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Antiwork

Management won’t let me automatize my workflow and have the rest of my colleagues enjoy it, so I learnt how to code using ChatGPT and now I’m using the automatization tools for my own personal benefits

So as someone who's the only one in the entire organization doing the type of work that I do, my manager asked me to get help from the “automatization team” to help creating tools and interfaces that helps simplifying what I do and hopefully when the team grows larger, we'd have people hop in and start using the tools right away and cut the time on training and operation. The idea was genuine and my manager was supportive. I coordinated the first project that we had on the agenda, and it was so successful, and I was praised so much, to the point that top management in the company (one step above my manager) thought I “was sharing too much sensitive information and critical knowledge specific to our team that should be contained within the team wherein you work,” literal word for word what I was told about a month…


So as someone who's the only one in the entire organization doing the type of work that I do, my manager asked me to get help from the “automatization team” to help creating tools and interfaces that helps simplifying what I do and hopefully when the team grows larger, we'd have people hop in and start using the tools right away and cut the time on training and operation. The idea was genuine and my manager was supportive. I coordinated the first project that we had on the agenda, and it was so successful, and I was praised so much, to the point that top management in the company (one step above my manager) thought I “was sharing too much sensitive information and critical knowledge specific to our team that should be contained within the team wherein you work,” literal word for word what I was told about a month or so ago. My manager and I were dumbfounded, the automatization team are busy working on global projects anyway, and they were all feeling sorry we can't proceed with the rest of the exciting ideas that we had in the backlog.

But joke's on them. While I was working with the team on our first project, I, more or less, learnt the ropes of automatization. It involves some basic ass VBA coding inside of Excel which helps generating statements using specific variables in a specific format that we choose. I took coding in high school like 10 years ago, so the logic of coding is there, but the language itself I have no idea about. The automatization team even praised my approach to the project because I was thinking in a programmer way of thinking, like outlining variables, their type, the HTML code for the template we'd use, the different if, then, else relation between the different variables, the formulae they'd use…etc.

So once I received this feedback, I just put myself busy for at least 4-6 hours every week where I interacted with ChatGPT and let it do the coding for me, while asking it to explain some lines of coding and what they meant, and overall just conducting the entire operation that automatization team would be doing but only by myself. Not gonna lie, it was fun! And seeing the whole thing coming together piece by piece felt awfully rewarding, to the point that it somehow turned into a little hobby of mine and a passion project. When working from home, I'd log off and start cording with ChatGPT while unwinding on a beer.

I'll be using it for my own sake and won't share it with anyone, even with my manager. The automatization team offered help with a basic project that we had, and I politely told them I'm busy now and can't handle working on a different project besides my work, but holy shit this subtle fuck you I'm giving to management makes me feel rebellious and cool lol.

Thought I'd share, maybe to inspire someone to do the same. It'll help with making your life easier and your work more pleasurable, trust.

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