> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours.
Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't).
This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.
When I moved across the country to Boston back in late 2000, all I could find was a data entry temp job. They were using a Perl program to automatically build QuarkXPress pages based on an XML feed. But the Perl program was introducing dozens of typos per page, in a 1200-page catalog (mostly extra spaces, plus some Unicode issues). Six other temps and I had to go through each page and fix the typos.
I looked at the Perl program, found the regex that was causing the space problem, and saw how to fix it. I mentioned that to my manager, and fortunately he had a better response. He made me write a proposal (can't really blame him), and sent that to the app's developer. I think the proposal was three pages, describing the problem, the cost, and the solution (to remove two spaces!). A few days later they offered me a job in the programming department.
Maybe I was just lucky? But I'd hope most places are not so WTF that if you're willing to earn some trust you can't introduce improvements.
The likely real reason you got such a frosty reception from your manager is because your automation directly threatens his position by making redundant his headcount.
My default advice (because I've seen this more than just a few times) in situations like these is to wait 2-3 weeks, then go back to the manager and say, "Hey Boss, remember that automation I showed you the other week? Your experience proved you right; after our meeting I went back and tested some more because you were so cautious about the idea, and indeed found edge cases it didn't catch, and man it's a pain to work through them all so I tossed the code. Boy, am I glad you advised me to tread carefully there with all your years of hard-won experience!". Unless you can get at an actual-owner who would see the obvious direct benefits, slash the workforce, and protect you from the backlash, you are not going to progress anywhere by continuing to threaten your manager the way you are now. Getting demoted or even laid off is a real possibility for you with a reaction like that to automation. The management level to sell this to is the one that will benefit from decreased headcount while holding productivity at the same level (or some variation thereof).
In the meantime, keep your automation on the down-low, use it to free up your time, maybe share with a very close friend at work (if you know for absolutely certain they won't blab, as a reveal is exceedingly likely unless they are a fellow coder and see the logic in my advice above, and maybe not even then), then allocate the slack time to other activities that will boost your marketability on your own equipment (learn new stuff, write more code, etc.). When the time is right, find a better job and jet, and leave them never the wiser about the possibility of automation (unless you want to come back and sell your automation to an owner or high-level manager, for the estimated savings on 3-5 years of automated-away fully-burdened labor expenses, which will look good on their budget...just make sure you do a new/improved from-scratch rewrite with better error checking/etc. on your own time and sell that and not the code you wrote while they employed you).
Time to go over your manager and show it to his boss. Low level line managers are often defined by the specific tasks his team is doing. If your script automates most of those tasks, the mission of the team has been eliminated and so is your manager's job. High level managers would love the productivity boost and the elimination of an entire team. And your work will be recognized.
Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.
That'd be the president of the company (we're a small mechanical engineering firm), and he's even worse. He vetoed the request from my boss to upgrade to MS Office 2013. We're on a mix of XP/2003 right now, and Excel+Word are the lifeblood of our work.
So your manager just suggested that you upgrade all your machines from XP to windows 7, and upgrade office from 2003 to 2013? That's not necessarily kneejerk stupidity - did your manager include a list of benefits from upgrading, against a cost analysis, and allow for a test run of trying to run all your existing spreadsheets (presumably more complex than just a few numbers!) on the new system, or just say 'hey we should get a new version of everything we use, it won't cause any downtime' and the boss said like hell it won't? I think upgrading is probably a good idea, but it's definitely not a no-brainer 'ok do it tomorrow' idea.
Sounds like he'd be better. Especially if the veto was done with concern over cost. He'd likely appreciate how much cost this automation could save him.
People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why?
Team of manager salaries.
They employee salaries.
Contractor salaries.
There over 500 people working on this thing.
I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.
Sounds like a terrible place to work. I work at a big corp and one of my jobs is to find people doing silly things like this and eliminate (the tasks) through automation.
My advice - quit and find another job at a more enlightened place.
I believe the correct play for this scenario is to automate the work and never tell anyone. Though I can imagine that not revealing it could be just a little bit tricky to pull off.
Listen to this advice. There was a guy on Reddit sometime ago who automated lots of his work, and his co-workers hated him for it. Wish I could find the thread.
Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't).
This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.