Man Automated His Job One Year Ago And Is Still Earning $90,000

The pandemic forced millions of people to change their working habits, moving from the office to the bedroom and only seeing colleagues over Zoom.

But while many of us struggled to adapt to the 'new normal', one man managed to make it work to his advantage.

An IT specialist recently revealed that he was able to make his $90,000 (£65,603) a year job fully automated.

Sounds pretty far-fetched but he swears it's true, instead spending his day playing video games and only spending a few minutes at their desk.

Any jobs going?

Sharing the lightbulb moment on Reddit, the tech whiz explained that his role was to handle digital evidence for trials, uploading data to the Cloud and managing it for a law firm.

However, even before the Covid outbreak, he said it was 'never an eight-hour job' and was often 'stuck pretending to work' while in the office.

Alamy

So when everyone was sent home, he came up with a way of reducing the workload even further, but this time there was no one there to check on him.

"I set up a remote workstation, tunnelled it to my house, and that's when the real fun began," he said.

"In about a week I was able to write, debug, and perfect a simple script that performed my entire job. 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 (in court you have to prove digital evidence hasn't been tampered with).

"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."

He then added: "I'm only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day."

A fairly cushy little number, ain't it?

Alamy

Well, at the beginning, that was part of the problem. The employee went on to say that he actually felt pretty bad for going behind his boss' back.

He said: "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. Win win for everyone involved.

They added: "Plus, 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."

Topics: Technology, Reddit, US News

Dominic Smithers

Dominic Smithers is LADbible's Editorial Lead. After graduating from the University of Leeds with a degree in French and History, he went on to write for the Manchester Evening News, the Accrington Observer and the Macclesfield Express. So as you can imagine, he’s spent many a night wondering just how useful that second language has been. But c'est la vie.

@SmithersDom