“I Automated My Job Over A Year Ago And Haven’t Told Anyone”

One IT employee is going viral after sharing his confession about automating his job and spending his workdays playing video games.

In an honest post made in the popular subreddit r/AntiWork, an anonymous Redditor said that he works as an IT specialist at a small law firm, and that they have spent nearly every day since the beginning of the global pandemic doing whatever they want.

Titled, "I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone," the story has received over 80,000 upvotes and nearly 5,000 comments in just two days.

The guy said that he was hired to handle all of the digital evidence his employer uses during trials and that when COVID arrived, they requested him to work from home. Within a week of making the adjustment, the Redditor wrote, debugged, and perfected a script to do his entire job for him.

It's been over a year, and nobody at his company has any clue.

This isn't the first time something like this happened. We published a story about a similar case in November. In it, we talked about how Redditor u/Cynicusme opened up to everyone on the same subreddit about how he has been paid to ‘do nothing’ for the past 5 years.

But if you dig around on the internet, you'll find even more examples. Someone by the nickname Etherable posted the following question to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?"

The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry" and the way they also put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results and for all management knew, its employee simply did flawless work.

Economists and futurists have been excited about automation for quite some time, dreaming about the time when machines would eliminate the drudgery of mindless and repetitive labor, freeing humans to fill our days with leisure, creative pursuits, or more meaningful stuff. In 1930, for example, John Maynard Keynes speculated that "automatic machinery and the methods of mass production" would help deliver a 15-hour workweek—and even those hours would only be necessary to help us feel like we have something to do.

However, almost a century later, we're not even close to this.

I wonder if this Redditor will get caught when they return to the office. And by the looks of it, this can happen pretty soon. At the end of 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that 71 percent of American workers who were able to work at home were doing just that. But as a result of extensive vaccination efforts (the Mayo Clinic said that, as of January 11, 62.6 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID) and relaxed CDC guidelines for quarantine times following a positive COVID test, workspaces are filling back up.

However, an Ipsos survey for the World Economic Forum of 12,500 employed people in 29 countries found that a majority (66%) want flexible working to become the norm. And almost a third (30%) said they would consider looking for another job if they were forced to go back to the office full time.

In another report published by McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm said they analyzed the potential of persistent remote work across 2,000 tasks in 800 occupations in 8 focus countries and determined that about 20 and 25 percent of workforces in advanced economies could work from home between 3 and 5 days per week.

Who knows, maybe the hero of our story is one of them and will convince his boss to allow him to do his job remotely.