Dutch, etc.), if he were to try to pull that "I'm not giving you the password" thing here, he could've got a visit from FBI and/or/most probably face jail time if the company cast his program as a type of virus (i.e. any unauthorized software on their system) and complained.
Not exactly the same scenario - but at the end of 2001 I worked at a company that went under - our parent company decided to close our doors, fire everyone in one shot and then didn't pay us our final paychecks. About 4 to 6 weeks later I get a call asking for the server passwords as I was the only one with them - I refused to hand the passwords over until all of us got paid. We all had paychecks within a few days and I released the servers to them.
Are you from the U.S.? I am, and also had a hard time believing this story when I heard coworkers talking about it. Then I realized this guy is from Netherlands. This is a much more believable story set in NL.
I agree. this story plays out exactly like every teenage coder's wet dream. It's got everything: persecution, vindication, crap boss who for some reason gets fired for firing the teenager (in the real world, firing someone who refused to turn over company property is not a reason to get fired), teenager saves everyone else's jobs, and even gets a promotion to a much better job.
This kid apparently also has insane negotiation skills, and somehow managed to negotiate his own salary increase and salary increases for everyone else around him.
All this, in a month...
We'll probably see an update in the next day or two that this story was a hoax.
UPDATE: More evidence of a hoax: the kid was making more money in an entry-level data-entry position than a manager-level employee in the company. And that entry-level data-entry position paid substantial bonsuses (which is the alleged reason the kid was making more than his manager.) And on top of all that, the boss was not eligible for bonuses bases on the productivity of his supervisees. Finally, the kid is now apparently the lead programmer in his own frigging department but somehow does not have the authority to change his desk chair. Yeah, that's all completely believable.
> Finally, the kid is now apparently the lead programmer in his own frigging department but somehow does not have the authority to change his desk chair.
Sadly, this is probably the most believable part of the entire story :(.
This is actually more likely in a big company. Money means little to big companies; unless they screw up in a very serious way, the money available for individual trinkets like desk chairs is almost unlimited. In a small company, an extra Aeron can put you in the red.
Also, if money belongs to a faceless entity and does not directly effect the individuals that hold the purse strings, people tend to be much more loose with the cash. This is a big reason why B2B is almost always a much better course than B2C. In a small company, there's still a founder who considers overall income vital to his sustenance, and as such is much stingier than a big corp.
I guess you have not worked at a company where these types of things can and do happen? It's a plausible story in my book since I had something similar happen early in my career. My boss hated me and another new hire (fear) and kept telling the VP that were were "not working and slow" well without letting my manager know the VP started logging all of the work and found that in a given week I produced 40% of the work, the other new hire produced 30% and the other three people on the team produced 10% each (including my manager) She was fired and I was given her position after being with the company for only a few months.
We're making wild guesses about the pay scales there. I've worked at places where employees make 30,000 and the boss makes 35,000.
Also, the bonus system sounds like it was based heavily on quantity, where it is believable that one automated system could substantially out-perform the sum of the other employees. In a system designed to split a bonus more normally (say 10% for 10 employees) it's not hard to imagine that in the scenario described it could have gone 90% for 1, and 10% split among 9.
According to reddit commenters, the reddit poster was making 6 figures (in Euros) for a data entry job (another HN commenter put this number at 250,000, but I couldn't find anything on reddit to support that). The manager was apparently only making 5 figures.
I'm willing to believe that managers can make less than their underlings (for example, project managers can make less than programmers depending on experience, sales managers can make less than salesmen once commissions are factored in) but I am not willing to believe that an entry-level data entry position pays 6 figures. Especially not in the Netherlands.
If data entry was that expensive then they'd have outsourced it to Poland pretty quickly. Or have invested in one of the many document scanning and OCR companies.
I've worked in The Netherlands for 6 years now (5 as consultant in this area), and am pretty sure that this story is bullshit. I've seen nothing like it.
I agree that level of bonus for data entry smells funny.
Although, the one exception could be some kind of government or hospital data where it cannot be exported out of the country, and therefore the only option is to pay local wages. Even then though, the bonus does sound bogus
Here in The Netherlands, it's very hard to sack people. For that reason you don't see the kind of salaries that you do in the US. An employer has less insentive to offer massive salaries, because with the massive salary comes an even bigger liability.
There's no way he's earning 250k a year in a data entry position. Or even as a developer.
Additionally, I've read nothing on the biggest dutch-language IT/Developers community. I can't believe that someone would boast about this on reddit and not on tweakers :)
I still find that odd, perhaps I should quit my current job and do exactly what he does? after all automating data entry has to be a lot simpler than most programming jobs.
Lets play with the maths of this, lets say that he is generously making 40 euros, which is a lot for data entry (think like double what specialist data entry people are normally paid)
That leaves us with a bonus pool of 2100000, the claim is that he was taking 90% of the bonus, that would make the bonus pool 233333, lets round up to 250000
Ok so lets split this evenly across several employees
5 clerks = 50,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 90,000 each !
10 clerks = 25,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 65,000 each !
20 clerks = 12,500 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 52,500 each !
Thats a stunning salary ! really, I would be motivated myself to get my bonus, even if I was only taking my _equal_ share of the magic pot.
Ok lets assume that his department is huge say ....
50 clerks = 5,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 45,000 each
Sounds reasonable right? but the 50 clerks would be costing the company
2000000 Euros ! At that cost even the most stupid of organisations would be looking at automation (human via india or say the meat-cloud), or computers)
Now you might say that 40K is generous for the type of work, that he would really be earning something like 25K, still a lot for data entry which is a low skilled job that is typically hourly paid; a fine argument but if that is the case then the bonus pool becomes larger which still makes all the numbers look suspect.
Maybe he got a raise (and didn't really declare it, for some reason), even then that is somewhat higher than a basic internet search gives me for someone in Holland as a programmer (http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Country=Netherlands/Sala...). Now the company he works for might be clueless, but I would be surprised if they did not do a wage equivalence as most companies are low that way.
So colour me extremely skeptical, the _only_ way it makes sense is if he misplaced a zero
Upper-level bosses probably never had any intention of firing all the workers just because some script automated a portion of their work. If it's a large-scale, decisions like that probably wouldn't be made without considering MPL abstractly or without considering the costs and bad PR incurred when laying off a significant number of people. That part of the narrative was likely more significant in the kid's mind than reality.
And apparently, the sub-boss was already on thin ice. This may have just been the final excuse needed to get rid of him.
Also, much empire building happens by headcount; if the work's all still getting done, better to retain the headcount than to faff around with redundancies.
I got my first real programming job because I automated dumb work and my then-boss handed me a bunch of extra unautomatable administration work; I went and explained this to his ex-boss at the company he'd left and started competing with, and said ex-boss figured anybody the idiot wanted to shit on was worth a try.
Now, in this case we're talking about two people still within the reporting chain, but if $redditor->boss->boss hated $redditor->boss as much as my first programming boss hated the previous boss, and $redditor->boss->boss managed to look good screwing him ... then it seems entirely plausible.
I still feel like it doesn't smell quite right, but it is to my mind way more plausible than people are giving it credit for.
Regarding your update, I'm pretty sure that he was making more money at the entry-level data-entry position than his manager because he was ALSO getting 99% of the bonus pool.
In the Netherlands he wouldn't be let go immediately, there would be a variable legally-required period of time before he is shown the door, during that time he is still technically employed by the company. I suspect that it is during this period that he spoke to the senior manager.
That would be standard operating procedure. The kid's program (if it really exists) would be company property, and his failure to turn over the password could result in civil litigation (or potentially, but unlikely) criminal prosecution.
Luckily all of this happened, i think i believe it did, in The Netherlands where litigation over this sort of thing is just not very common. Especially in smaller companies as this one seems to be.
A password is not property. The company holds the copyright to the software, but the employee has no obligation to have made the software usable for any purpose. (No more than a cabinetmaker who creates an innovative jig is reqyired to write a manual or provide training.)
You're wrong. Anything you produce in company time that is even remotely jon related, is company property. The code, the binary, the password and any intellectual property rights protecting them is the company's property. Every contract clearly arranges that, so you can't extort your former boss, as in the story. If your contract doesn't contain such clauses, your company is incompetent.
Property is tangible. The computer that stores the software is property, the software is merely a configuration of the property. Certain monopoly privileges regarding that configuration (copyright) might be assigned to the company depending on the details of the contract and local laws.
Providing a password is an activity. Whether the employee has a duty to perform that activity depends on the contract and circumstances. In this case, the employee was not assigned the task of writing down the password, so failing to write down the password was not a breach of duty. His boss attempted to negotiate a new employment arrangement involving writing down the password, and negotiations fell through.
Extortion is the threat to perform an unlawful act unless demands are met. This case was not extortion because the employee did not perform any act, let alone an unlawful one.
Put simply, if an employee goes beyond the call of duty, the employer cannot compel them to continue going beyond the call of duty. All the employer can do is fire them.
So if I buy a safe secretly with the company credit card, and fill it with material I completed on company time, and they fire me, I'm not legally obligated to tell them the combination to the safe?
The fact that you did it "secretly" might get you into trouble- using a company credit card for unauthorized purchases is fraud. I suppose you could argue the kid defrauded the company by spending his time programming rather than doing data entry. I don't think that would be as easy to get a judgement for as credit card fraud.
If your job was securing their stuff, which was before in piles on the grass outside the offices and they fire you for putting it in a safe instead, then probably not. You haven't stolen anything and they fired you for doing your job too well. All safes are openable and they opted for the hard way when they fired you. Would probably depend on the court though.
I have a similar story which I posted on HN before, here is the repost:
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.
There were a few more steps that I don'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 "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice.
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.
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.
Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors.
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.
"You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" 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 "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal.
No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". 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.
Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" 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!
I'll throw my own similar experience into the ring.
Let me take you back a few years, when I was hired as an editor at a traditional books-on-paper publisher. These people had an arcane process in place for getting their printed products online.
1. Send PDFs to indifferent, bottom-dollar offshore vendors.
2. Get incredibly broken XML in return.
3. Task an editor with fixing that broken XML by hand (can't go back to the vendor due to extremely tight deadlines).
4. Complain to the vendors and hope they listen for next time.
5. Have the editor manually upload said XML to various hosting services.
When that miserable list became my responsibility, I quickly turned to automation. I wrote scripts to fix up the bad XML, upload the content where it needed to go, send out emails to interested parties, and so forth.
"Fabulous!" they said as they heaped on the work. I pushed my capabilities even further by writing more software to pump out ebook files and do other cool stuff. And I wrote long white papers about how we might modernize our broken electronic publishing procedures.
But by this time, nobody was interested. I had become totally typecast as the widget maker, the guy that makes the cheap XML go zoom. None of the artsy credentials that brought me on board in the first place (English degree, writing portfolio, etc.) seemed to matter anymore. I was the tech. I was to sit in my corner and play with my toys.
The end. I'm still here, but finally starting to cut my losses and look for an exit. Lessons learned!
Thank you, HN, for allowing me this cathartic moment.
It's a dog eat dog world. Your mistake was incorrectly assessing the incentives. You thought you were helping. But you were actually threatening to topple an existing power structure. Unwise.
A story.
A coworker ("Dan") automated his timesheet reporting, allegedly for "budgeting", something we all hated doing. Dan would select some project codes, target hours worked for the week, choose percentages, and his macro would randomly fill out a time sheet.
The kicker was he used increments of 5 minutes (vs quarter hours, whatever).
Meanwhile, his office mate ("Stan") kept meticulous time sheets. Actually honest.
A few weeks later, Dan gets recognized and rewarded for his awesome time sheet. A role model for us all.
(Stan flips out. I mean really loses it. It was hysterical.)
So. Were I you working in that environment, I would have mimicked your output with the macro(s). Same error rate. Same time duration. Let it run in the background while you're doing something else more enjoyable. Maybe dial the accuracy or finish time up and down so you'd occasionally get a perk. Like a dog gets its treat.
If you wanted to be really subversive, you could share your tool with some favored coworkers. Strictly quid pro quo, because your "friends" are the first to screw you over. So make sure you have dirt on anyone you help.
We would track the hours, but there were some requirements in the reporting that prevented us from handing our report
And in the end it was the total amount of hours that mattered
So instead of manually writing it down (yes, it was an html page template that we printed and filled manually)
Here comes python to save the day! Input the total amount of hours, it will fill the HTML with the hours at a standart schedule and skipping over weekends and holidays
My first internship in college was in R&D of a Fortune 500 company testing bugfixes for software that ran $1M+ machines.
Sometimes this involved following test matrices to exercise the machines. At the end of the test or when something went wrong, you had to read operational data off a terminal emulator on the PC hooked up to the debug port on the machine, and then log that data in the tracking system as part of the report.
The manual data entry was horribly boring and error-prone. There were a few dozen test operators who did nothing but run matrices all day so it sucked up a substantial amount of man-hours too.
Once I discovered the way-fancier-than-it-needed-to-be terminal emulator had its own scripting language, I hatched a plan. In my spare time I figured out how to automate the commands in the terminal emulator to make the machine spit out the appropriate debug data, and then I researched Windows automation and figured out how to automatically copy the data out of the terminal emulator into the reporting software. I had to deal with the machine OS developers moving debug menus around constantly for no reason (hello escaping to root menu and then regexps) and all sorts of messy stuff. End result: one button press and all the data magically appears in the report.
Once I had the kinks worked out from using it myself, I gave it to one of the operators. Instant hit. Within a couple weeks everyone had it.
Luckily management was pretty great about it - I never asked anyone before I did it. They saw how much better the automated way was and how much time/money/productivity it was saving them and heartily endorsed it (and gave me a raise).
I always hoped they managed to find someone to maintain it after I left.
I did something similar, boil about 5 hours of work down to 15 seconds using an Excel macro. I was told to re-do it by hand, because my future replacement wouldn't understand how to use a macro.
Your story makes me fear every working for a big company. With these exception of a few retail stints while still in school, I've primarily enjoyed working for smaller companies.
I had a very similar human-powered spreadsheet task which was a massive time sink, and hugely error prone. It entailed looking up values in one sheet, comparing to another, and then combining separate pdf files based on the result of the spreadsheets. After doing it a few times, I decided I wasn't cut out for this kind of task. I fired up Python, scripted everything away, and turned what used to literally be an all say task, into something that took only a few minutes to run.
Showed my boss, he was pleased as punch, and I received a sweet bonus at the end of the week.
Small companies rule (for their lack of stringent bureaucratic rules).
Lameness of boss is a bigger factor than company size. This story is of a 80 person company.
I had a job working for founder and president. Primary product was very complicated, requiring lotsa training and effort. Think purpose built Adobe Illustrator for creating manufacturing production plans. Kudos to him for making a capable, dependable product that had 80% market share. He was very proud.
The growth goal of the company was to "automate" our customer's workflow. After a few years, I understood the problem domain well enough to take a crack at it.
I wrote forms-based app that automatically generated the production plans. You spec a couple variables and style of work, and viola, production plan.
Took about 1 month to implement.
I show my new app around the office. Lotsa excitement. Time to demo to the founder. I show him what's what. He asks me to try a few tricky scenarios. No problem. He then walks out of my office. No "good job". No "I gotta take this call". Dude never spoke to me again. (Our offices were adjacent.)
I then figured out that founder didn't want a better solution. He wanted other people to fail trying to find a better solution, thereby validating his awesomeness.
My advice to anyone with a game changing idea: Shut up. Figure out an exit strategy. Capture the benefit / reward for yourself.
This stuff isn't exclusive to big companies, I've had similar BS in smaller companies too. Usually when you have a company director who is scared of technology.
That's my experience too. I've encountered this anti-technical BS at a company as small as eight.
And you're spot on in that case: the two directors spent a quarter of every year at their out-of-state retirement home and otherwise didn't look too kindly upon surprise or change.
I had a similar experience, that was at least as groan inducing. I was working a low-level IT job, as an AS/400 operator / network tech. The "IT manager" was a complete fraud who knew about as much about technology as I know about the culture of ancient Mesopotamia, and she had some project she was trying to get done, involving moving some data from an old database into a new one. OK, easy enough, right? Well, a couple of her "pet" subordinates spent a couple of weeks trying to migrate this data and couldn't get it done, so they gave up. I came into work one evening and found a fracking HUGE stack of greenbar on my desk, and then she comes in and goes "we're going to rekey all this data into the new database over the next couple of weeks, so start chewing through as much of it as you can tonight."
My first thought was "WTF?" My second and third thoughts were something like "Are you f%!#ng shitting me?" and "You are f%!#ng braindead."
So, after everyone else left for the evening, I found the machine with the old database (running Paradox 4 for DOS), exported the data to dbaseIII format (because I knew it was a commonly used and widely supported format), put it on a floppy, took it to the machine with the Access database and loaded it up. Turns out I had to write one update query to populate one of the fields, but that took something like 5 minutes. 30 minutes into the whole thing and the entire database is finished.
Next day I see the "IT Manager" and she's like "How much of that data did you key in last night?" I looked at her and said "none." She about blew a fuse and started yelling "Why not, I told you to <blah, blah, blah>?" Then I told her the whole thing was done and she's like "But.. wait, what? But..but... spluttercoughsplutter but, but... So-and-so and You-know-who spent TWO WHOLE WEEKS trying to migrate that data and you mean to tell me you did it in one night?"
Of course she never forgave me for showing up her "pets" like that.
Needless to say, I didn't work at this place very long.
Edit: there's another fun story to tell about that place, and how this same IT manager used the AS/400 system message queue facility as a poor man's IM system, and - more to the point - used it to talk shit about anybody and everybody she worked with (myself included). Of course this dim-bulb didn't realize that when I was logged in as QSYSOPR I could read all her messages. So, on my last night there, I printed out copies of a few "choice" messages from her, and then sent a systemwide message saying something like:
"Foo: You should probably be aware that a QSYSOPR can read all of your system messages, and knows what you've been saying about everybody in this company. You should probably hope that somebody doesn't take offense, and print out copies of some of these messages and distribute them so that certain other people can see what you've had to say about them."
In the end, I decided not to leave the printouts to be found, but a co-worker told me a few months later that I nearly gave this "IT manager" a heart-attack and that she spent weeks doing damage control and trying not to get fired.
That was like 13 years ago, and I'm guessing she hasn't forgiven me for that either. shrug
Of course she never forgave me for showing up her "pets" like that.
People like that are legion. I was fired by one such. When I applied for unemployment - and was turned down - I found out that I'd been fired because I was 'incompetent' and ms-represented my credentials.
Which was funny: I was fired because I did not bring in cookies on Friday.
I don't know what kind of work you were doing, but sometimes data needs to be checked with human eyes for legal reasons, in which case you would actually be cheating.
It doesn't make any sense since your error rate is actually lower, but sometimes bureaucracies work that way.
I'd be surprised if that was true in this case. Especially given that the human operators were given about a days training and didn't have any knowledge beyond what was written down, so would have been pretty useless for checking anyway.
If that had been the case, I would have understood if they had explained that to me but it amused me that the immediate defence was basically "this makes everyone equally productive, so how do we know who is the most productive?".
It's sort of like being pissed off with people typing documents on computers because you can no longer tell who has the best handwriting (incidentally I had a similar issue at school when I submitted a typed essay once).
I remember reading the original post when he was asking for advice, nice to see him coming back with a good follow up.
The company he works for is definitely doing it right, they've spotted an opportunity to put someone in a correct role with no hiring process, and with them up to speed on the corporate background. They've optimised a department out and managed to retain the staff in other areas, and saved once again money on hiring, and saved money on firing the dead weight (I'm not sure what Dutch employment law is like but it's notoriously difficult to fire someone in the UK). Pragmatic and sensible, companies take note.
EDIT: from my limited experience, every Dutch person (all 6) I've met has been pretty pragmatic and sensible, maybe a cultural thing. I could be wrong though!
Firing people in the Netherlands is sufficiently hard that it causes me to think that this story has been fabricated or at least been exaggerated a little. I can see how his original 'cheating of the system' could be seen by his employer as misconduct and thus be grounds for firing, so I'm willing to believe this part. However, the firing of the other people in his department and his old boss smells a bit fishy. Unless they were temporary workers, the employer would have to start a redundancy procedure. The story makes it seem like they were fired on the spot as well.
I'd guess they were temp. workers from how it sounds with bonus based on performance and a few other bits from the first post, but even if they're temps you'd still have to begin a firing process unless you can say 'hey, no work left'. But then shifting temps elsewhere is unlikely so who knows, I'd lean towards potential exaggeration.
I am willing to believe that the story was embellished a bit.
For instance, in Brazil I could say that I was "fired on the spot", even though in most cases the company is required to give notice, meaning I'd still be working in the company for a month.
Doesn't change the fact that I am effectively fired in this case.
Sounds like they got a software engineer for super cheap, too. I bet his boss's boss was laughing so hard because the kid doesn't realize how much money he could have been making.
Software engineer/programmer wages in most of Europe are much lower than what you'd probably expect, if you're in the US.
Now I don't know how much bonus he was earning, but he says he was earning 85-95% of the entire bonus share, and that the other members of the team were earning about 100-200... Given that, I'd guess it was at least 1500 on top of his basic wage (let's assume that's another 1500), totalling a low estimate of 3000eur/month, which is higher than the average in many European countries:
http://www.worldsalaries.org/computerprogrammer.shtml
I know the rates in the US are higher, but I'm curious to know why? The standard of living in an average European country is way higher, and the tax is higher as well. So is it basically the demand supply scenario or what?
I suspect that debt plays into it. Americans, particularly ones fresh out of college, tend to have a crap-load of debt. Then they "demand" higher pay because they literally can't have the same standard of living without it.
Although I could be wrong. I certainly don't know much about how Europeans view debt.
Maybe you're right. I've heard that education in Europe is pretty cheap. This could be one of the major factors for having "good enough" salaries.
Also, in the US, you need insurance for everything, unlike Europe with public healthcare (I'm not sure how many countries have free health though). So, that could be one of the hidden costs as well.
I do indeed, but it's sort of an increase by default. SV pays that level so to attract you have to price accordingly, or that's my shaky not based on anything but gut feeling theory.
> 2. Kid did not respect the authority of Boss. When Boss fired him, Kid went over his head and sold his actions to Big Boss.
No, he did respect the chain of command. He first went to his immediate boss, which promptly fired him. After being fired, I think it's fair game to sell his actions to the Big Boss.
I the the password he attached to the program also helped a bit. It would seem the boss wanted to continue using it. It's possible he would not have received proper credit without it.
Way too perfect. At the end, all of his coworkers get transferred to other places in the company to do translation work, for the same pay? Uh huh. The only thing this kid did is spin a good yarn and rack up a ton of reddit karma.
Between this and the passing out at 10, I'm more and more of a grumpy, cynical old man...
Not all of the coworkers kept their jobs. The good ones did.
It's often cheaper to transfer someone in a company to a new job than it is to hire a new person. If they had openings at the company, why not just move people from a job that doesn't need to be done anymore?
Of course, it's also possible that this isn't true.
Like that matters. Getting front page is satisfaction enough. People are way to credulous about Reddit stories, as if the usernames make them more credible than 4chan.
Now listen here, "jquery", if that is your real--oh, whoa, wait, jquery? The javascript framework!? Dude! Oh I'm sorry, man. My bad, I was just... I didn't... I'm really sorry!
When I was 14, bunch of my cousins and I started working at my uncle's start-up as a summer "internship." Bulk of our job was to find product images and resize them in various sizes. For a while, my cousins were using photoshop to do them and at the least, each image would take a minute. I saw the repetitiveness and wrote a Visual Basic tool that would process entire directories in seconds. Their work was significantly reduced.
We decided not to tell my uncle about my tool for a while so that we could all finish our work a bit early and get out to play cricket together before it got dark.
I wonder what the thought process of the original boss was? It seems like his decision to fire the clever programmer was based entirely on the fact that he wasn't doing what he was "supposed" to be doing, regardless of the massive benefits.
I'm glad I've never worked for someone like this. But I'm afraid it's because I've mostly worked in start-ups or small companies where efficiencies and clever hacks are always appreciated. Is that kind of "logic" common in power structures?
I think the problem is the boss manages, say, 10 people. Someone points out that the work of those 10 people can really be done by one person part-time and now the boss is redundant because no management is really needed anymore.
Pretty much it. This is also a good illustration of the difference between the private and the public sector. In the private sector your boss would rather keep all his employees, but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit.
Start working for the government, though, and every level of management is keen on having as many people beneath them as possible, and there's no real desire at any level to reduce costs; the less efficient your department is the bigger your budget is and the more important you look.
Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.
I had a co-op job with the Navy (civil service) while in college. I sat next to a really nice lady named Peggy who was on the phone every day fielding lost password requests. She'd reset the password, then read the new password to the person over the phone, day after day after day.
I went to my boss and offered to add a forgot password link to the site. His response: "But then what would Peggy do?"
This is what I imagine when I hear the phrase "job creation."
If you want something done - your lawn mowed, a meal made, etc - you'll hire someone. But a job for its own sake? What, are you going to hire somebody to move a pile of rocks back and forth across your yard?
I know you say this in jest... but if you can solve unstructured pick-n-place (ie. non-uniform, unmodeled objects in arbitrary configurations with difficult outdoor perception), you could make some serious bank. This is actually a _very_ difficult problem.
So much of the software work I've done is around getting computers to do the things that computers are good at. My response to the "what would Peggy do?" question is always "something that only Peggy can do"
Automation doesn't have to be about reducing staffing costs, firing people, or hiring fewer people, it can be about getting more and better output from the humans on your team. Humans are great, and are wasted by reading passwords over the phone.
I've worked with plenty of otherwise competent people who could spend 5-10 minutes trying to find a website link or form submit button that was right in front of them.
Peggy provides better, faster feedback than a "forgot password" link does for the vast majority of the population. Not everyone knows their way around a computer; the HN crowd is definitely not representative in this respect. But plenty of people, especially in older generations, know how to use a phone and talk to someone.
Think of Peggy as a UX hack: she makes non-technical employees more efficient by cutting down by 75-80% the amount of time such people would spend trying to reset their password (using the "forgot password link" method). Alternatively, think of her as internal customer service. Either way, she actually does/did provide value to the organization if the organization was large enough that she could spend essentially all of her workday resetting passwords for people.
"Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs"
If you're referring to any non-military domestic stuff, "Occasionally" means "Every year from 2000-present". Head on down to town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last 10 years if you don't believe me.
> "but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit."
That's a touch optimistic in my experience. There are definitely those who would love to cut costs and bump profit. But those who are out to pad their budget and status are more than just direct managers.
In my experience, the more common driver of increased efficiency in the private sector, is department A angling in on department B's responsibilities with offers of being able to do them more cheaply/efficiently.
Yup, every large organization has a tendency to develop sclerosis. Some manage to keep this down to a reasonable level, but those that don't collapse and are replaced.
If I were to guess, it's because that there are a bunch of temps doing data entry. They get paid a bonus based on what percentage of data they enter. Then comes this one guy, and he starts getting 90% of the bonus, thus effectively cutting out the bonus money for the rest of the employees (in a manner someone may see as cheating the system)
That's just the other viewpoint of the story. Not saying it's most efficient, or right, but I can see a manager thinking that way.
I've mentioned this here before, but this sort of thing has been going on for a long time.
When the SF writer Arthur C. Clarke was a young man he had a tedious civil service job that involved merging and consolidating figures (IIRC, it had something to do with government pensions, and he got the job because he scored well on a math test). Since the final numbers only had to be accurate to within a few percent, he started using his slide rule to get his day's quota done before noon then take the rest of the day off.
Preface this by acknowledging don't know much bout the OP and his professional experience, but he is likely young.
I don't care for the "I'm now the Lead Software Engineer with my own department". If he was in manual data entry, he is likely young and has limited professional coding experience to cut his teeth on.
He is likely soloing himself, will limit his advancement by not having peers, and when he changes jobs he may have unrealistic expectations not realizing these.
He didn't have the resume to get a job in a proper software house with strong peers before. Two years from now he will, assuming he wants to leave his one-man-band operation.
Don't see why he was told he shouldn't have done it on company time as the time he spent writing the script was more than made up for by the increased rate of record entry
This would never happen in the USA. I had a somewhat similar experience and was fired.
I had a young, naive friend insist on giving two week notice at a job after I warned him not to, and he was terminated immediately. Just doesn't work like that anymore, maybe high-end salary jobs but not hourly wages.
Depends on the manager, and probably labor supply. I worked a minimum-wage stocking job a while back, gave my two-weeks' notice, and worked those two weeks. YMMV.
I'm not entirely sure this guy is a "kid", and this clearly isn't just data entry that he's doing (as many people are claiming). He claims to be making 250,000 USD with bonuses a year [0]. I'm surprised no one has questioned what's really going on here, but if the author's claims are accurate this certainly isn't the story of someone fresh out of college guy working a mindless data entry job just barely scrapping by.
There are some excellent subreddits and some terrible ones; admittedly since the huge rise in popularity (thanks Digg) the good stuff is harder to find.
As a backup strategy, the guy should have made a version of the program that is buggy and only gets 7x the regular production rate of the other workers. Then if company wants his code, they get the inefficient program and he gets hired to make it work 100%.
He can explain his bonuses as script + great manual work in case they wonder.
I really don't like this idea. While it might have helped ensure the OP's longevity in the company, it's selfish and is really doing more harm then good in the long run. And that doesn't really seem like the OP's style.
I hope you and others don't view the world this way. If you do, you're only holding the rest of us back. It reminds me of the other comment here about screwing things up on purpose just to increase budget:
Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167459
How is that any different than adding a password? He's protecting his own interests so he won't be fired without a chance to come back to his job and finish automating the whole company. He made himself indispensable with the password. This would be another way to do it in case they figure out the password with some other methods, such as a keylogger, before letting him go.
There's a difference between protecting a buggy alpha, which he probably didn't realize (or maybe wouldn't be) company property, and intentionally making an artificially weaker program in order to ensure your job security.
Automating something and efficiency may or may not be desirable thing depending on the alignment on incentives.
Let's say you are a small company with a relatively flat structure and you as the owner, also work as CEO. Then every bit of efficiency is precious to you.
Let's say you, a techie hotshot, come to work for a big company, and automate some process that suddenly makes 20% of staff in your department redundant. Essentially that means that your boss and may be boss of your boss will have to lay people off (which is bad for morale and relationships), they get smaller headcount and budget numbers.
I'm skeptical. The story seems fishy to me. And who would trust an employee who develops something, keys it to his machine only, password protects it, and goes around boasting about it?
TLDR: Believability low + employee proud of poor ethics
This is fantasy, of course. My guess is that it's some college course doing a social experiment rather than an individual troll. Perhaps it's called The Creation of Myth (user's name is CM-NL). There's probably some college class out there patting themselves on the back for convincing so many people through a cleverly-crafted-but-just-a-little-too-perfect story that was tailor-made for Redditors.
After all, the follow-up is basically created from the most popular responses to the original post.
Assuming the story is true, I especially like the part where he insisted that his former coworkers keep their employment with the company, even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence. Nice solidarity!
even though he automated their existing jobs out of existence
He didn't automate away their domain knowledge or the company's understanding of them as known quantities. Immediately getting rid of someone just because their narrow job description doesn't fit anymore is incredibly wasteful.
I remember reading the original post as well. And, man, that could not have ended much better. I'm glad to see that someone at the company realized the potential of what this person created. I would have expected pride to get in the way of all that, so kudos for him having the balls to go above his former boss's head. That was crucial.
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's original scumbag boss gets fired, all the old data-entry employees/friends are better off, OP gets amazing new job.
Now that being said, perhaps I'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.
Perhaps I have a negative view of companies as well, but when he said he programmed it on company time, and wouldn't give up the password, I was surprised that the company didn't just sue him for not giving up company property.