This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman-could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from an HTML document, cutting out portions that weren't supposed to be there with scissors, and then photocopying the cut up page to get a final report to mail out to the client. I'll let that sink in...

It didn't take me long to start editing the HTML document directly to skip the physical work (someone before me had figured this much out, but hadn't been able to teach anyone else well enough to pass it along when he left, just a vague rumor that it had happened). Then I went ahead and made a crude script to edit the documents automatically, ultimately turning an hour long job into a 2 minute one with cleaner looking results. Ended up spending a lot of time at that job just watching TV.

My next job after that was all about automating manual processes, but with less down time since I was automating other people's jobs, rather than my own. I think I preferred the former.

I used to work for a company basically copying and pasting data from one excel spreadsheet to the other. I didn't know how to program yet, but I knew there had to be a better way, so I learned macros. I spent ~20 minutes a day working. I worked part-time and when I left, my boss commented on how I got done more than all of the full-timers there.

I personally think the biggest benefit to every company would be to drill into people's heads how software should automate your day to day work. Software people think that way, but most employees don't.

>>Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!

Many years ago there was a post on an obscure online forum about some guy who hired virtual assistants do to 100% of his work for him for a tiny, tiny fraction of his salary. I don't remember the details, but he would basically go to work and do nothing all day. After a while he started staying at home, and no one at his company even noticed.

By jump ship, you mean you now consult? or work for contract to fix/automate a company's process and move on?

As someone who's interested in this kind of work, do you have any advice?

No, I do not consult, I am a normal employee working as a data scientist in business intelligence. By jump ship I mean I went back to a small company I used to work for in the past. The VP of IT knows me (my unpleasant side too) and he needed someone impatient like me interested more in doing than in talking.

I do not know anybody doing consulting/contracting here in Germany, it seems to be an uncommon thing. I wish I would know how to get into it.

Sweet! I've been automating my own tasks for years and I'd love to do it as a full time job.

what was your job? what did you automate?

Nothing fancy. I was in the BI department of a big telco and I inherited a "next best offer" system. It was extracting data from the DWH, doing some scorecard based optimization, picking the right product for the right customer and sending the results to the call centers. The data extraction part was a PL/SQL framework and the optimization was done by a SAS tool. The system was really slow: after a change in the parameters it took 48 hours to recalculate the results. Unfortunately the product line managers loved to change the parameters on the day of the data delivery and my team lead couldn't say "no". So after a couple of month I ended up doing almost everything manually in order to keep the product line managers happy and to keep the deadlines. Practically I took the system step by step to pieces and I worked with standalone SQL scripts, like back in the 90's. After a lot of people were fired and my team lead resigned I was left alone for two months. There was practically nobody to require urgent changes so I used my time to rewrite almost everything from scratch, included the features the product line managers wanted and reduced my monthly workload from 25 days to 3. And I didn't tell about it.