I have a similar story which I posted on HN before, here is the repost:
A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database.
There were a few more steps that I don't quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice.
A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0.
Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work.
Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors.
So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat.
"You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal.
No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way.
Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!
I'll throw my own similar experience into the ring.
Let me take you back a few years, when I was hired as an editor at a traditional books-on-paper publisher. These people had an arcane process in place for getting their printed products online.
1. Send PDFs to indifferent, bottom-dollar offshore vendors.
2. Get incredibly broken XML in return.
3. Task an editor with fixing that broken XML by hand (can't go back to the vendor due to extremely tight deadlines).
4. Complain to the vendors and hope they listen for next time.
5. Have the editor manually upload said XML to various hosting services.
When that miserable list became my responsibility, I quickly turned to automation. I wrote scripts to fix up the bad XML, upload the content where it needed to go, send out emails to interested parties, and so forth.
"Fabulous!" they said as they heaped on the work. I pushed my capabilities even further by writing more software to pump out ebook files and do other cool stuff. And I wrote long white papers about how we might modernize our broken electronic publishing procedures.
But by this time, nobody was interested. I had become totally typecast as the widget maker, the guy that makes the cheap XML go zoom. None of the artsy credentials that brought me on board in the first place (English degree, writing portfolio, etc.) seemed to matter anymore. I was the tech. I was to sit in my corner and play with my toys.
The end. I'm still here, but finally starting to cut my losses and look for an exit. Lessons learned!
Thank you, HN, for allowing me this cathartic moment.
It's a dog eat dog world. Your mistake was incorrectly assessing the incentives. You thought you were helping. But you were actually threatening to topple an existing power structure. Unwise.
A story.
A coworker ("Dan") automated his timesheet reporting, allegedly for "budgeting", something we all hated doing. Dan would select some project codes, target hours worked for the week, choose percentages, and his macro would randomly fill out a time sheet.
The kicker was he used increments of 5 minutes (vs quarter hours, whatever).
Meanwhile, his office mate ("Stan") kept meticulous time sheets. Actually honest.
A few weeks later, Dan gets recognized and rewarded for his awesome time sheet. A role model for us all.
(Stan flips out. I mean really loses it. It was hysterical.)
So. Were I you working in that environment, I would have mimicked your output with the macro(s). Same error rate. Same time duration. Let it run in the background while you're doing something else more enjoyable. Maybe dial the accuracy or finish time up and down so you'd occasionally get a perk. Like a dog gets its treat.
If you wanted to be really subversive, you could share your tool with some favored coworkers. Strictly quid pro quo, because your "friends" are the first to screw you over. So make sure you have dirt on anyone you help.
We would track the hours, but there were some requirements in the reporting that prevented us from handing our report
And in the end it was the total amount of hours that mattered
So instead of manually writing it down (yes, it was an html page template that we printed and filled manually)
Here comes python to save the day! Input the total amount of hours, it will fill the HTML with the hours at a standart schedule and skipping over weekends and holidays
My first internship in college was in R&D of a Fortune 500 company testing bugfixes for software that ran $1M+ machines.
Sometimes this involved following test matrices to exercise the machines. At the end of the test or when something went wrong, you had to read operational data off a terminal emulator on the PC hooked up to the debug port on the machine, and then log that data in the tracking system as part of the report.
The manual data entry was horribly boring and error-prone. There were a few dozen test operators who did nothing but run matrices all day so it sucked up a substantial amount of man-hours too.
Once I discovered the way-fancier-than-it-needed-to-be terminal emulator had its own scripting language, I hatched a plan. In my spare time I figured out how to automate the commands in the terminal emulator to make the machine spit out the appropriate debug data, and then I researched Windows automation and figured out how to automatically copy the data out of the terminal emulator into the reporting software. I had to deal with the machine OS developers moving debug menus around constantly for no reason (hello escaping to root menu and then regexps) and all sorts of messy stuff. End result: one button press and all the data magically appears in the report.
Once I had the kinks worked out from using it myself, I gave it to one of the operators. Instant hit. Within a couple weeks everyone had it.
Luckily management was pretty great about it - I never asked anyone before I did it. They saw how much better the automated way was and how much time/money/productivity it was saving them and heartily endorsed it (and gave me a raise).
I always hoped they managed to find someone to maintain it after I left.
I did something similar, boil about 5 hours of work down to 15 seconds using an Excel macro. I was told to re-do it by hand, because my future replacement wouldn't understand how to use a macro.
Your story makes me fear every working for a big company. With these exception of a few retail stints while still in school, I've primarily enjoyed working for smaller companies.
I had a very similar human-powered spreadsheet task which was a massive time sink, and hugely error prone. It entailed looking up values in one sheet, comparing to another, and then combining separate pdf files based on the result of the spreadsheets. After doing it a few times, I decided I wasn't cut out for this kind of task. I fired up Python, scripted everything away, and turned what used to literally be an all say task, into something that took only a few minutes to run.
Showed my boss, he was pleased as punch, and I received a sweet bonus at the end of the week.
Small companies rule (for their lack of stringent bureaucratic rules).
Lameness of boss is a bigger factor than company size. This story is of a 80 person company.
I had a job working for founder and president. Primary product was very complicated, requiring lotsa training and effort. Think purpose built Adobe Illustrator for creating manufacturing production plans. Kudos to him for making a capable, dependable product that had 80% market share. He was very proud.
The growth goal of the company was to "automate" our customer's workflow. After a few years, I understood the problem domain well enough to take a crack at it.
I wrote forms-based app that automatically generated the production plans. You spec a couple variables and style of work, and viola, production plan.
Took about 1 month to implement.
I show my new app around the office. Lotsa excitement. Time to demo to the founder. I show him what's what. He asks me to try a few tricky scenarios. No problem. He then walks out of my office. No "good job". No "I gotta take this call". Dude never spoke to me again. (Our offices were adjacent.)
I then figured out that founder didn't want a better solution. He wanted other people to fail trying to find a better solution, thereby validating his awesomeness.
My advice to anyone with a game changing idea: Shut up. Figure out an exit strategy. Capture the benefit / reward for yourself.
This stuff isn't exclusive to big companies, I've had similar BS in smaller companies too. Usually when you have a company director who is scared of technology.
That's my experience too. I've encountered this anti-technical BS at a company as small as eight.
And you're spot on in that case: the two directors spent a quarter of every year at their out-of-state retirement home and otherwise didn't look too kindly upon surprise or change.
I had a similar experience, that was at least as groan inducing. I was working a low-level IT job, as an AS/400 operator / network tech. The "IT manager" was a complete fraud who knew about as much about technology as I know about the culture of ancient Mesopotamia, and she had some project she was trying to get done, involving moving some data from an old database into a new one. OK, easy enough, right? Well, a couple of her "pet" subordinates spent a couple of weeks trying to migrate this data and couldn't get it done, so they gave up. I came into work one evening and found a fracking HUGE stack of greenbar on my desk, and then she comes in and goes "we're going to rekey all this data into the new database over the next couple of weeks, so start chewing through as much of it as you can tonight."
My first thought was "WTF?" My second and third thoughts were something like "Are you f%!#ng shitting me?" and "You are f%!#ng braindead."
So, after everyone else left for the evening, I found the machine with the old database (running Paradox 4 for DOS), exported the data to dbaseIII format (because I knew it was a commonly used and widely supported format), put it on a floppy, took it to the machine with the Access database and loaded it up. Turns out I had to write one update query to populate one of the fields, but that took something like 5 minutes. 30 minutes into the whole thing and the entire database is finished.
Next day I see the "IT Manager" and she's like "How much of that data did you key in last night?" I looked at her and said "none." She about blew a fuse and started yelling "Why not, I told you to <blah, blah, blah>?" Then I told her the whole thing was done and she's like "But.. wait, what? But..but... spluttercoughsplutter but, but... So-and-so and You-know-who spent TWO WHOLE WEEKS trying to migrate that data and you mean to tell me you did it in one night?"
Of course she never forgave me for showing up her "pets" like that.
Needless to say, I didn't work at this place very long.
Edit: there's another fun story to tell about that place, and how this same IT manager used the AS/400 system message queue facility as a poor man's IM system, and - more to the point - used it to talk shit about anybody and everybody she worked with (myself included). Of course this dim-bulb didn't realize that when I was logged in as QSYSOPR I could read all her messages. So, on my last night there, I printed out copies of a few "choice" messages from her, and then sent a systemwide message saying something like:
"Foo: You should probably be aware that a QSYSOPR can read all of your system messages, and knows what you've been saying about everybody in this company. You should probably hope that somebody doesn't take offense, and print out copies of some of these messages and distribute them so that certain other people can see what you've had to say about them."
In the end, I decided not to leave the printouts to be found, but a co-worker told me a few months later that I nearly gave this "IT manager" a heart-attack and that she spent weeks doing damage control and trying not to get fired.
That was like 13 years ago, and I'm guessing she hasn't forgiven me for that either. shrug
Of course she never forgave me for showing up her "pets" like that.
People like that are legion. I was fired by one such. When I applied for unemployment - and was turned down - I found out that I'd been fired because I was 'incompetent' and ms-represented my credentials.
Which was funny: I was fired because I did not bring in cookies on Friday.
I don't know what kind of work you were doing, but sometimes data needs to be checked with human eyes for legal reasons, in which case you would actually be cheating.
It doesn't make any sense since your error rate is actually lower, but sometimes bureaucracies work that way.
I'd be surprised if that was true in this case. Especially given that the human operators were given about a days training and didn't have any knowledge beyond what was written down, so would have been pretty useless for checking anyway.
If that had been the case, I would have understood if they had explained that to me but it amused me that the immediate defence was basically "this makes everyone equally productive, so how do we know who is the most productive?".
It's sort of like being pissed off with people typing documents on computers because you can no longer tell who has the best handwriting (incidentally I had a similar issue at school when I submitted a typed essay once).
A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database.
There were a few more steps that I don't quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice.
A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0.
Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work.
Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors.
So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat.
"You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal.
No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way.
Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!