IT staff completely automates their job and nobody notices

As long as a required task is completed, many bosses don’t care much how their employees organize their work from home. However, the case of an IT employee at a law firm is likely to take this principle to the extreme. The person reports in a Reddit post from the fact that she was originally hired full-time. The job is about making the digital evidence available on a cloud platform in a court-safe manner.

Even in normal everyday office life, the task was not actually suitable for filling eight hours of working time a day – however, the employee in question made no effort to address this problem and take on more responsibility in everyday life. However, the start of the corona pandemic was a real stroke of luck for the employee. Because now all the people from the law firm were sent to the home office and there was no direct control over attendance. This gave the employee, who for good reason did not reveal his name, a chance that only a few get:

bullshit job

Over the course of the first week, he managed to develop a script that could do its job completely automatically. So basically he hasn’t really worked for many months – apart from probably a few routine checks of his automated system. With an annual salary of around $90,000, he could then have a good time – the salary kept increasing as the expected work was finally done. The law firm employee describes his daily routine as primarily playing video games and doing various other things.

He now deals with his job for ten minutes each evening, during which he checks whether everything is still running smoothly. So far there doesn’t seem to have been any problems. Whether the story is so fully true can hardly be verified. However, it is not entirely unlikely – after all, there are quite a few jobs that actually make little sense. The economics professor David Graeber had already pointed this out in 2018 in his book “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”, in which he describes various places where people did a job that was actually of no use.