IT employee quietly automated his $90K-a-year job and plays video games during 'work'

Imagine if work got done by itself. No Monday blues. No deadlines. Sounds almost too good to be true and yet one ingenious employee made the impossible dream possible. Reddit user u/Throwaway59724 shared how he automated his 90k/year job, leaving him to lead a relaxed life. At a time when the pandemic has taken a toll on all of those reporting to work and those working remotely, this IT employee has been living the life we can only dream of. His job is to transfer company files including digital documents, photos, and so on, on a daily basis to the cloud and then verify their fidelity. The company believed what he was tasked with was an 8-hour job but he found a way to automate it and needed just ten minutes at his desk. "I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone," he titled the post.

"I work for a mid-size law firm that hired me as an IT specialist to handle all of their digital evidence for trials," he wrote. "The law firm was in the process of changing their evidence managing system to Cloud-based and wanted me to to be the only person with admin access to the Cloud, everyone else would be limited to view only and would work on a local network drive." He soon realized that it was the only task he was given to do during his 8-hour shift. He knew didn't need that many hours to work and was left with a lot of free time. He spent most of his time pretending to work.

The pandemic would change everything. "Then COVID happened and I was asked if there was any way I could work from home. I set up a remote workstation, tunneled it to my house, and that's when the real fun began. In about a week I was able to write, debug, and perfect a simple script that performed my entire job," he wrote. "It essentially scans the on-site drive for any new files, generates hash values for them, transfers them to the Cloud, then generates hash values again for fidelity." The idea of verifying their fidelity was to ensure they hold up in court for not being tampered with.

Suddenly, his work-life balance was all life. "I clock in every day, play video games or do whatever, and at the end of the day, I look over the logs to make sure everything ran smoothly... then clock out. I'm only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day," he wrote. Initially, he wasn't too comfortable with the idea. "For a while, I felt guilty like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy, there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life," he wrote. "Win-win for everyone involved." He also found a way to ensure he doesn't lose his job. "I've already decided that if they ever try to get rid of me I'll just get rid of the script. I'm running it on equipment that I own so if they lose me, they lose the work. Creating my own job security."

In a world where companies rip off workers, Reddit users lauded the employee for his ingenuity. One person even suggested they make a business out of it. "Even better than this is to create a product and sell it to them and others," wrote one user. Many urged him to not feel guilty at all. "If it helps you justify it, they're not paying you for the 10 minutes a day it takes you to do that, they're paying the work to be done reliably and an expert on standby full time, ready to jump in and address any issues as they happen," wrote one user. The employee joked, "This is true. Every now and then I have to perform rigorous maintenance, like restarting my PC."