Re:Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the leas...
by etxm on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @04:03PM
(#26730407)
Items three and four I did at my first job (non-technical).
I had been screwing around with software through my teenage years building AOL chat tools and little mods for games - I never considered it for a career.
I was hired as a data entry clerk when I was 18 at a large hospital. The billing department would work in excel and print hundreds of pages a day for data entry clerks to enter into our insurance billing system.
It took me about two weeks before I realized that if I could get them to bring me the spreadsheets on diskettes I could write a program to input the data into the system for me.
It took me a few days to figure it out and then I completely automated my job for about six weeks.
I was busted reading the Dungeon Masters guide in the middle of the day by my boss.
She asked what I was doing and I explained “I am reading the dungeon Masters guide.”
I explained that I had written a tool to automate my job.
I had not signed a PIIA form and I wrote the software at home on my own computer. I guess the company had no legal right to take it, so she offered me $2000 and a promotion to the IT department to give the company the rights to my software.
I was making $7 an hour, so I was very excited at the 2k.
I had been screwing around with software through my teenage years building AOL chat tools and little mods for games - I never considered it for a career.
I was hired as a data entry clerk when I was 18 at a large hospital. The billing department would work in excel and print hundreds of pages a day for data entry clerks to enter into our insurance billing system.
It took me about two weeks before I realized that if I could get them to bring me the spreadsheets on diskettes I could write a program to input the data into the system for me.
It took me a few days to figure it out and then I completely automated my job for about six weeks.
I was busted reading the Dungeon Masters guide in the middle of the day by my boss.
She asked what I was doing and I explained “I am reading the dungeon Masters guide.”
I explained that I had written a tool to automate my job.
I had not signed a PIIA form and I wrote the software at home on my own computer. I guess the company had no legal right to take it, so she offered me $2000 and a promotion to the IT department to give the company the rights to my software.
I was making $7 an hour, so I was very excited at the 2k.
I took it and they fired 15 clerks :(