Employee automates boss's job and boss's boss's job and gets them both fired: 'I automated all her tasks and the CEO fired her'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Sep 12, 2024 1:00 PM EDT

The last 50 years have brought an unprecedented amount of technology and reform to the way we do business. Those writing Science Fiction around that time might have predicted that we'd either be living in a utopia where we no longer needed to work to live or we'd be living in a dystopian world where few oligarchs, like the fictional  Eldon Tyrell, hoarded wealth from the masses like dragons sitting on a pile of gold, while many struggled just to survive in a world of decaying infrastructure amidst technology that should be making their life better only leading to further hardship.

I'll leave you to figure out which of those is closer to the current present. But the point stands that you might expect that this technology, automation, and artificial intelligence would be leading us somewhere. But the relief that would come from making our jobs easier by cutting down on monotonous and replicable tasks is overshadowed by the ever-present reality that your job will be gone as soon as automation can do as much as 25% of what you're doing for free.

Despite what the tech industry would lead us to believe is an exciting development in technology, the sector is cutting jobs by the thousands—still while posting record profits. It's brutally ironic in the sense that the industry leading the charge is also leading in kicking employees to the curb.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can't escape having existing features that are being labeled as some form of "intelligence" shoved down our throats by project managers and executives who lack imagination.

For any managers out there wondering whether they can earn themselves a sweet bonus by automating their team's work: you should probably take a look at your own work first and make sure that a short shell script couldn't easily replace what you're doing. 

In an excuse for me to rant about this pertinent topic, today we're sharing this classic and ever-relevant story that was originally shared with this popular online community by user "lungbong" who shared how their boss tried to automate their job, leading them to automate not just their boss's job but their boss's boss's job too—leading both to the firing of both.

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    via Luca Bravo
  • Automated my useless boss out of her job M This happened a few years ago, I was a data and reporting analyst and did all the ad hoc reports for the company. My boss, we'll call her Kerry, was a useless, she was one of these people that was always late, left early and took days off at short notice. The only thing of value she did was all the regular reports - sales, revenue etc. We suspected she got away with it because she was having an affair with her boss, we'll call him Stewart.
    via lungbong
  • Our CEO was a fairly decent bloke, he'd look for ways to cut costs and would pay regular bonuses for the best cost saving initiatives. Kerry was very keen to submit ideas and encouraged us all to automate our tasks so she could try and take the credit for the savings.
    via lungbong
  • On one of her skive days, which coincidently Stewart was "sick" as well the CEO was desperate for the sales report my boss does. I said I'd give it a look and see if I could get it done. Normally she'd spend 2-3 days doing it each week but the CEO wanted it that afternoon. A quick inspection of the data showed it would quite
    via lungbong
  • easily be automated so I knocked up the necessary script and got it over to the CEO who was super impressed that not only had I got it done in a couple of hours but also that it could be updated whenever he needed it. He asked if I could also look at the revenue, churn and a couple of other reports. Over that afternoon I automated everything my boss did.
    via lungbong
  • Both Kerry and Stewart were back in the next day but were immediately summoned to the CEO's office before being suspended and sent home. Turns out the CEO knew they were having an affair and all the times they were sick or late or had to leave early was so they could sneak off and have . He'd not done anything about it because how important these reports were.
    via lungbong
  • Now they were automated he was able to get them suspended and later fired for gross misconduct for all the time they'd taken off. I also got a nice bonus out of it. TL;DR: My useless boss encouraged us to automated our work so I automated all her tasks and the CEO fired her for.
    via lungbong
  • IsThatDaveByCha... "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script".
    via lungbong
  • hotlavatube "I've got good news and bad news CEO. The good news is I've automated the sales report and revenue report using bots. The bad news is the sales report bot is now having an affair with the revenue report bot..." ;-)
    via lungbong
  • AnotherLolAnon We had a secretary at work. The nurses would nicely ask her to do things like make copies and send faxes while she was busy shopping online and gossiping with the housekeepers. She would snap that that wasn't her job. I asked her what was her job and advised that she was careful how often she said that. I think she got the drift. Things mildly improved for a bit.
    via lungbong
  • [deleted] Best part was the CEO recognized your work and gave you a bonus. Saved him a buttload of money for two employees.
    via lungbong
  • nagerjaeger Two stories. No one lost their jobs on these but I did some automation that cut costs and allowed people to focus on other tasks. In 1986-87 I was a bookkeeper at a non-profit. Each quarter they had a report for the county that took 3 days to compile. The first two times we did it I realized a spreadsheet would help a lot. I had a Radio Shack TRS80 and
    via lungbong
  • Microsoft Multiplan. I was able to cut the time down to 3 hours. In 1988-89 I was a programmer in an IT internship as a civilian with the Army. A team of supply clerks were working weekends locating records. in a production database and moving them to an archive database. They were sick of working weekends and it cost a lot in wages. I
    via lungbong
  • was able to automate and they were thrilled to not work weekends anymore. I got a cash award for the tens of thousands my automation saved. Hilarious side story. Databases were Oracle running on Unisys midi- computers. My first attempt used something called UFI, User Friendly Interface, so
    via lungbong
  • you know it is not. In my ignorance I wrote a UFI script that copied all the records to the archive db and then deleted them from the production db. I ran tests on a small subset of records and it worked great. My team lead looked my UFI script over and said, "Give it a go." You know what happened next. The copy failed but the delete worked great. Thank God the DBA liked me and was
    via lungbong
  • unperturbed about rolling the records back. To this day I don't now how that is done. Anyway, my team lead had me learn some C with embedded Oracle SQL commands to copy a record, make sure it copied, and then delete from the production database if it copied successfully.
    via lungbong
  • liarandathief And did you get a raise?
    via lungbong
  • WhatACunningHam While the justice is tasty, what will the CEO do if someone brought him a script that automates your job too, OP? I'm just kidding. Most CEOs are fairly decent blokes, right?
    via lungbong
  • Slaye... Lol, I did something like this for a useless boss. Using Access, Excel, and a few VB scripts, I automated like 95% of his job. He got super and couldn't figure out how to change it back- | told him some ridiculous bs about how it's basically permanent that way now and that he should look on the bright side- lots more free time to work on the so- called pile of he always "needed to catch up on".
    via lungbong
  • Cocreat I've read several "I've automated my own job and do nothing all day now" posts, but this is next level.
    via lungbong
  • SnickeringBear Go away, I've replaced you with a machine that can't do anything but count 0 and 1, it does your job perfectly.
    via lungbong
  • DE3NIL3 There's a guy on r/antiwork that automated his job with a script and he was waiting for his boss to find out. You guys should talk.
    via lungbong
  • VesperVox_ Don't ever tell your boss how you created or maintain the reports. That way, you're indispensable.
    via lungbong

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workplace discussion employment issues antiwork workplace-stories jobs employee employment-discussion job automation work technology employees overworked-employees workplace Horrible Bosses Tech employment information technology in the workplace
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