A few months ago I posted about how I wrote a script to automate a large portion of the work for my department in an order fulfillment position of a warehouse.
Long story short, I work for a multi-million dollar company that is using excel to track inventory and had the people in my department manually counting thousands of boxes a week to keep inventory “up to date”. I have some coding experience and, shortly after I started at the company, was promoted to team lead because I know how a spreadsheet works. I'm not joking. It was literally because I could use excel, and nothing more. So, since I didn't want to spend hours every week shifting thousands of boxes around and typing things into a spreadsheet by hand, I found a scanner in a supply closet, paired it with my computer, programed it to read a bar code and output the correct string of characters, then did some coding at home on my own time. It was without pay, but also without company assets so they have no claim to my code and I can take it with me if I ever leave. I took a job that realistically took +10 hours of my week and reduced it down to literally 30 sec and management didn't have a clue what was going on.
My whole team was in on it and basically collected 40 hour paychecks for 25-30 hours of work. Hell, I even managed to convince management that we needed overtime to get them paid even more. It wasn't mandatory, but they were more than happy to come in on a weekend for a few hours and just hang out for time and half pay and maybe get a head start on things for the following week so we could have an even easier time. If nothing else, it helped sell the story we were pitching to management since they never actually come down from their offices upstairs to mingle with the peons. The way they saw it, if I'm asking for overtime for my team, we must need it. I didn't do it often, but every few weeks or so I would, typically near the end of the month since that was our busiest time. Management always bought it and since we always hit our targets, they thought it was necessary as well.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and I find out that I'm being offered a promotion as the inventory manager for the entire facility. It turns out that my department went from having issues fairly regularly (due to us being crunched for time) to having no issues at all, including having months of perfect inventory reports, all as soon as I took over the position. Upper management was thoroughly impressed with the turn around the department took and thought that my “talent” was being wasted where I was, so they offered me a new position. It comes with a work phone and laptop so I can work from home if I want (it's mostly just spreadsheets and emails with the occasional phone call or meeting) as well as a 50% bump in pay. I get all the perks of being a manager, but have no employees to actually manage.
Oh, and before anyone says anything, I'm not going to fuck over my team. Whenever management would do something stupid, I always had their backs and went to bat for them. Each member of my team has told me on multiple occasions that I was the only reason they didn't quit, and that if I ever quit, they were quitting too. Well, I didn't quit, but I am leaving. I did give them one last gift before I left though. In addition to leaving my code behind, I managed to convince management that the department would be “more efficient if we streamlined” and “delegated responsibilities in a more practical way as the company continues to grow”. Essentially, I bullshitted my way into getting them to split the department's duties in half and get another team of people hired to pick up the slack of me leaving, which wasn't that hard of a sell since management thinks so highly of me (joke's on them). My old team is keeping my code and ensuring the inventory is accurate, while the new team will be pulling orders to be shipped. In other words, I got two more people hired and reduced the workload for everyone in the department. I have successfully, yet unintentionally, infiltrated their ranks and have already begun the process of siphoning their ill-gotten gains back to the employees.
This is a small step in the grand scheme of things, but I'm doing my part to improve the lives of my fellow employees. I may be a manager now, but I'm nobody's boss, and I don't care what happens to me, I'll keep fighting this fight because I have the means and the opportunity to do so. I have other job offers on the table that I can fall back on if I lose this job and I am fortunate enough that my bills were paid even before this promotion. I am by no means wealthy, but that is largely due to not having extenuating circumstances like health problems. I make enough to have a few thousand in savings at any given time. Not enough to live on, but enough that I can pay for unexpected expenses or miss a paycheck and not be left financially destitute. I know that many people aren't as privileged as I am, but don't give up. Fight the fights you can, and stay out of the ones you can't. Nobody is asking you to be a martyr, just to offer whatever help you can and to not be a class traitor.