If you automated 95% of your job, but still had to report to an office/cubicle, what would you do with your (40hrs)time?
A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I'm a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It's looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/
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what is professional development?
money given to you to obtain certifications, for example
Courses or other training to develop your professional skills, preferably provided or funded by your employer.
Platform like LinkedIn learning, on books no matter whether it's about programming or management (or any other field, may be you want to learn material science or Korean). Usually, these ones are pretty tolerated by HR, especially if you can find even a remote link to your work. I would add fun side projects on work data/material, that you can use to get promoted (not only I am doing my job but I am experimenting with XYZ, meaning I should be at the next puygrude)
Bring a whole laptop to play games? Get a Steam Deck! Or if you want a smaller form.factor then get a Retroid Pocket 6.
Other than this:
You guys work 40 hours per week?!
Is this your way of saying you work more or less than 40? lol
Less. And it barely feels like work.
what do you do?
I teach machining in Scandinavia.
Lathe and mill, both manual and CNC. ISO programming, CAD drawing, etc. The studens are have 32,5 hours of school (including breaks), and I rarely give them homework. I have, in theory, 4,5 hours of preparations per week, but I don't use it.
Students are happy. 4 gift baskets from 9 classes in the four years I've worked there.
My job requires 45.
You fill out your own timesheet. Mine varies from 39 to 50 hours. They dont care what it says. But if you turn in a lot of timesheets under 45 hrs and dont get your work done and people complain that youre bad to work with, you may get asked whats up. If however you always get shit done, it doesn't matter what it says for hours.
I present myself to the office for 40 hours a week.
Do I work for 40 hours a week?
No.
First of all, DON'T TELL ANYONE.
I'd use the time to learn a new skill, though at this point I have no idea what to recommend.
This is me.
I do 30 minutes of checks in the morning, check email, and attend the standup. After that i got hours to kill.
I teach myself things.
Learned how to mine crypto.
Learned advanced bash.
Learned boto3 and started automating aws shit
Wrote 2 books on automating aws shit.
Played alot of online dungeon crawlers.
Learned how to code a dungeon crawler.
Leaned how to code a 2d scoller game
Inked alot of comic sketched from (then) deviant art.
Just to name a few
Getting paid to make personal advancement is a pretty good deal.
Crazy. As someone whose job it is to automate, automating my job means getting more work. That’s kind of the definition of being more productive: by focusing on automation one person could do work that formerly took multiple people
If your employers are willing to pay you more for the extra work you're getting done through automation, go for it. If your employers are going to fire your colleagues, make you do their work, then pocket the profit - keep your improvements to yourself and read a book
Tired that. Still got more work. Eventually I had a 3 day process down to half an hour, since the actual process was super inefficient. The company was restructuring and my coworkers were trying to avoid having their jobs automated. It all resolved by outsourcing, which was funny because the tasks only required 5-6 people, had 18 originally, and was called a win for being 'global'.
I'm somewhat confused by your comment. I automated my tasks because I got tired of typos and having to remember the processes of things. if I just fully script the process, I don't have to remember or do anything XD
When you automate your tasks, do you not get more tasks?
Quite the opposite. My higher ups enjoy their manual admin work as it's the only peaceful part of their day. They do joke about making me do it, but when I insist they allow me to so I can improve and automate it they are quite quick to silently go back to their office XD
I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven't met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say "oh yeah, I'm working on X, which will have Y benefit."
THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.
Unfortunately, this will not help when working with people who are only interested in sports. I was asked which team i followed for the World Championship in football, to which i responded "I don't watch football".
Response: "Then what sports do you watch?"
"I don't watch sports."
His eyes widened while he stood there thinking for a second. "Then what do you do in your spare time?" He asked, flabbergasted. I told him there are other things in life than watching sports.
It's like this for everyone I work with. They're all hillbillies. I need to get out.
Have you tried... watching sports? I'm kidding. However, with something like the World Cup coming up it's pretty easy to feign a passing interest. Even my mother seems in to it, and she usually couldn't tell a football from a pinecone.
I have tried. Just not my thing lol. Like, at all. I love playing sports, I just don't see the fun in watching someone else play.
And don't get me started on the people who's complaining about what someone on their team did wrong; they wouldn't be able to do what the athlete do if they got 1000 tries!
You need BLUFFBALL. A Bit from a TV show that somebody made kinda real.
Holy shit, that's awesome!!! Also, I haven't watched IT Crowd this year, so thanks for reminding me!
I've had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX's rocket launches because it's honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I've had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk's involvement with Trump of course)
But popping over to a coworker and going "hey there's a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?" is a brilliant ice breaker
Trust me, my coworkers would not care about anything as exciting as a space launch! I've tried sharing my own interests with them, but they're not interested. The only thing I can talk with them about is my dog (because he's allowed in the office, and they love him).
I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you "because he's a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he's a bit screwy to not watch sports"
The people I'm referring to are warehouse packers and repair technicians, while I create the automations for the warehouse. I highly doubt they'll be able to recommend me in the future.
Talk to people?! That's insane. Far better to deep dive into arcane coding disciplines and submerge oneself in niche strategy/fantasy roleplay. Fucking norm.
Make video games so I can leave the job I automated and do what I want to do. Which would probably also give me shit loads more time for activism.
Contribute to opensource you use! Honestly I ping pong back and forth between swamped and bored , with contributing back as a good way to get ahead of future issues and involved in future work
Where can I find a job like this?
Office work. For years, I was afraid of working in an office because of films showing people how boring it is and it'll make you want to kill yourself.
But yeah, spend a year or two actually doing your job, then automate it.
I'm paranoid so I'd be continually monitoring the automation. 😉
Especially if the automation is meant to take fractions of a penny from millions of transactions and deposit it into your bank account
Depends on the privacy but
Read, draw, learn a language, sleep, gameboy/psp
ahh, I should get back into learning german/japanese. Thank you for this reminder
Spend it all trying to look busy.
But actually, I'd take online courses in something you have interest (learn a new language?) or something you just want to know better (networking? programming?)
Or maybe I'd start developing something for myself. You know that dream app you always wanted but doesn't exist yet? Maybe you can create it?
Or maybe I'd take a look at the currently open issues for the FOSS stuff I use and try to familiarize myself with the code base enough that I can start submitting bug fixes
Anything you build on company time, the company will claim ownership over. The FOSS stuff isba good idea.
Or try to automate the remaining 5%
My job has a fair amount of down time. I'll use it to study for career certifications or work on personal projects that are work-adjacent.
Educate yourself and learn a new skill that is useful for the job you really want, assume this doesn't last long and that you might get fired or laid off one day. I remember a story on reddit about some guy who had outsourced his job to India. The guy only played videogames the entire day every day, after a few years the gig was up and he was fired. Dude had a hard time finding a new job since his skill set and knowledge base was several years behind of where his field had advanced to. Don't waste this opportunity, sure play some games, fiddle around now and then but use most of the free time to improve yourself.
If I was in your situation I would just learn how to make videogames and then eventually try to release one on Steam made entirely during the boss' time.
I suggest building your skills in your career by taking classes. You can also learn a new language with all that time. If you’re feeling creative writing a book is also a great hobby.
This is the best answer. Obviously, relax when you need it, but if you’re bored, start learning. It’s interesting (if by choice), it’s good for your brain, and you can use this lull in your career to build skills that you can use to progress later when opportunities come up.
Plus, if you are learning related skills, your “slacking off” might even still look like working to passers by.
Look for another job; I despise being in the office to begin with, and being bored in the office is an insufferable hell. Reading and listening to music is ok, but I prefer to do that at home.
I did apply to jobs for a good while, but I'm overly invested with my current employer since I've already been here for 10+ years. Not to mention AI has wreaked serious havoc on the hiring sector of things
You may want to future proof your career path. Eventually they will figure out that you automated your workflow. What else can you do in the future for them to kep paying you? What orher skills would other employers demand from you in the future? With AI in the mix, what skills you can use that won't be affected by the emerging technology?
I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught "not working"
I'd be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they're working on, things they'd like to see done. If you're the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.
You mentioned being a safety admin, I'm guessing that's industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don't already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that's about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization's SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it's highlighting useful data points in the data we've already collected primarily)
Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there's always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes
There are a lot of recommendations to work on other SW projects. Be careful with this if there is a clause in your employment agreement (if you have one) regarding any work you do during work hours being owned by them. Especially don't do it on your work PC.
Use Rustdesk to remotely work on a computer you own. If you're sure there's not screen recording or keystroke spyware on the work PC, it's pretty untraceable
e621 and a bullet vibrator
What is e621?
Furry porn website just like r34
Yiff.
The objectively best website to ever exist
I second this
Gooning
Never
Mix and master my music. Music production takes a lot of time and eats up my weekends. 40 hours during weekdays would free up my weekends and I can actually rest.
This is my rest :P
I've actually been in this situation when I was working as a sys admin at a webhosting company. First I played a lot of games. Once that started to get boring I taught myself how to code which set me up to transition from sys admin to development work.
I already know how to code, but sysadmin stuff does sound fun, thx
You're looking at it, bud.
I made a little game in excel and then just kept adding stuff to it, it LOOKS like youre doing something important cuz youre coding but no youre fighting goblins :)
I made an excel plugin, at first to automate the job, and just kept learning new stuff and adding to it.
Had entire ribbon sets enabled by current user presets.
Good times
Yep. Same. When I worked at an office, my coworkers and I would play ping pong a lot.
Also, I would work on my own software projects. This has the advantage that it looks like you're doing work work.
Or... go off into a corner of the office and play some games on Steam.
Take long walks. I used to be able to kill about half an hour walking around my old office park. Do more laps...
Drive somewhere kinda far for lunch.
Grind leetcode. Doesn't hurt to stay sharp.
I read. Right now I don't have anything to read so I do origami.
This actually happened to me. I still had to look busy so I mostly just studied more or worked on a second job I had grading papers. I also spent a bit of time writing stories and designing things. Adding in something creative can help your brain balance things out.
I have to do 40/w but don’t have enough work. So I spend about 70% of that time reading manga online. I’ve also read up on a bunch of wiki articles.
Sit online responding to posts on social media...
In the past I would write Wikipedia or translate libre software. Now I would work on developing Wikimedia and longevity organizations. Especially the engineered longevity have a huge future societal impact.
I'm confused, why did you halt wikipedia writing and move on to wikimedia/longevity orgs(What are these?)? I'm also curious to see if you could expound on that last part too please
I am always seeking how to provide most societal impact with my work. Writing Wikipedia is cool and useful. But as a one person I can only do so much work and only about topics that I am knowledgeable about. Wikipedia needs much more and better content, and of wider range of topics.
So I have founded an organization that helps other volunteers to write Wikipedia. The intention is that by doing so, at the end I help Wikipedia grow faster than just by my own writing. Organisation, if done right, has much bigger impact (even per capita) than an individual.
For similar reason I am thinking about founding a new organization focused on supporting longevity research and public awareness. I mean advanced medical therapies to extent healthy lifespan at least by many decades.
When thinking about what is going to have biggest impact on human lives in next decades, there are several things. One of them is the option to (if one decide so) live in hight vitality well beyond the age 100. Imagine hitting 80 with health of 40, or hitting 150 with health of 50. Sciencista are already working on that, and current people under 30, maybe even under 40, will quite probably have the option to take such therapies and possibly live a very, very (possibly indefinite, but finite) live. This will change a lot of thing in society as many current social contracts stay on the premise of leaving to pension in 65 and checking out at 85. You may be interested in [email protected].
I think the thing that would be the most productive would be to start a project you've been waiting to work on or something that might make you money. Either studying something you've always wanted to do or programming/writing something you've always wanted to write.
With 40hrs of paid time you could write whatever you'd like and it doesn't really matter if it pays off or not so you're not pressured to compromise on it. But if it does pay off then you're that much closer to an early retirement or the ability to take more control of your time by working on the thing you want to do.
If you're happy where you are then yeah. Read a book, play some games etc.
Don't use work resources (company network, computer system, tools, etc.) for this. If the project happens to make money the company will have a good basis for owning the IP.
Well put. This was exactly the answer I was needing to get going after a few ideas I have for a blog-like thing.
I know there's already too much content on the Web, but it's still something I'd like to try and hopefully begin failing better at. Gracias!
No such thing!
I'm making a browser based game about losing your job and then picking up cans to deposit them at 10c a piece for a living. Like the existential paperclips game.
I've been there. I worked on learning a language some, read so many books, began documenting an organizing large data sets I had for personal projects. I also spent so much time watching speed runs.
we are very close to a perfect mario speedrun, aren't we? could be any day now
Every time I think they're close they find something new. I've stopped trying to keep up lol
I've expanded the scope of my job. From sysadmin to Information Security Officer etc. etc.
I work in a highly automated job so there is plenty of downtime between tasks. We are allowed to use our phones even though officially we are not meant to be. That said, there is plenty of self-productivity activities you could do. You could read books, ebooks or audiobooks, listen to podcasts, watch gym training videos, learn and hone skills in self-learning sites like Udemy or Brilliant, etc. Of course, one could consume brain rot media like Tiktok, Netflix or Instagram to unwind but we all know it's not productive in the long run.
This is not imploring anyone to do it immediately, but in my case, I do side hustle of day trading and market speculation. While I am doing it, I learn as much as I could with how to trade better and reading the stock market news. I am not rich but I get couple of bucks every now and then. On the luckiest of days, I could earn hundreds within days. That supplements my income. It does not always work of course, I had my "bull run" two months ago but the stock market slowed down and declined even due to uncertainty in the market.
Does this job have a claim on IP you create on company time? If not, I'm making videogames and contributing to FOSS projects.
I've always wanted to contrib to the floss world, but I don't understand how one gets skilled enough to push good code...
Ta-daaaaa, skilled.
You can never hit a wall with programming. You can always keep improving your scripts. You could add observability or logging. Try different languages. Create a DSL for it.
Check out Language Oriented Programming with Racket.
Create a full test suite. Unit tests. Integration tests.
Where are you running your scripts? Do you have a deployment pipeline?
Workflow tools like Apache Airflow make for nice observability.
well, it runs and accounts for every erroneous potential I can think of...but I see there is clearly much more work to be done. Thank you for the new set of challenges
Start planning my new off-grid life. I do industrial automation, and if those robots start being able to program themselves, I'm leaving.
When I was in this position I would either be working out, gaming, Or studying for a class. Rotate your task because it will get boring.
Automate the undesirable tasks of my life. Probably means learning to write mobile apps. But maybe some AI tools for like making a meal plan every week. Or contribute to existing open source projects that accomplish the same.
You just need to find a hobby that you can do at work. Can be reading books, making music, playing video games, watching TV shows, chess etc.
Working on some hobby coding project could also be fun. When work is slow I work on an HTTP client that's terminal based.
Also check if you can go out for a haircut or do misc errands and with enough excuses you could put a gym workout while at work. Maybe you say you have a dentist or a doctors appointment but go to the gym instead. Kids are also a great excuse like "my kid is sick today so I'm going to pick him up and leave early" and you just go to the gym and do groceries.
If I had that type of situation I'd play tons of video, right now I'd play factorio and go to the gym. I might also see if there are some nice people at work that I can schedule a meeting with to just banter.
Hello me.
Fanfiction.
Contribute to or make my own open source project. I dabble right now, but I just don't have the time to polish up my projects for public release or to learn an unknown codebase...
If you are young, maybe ask your boss for more work or take additional work from a related position. If you let your skills rot it will end up costing you in the long run.
Welk I’m here aren’t I?
Waste it doing random shit. If I was in your position I'd start getting through my watch and read list. Oh and learn a new language, that never hurts.
Make an pseudo-CEO AI agent for the company you work for ... and track its decisions versus the actual CEO's performance.
Let their own data destroy C level careers and their money hoarding. Publish book. Retire.
I'd find other stuff to improve on. If the employer provides access to an online-based training platform (ex: Coursera, Udemy) I'd enroll in some trainings I may find useful for either my current position or another I'd like to have.
There's no better time to learn than while being paid at work, without having to deal with the daily grind.
I play a lot of gameboy
Honestly an AI use I'm kinda OK with is that it's making audio transcription services good enough that nurses can start using them and they auto generate a flowsheet for the qualitative data from spoken word (you'd review before submitting) and tbh if I could get back to providing actual patient care instead of filling in spreadsheets that would be cool.
I agree. Transcription of audio is pretty good these days and this is definitely being done now. The charting workload of nurses and doctors is ridiculous and a huge time sink. Anything that gives them more time to be actually interacting with patients is a good thing in my book.
I've always wanted to transcribe and index everything I say or hear and that way I can go back and remember shit
Be careful on the work desktop. You could go to prison for being on the fediverse if they find out (if in america).
It's a tale as old as time
I read books on algorithms and data structures and typed out the examples. The work computer was locked down for installers but I could download open source programs and compile Java. One of the more interesting chapters I remember was parsing basic math operations for a calculator into a tree structure, evaluating it, and converting it between infix and postfix notation.
My boss probably noticed I had automated things because sometimes they would send new data requiring an urgent redo of everything, and I would send results back in a minute instead of the 8 hours it used to take. He didn't seem upset, more like pleasantly surprised that a temp-to-hire pulled it off. I even got a compliment at one point, which never happened before.
One day I applied for another job that was a lot of what I already did and some of what I wanted to do more of. I called in sick to do the interview and got the position. It was good timing because the place I was at got acquired, and that never goes well if you're in a group that overlaps what the parent company already has.
Learn something like gdscript so I can start making my income less dependent on the company that currently employs me.
Work on the backlog! Of what? Anything! My back log of books, video games, hobby projects sitting half finished in my workshop! My boss would stop by and I'd have my soldering iron and extractor fans set up and I'd be like "Yeah, I'm waiting on the phones right now."
Mostly I sit around and browse lemmy
Bring down Skynet and also, cat videos.
Implement a CPU, then a GPU, then start designing weirder, domain-specific architectures.
PPU
WTF?!! Are you watching me at work?!!???
Try blender.
Tried this, now my iPhone is broken up into a million tiny pieces
It works better on al desktop PC. Try again.
Steam deck. I already spend my 1 hour lunches playing on it.
Do a PhD in whatever I feel like on the company's dime
Play the main character in an office sitcom where nobody ever seems to be working.
Study Spanish — or the language of your choice. Swahili. Whatever.
A guy I know learns sleight of hand card tricks
If your profession has a professional society or industry has a trade association, look into webinars, certification classes, or other events they might have. They often have opportunities to get involved with the organization as well, which could look good on paper to management when promotion opportunities arise
We live in capitalism, so unfortunately id probably spend my time figuring out how to manage my new 95% higher workload for the same pay.
Read history books
I would need all that to fix only ⅛ of that code