Prodigy Who Got Fired For Automating His Job

While reading the book “Feel Good Productivity” by Ali Abdaal, I came across this real incident of a software developer that really struck me. So, I thought I would share it here.

In June 2016, this prodigy actually made headlines for getting fired for automating his job. At that time, I was in high school and barely had any access to the internet, so this is the first time I got to know about this incident.

So this guy had been working as developer for six years at a company where his work was mostly involved with testing software in QA Department. When he got bored by running same old tests repeatedly every time he came up with a plan.

Without alerting his boss, he spent the first eight months of his employment programming software to automate his job. From then on, the tests worked on autopilot, running perfectly!

After being fired, In his reddit post he wrote:

From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For forty hours each week I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years I have maybe done fifty hours of real work. So basically nothing. And nobody really cared.

Everything was going fine until after over half a decade somebody at IT figured out what was going on and reported it to his boss. He was sacked for having the audacity to automate his own job xD.

You can look up this incident on the web & see many news post from 2016 who have wrote about it. Here is a post by Interested Engineering. Turns out he deleted his reddit account and entire story within 10 minutes after finding the quotes of his story.

I could relate to this incident because a DevOps role (which I’m trying to break into as a fresher) also involves automating one’s own job. However, this largely differs from what this individual was doing. DevOps emphasizes automation as a means to foster collaboration, speed up processes, and drive innovation, ultimately benefiting the organization as a whole.

Perhaps if this individual had been in a company where DevOps practices were exercised, automating his job of running scheduled tests would have been an everyday activity.

This is Day 5 of #100DaysToOffload

That is all for today. If you found this post useful consider sharing it with friends.