I’m a huge fan of automation.
I don’t see the point of doing everything manually. Firstly because it’s not humanly possible to. Secondly because it doesn’t make sense to. And thirdly because I don’t want to.
Never trade your time for money.
If your business, whether online or off, can only make money when you’re physically working, then you’re losing out.
One of my earliest endeavors in making money online was to set up websites for other people. I would charge US$100 per site and could average 5 sites a day. I was really proud of myself and I thought I had it made.
It wasn’t until I attended a family reunion and an uncle of mine pointed out that because I was having lunch with him, I was making absolutely nothing. In comparison, my uncle’s offline business was still running on autopilot and making money for him without him actually needing to be there.
Automation is the key to financial freedom.
Yesterday I came across an article about a guy who was fired for automating his work. Here’s the story:
He was hired full time to do a lot of data entry and stuff like that. As a programmer, he figured out a script to fully automate his work. His accuracy rating jumped up to 99.6% while his colleagues averaged 90%. And he was completing 10 times the transactions a day as compared to his counterparts.
It got to a point where he only needed to do “real work” 8 hours a week. And he spent the rest of his time playing games and surfing the net.
Now because they were paid a monthly bonus based on their accuracy and transaction count, he was receiving 85-95% of the entire bonus pool.
Faced with a moral dilemma, this guy posted up his situation on Reddit, asking users if he was a scumbag for automating work that he had been hired to do manually.
What happened next was his boss found out and he was fired on the grounds that he was using company time to program.
Now here comes the twist.
After he was fired, his manager demanded he reveal the password to the program. He refused.
He gets called in for a meeting with his direct boss’ superior where it’s revealed that his program could and would potentially save the company a hell of a lot of money.
To cut a long story short, the conclusion is that he was re-hired as the lead software engineer, implemented the program across the board and now manages his own department.
As part of the deal, he negotiated to have many of his former colleagues (now redundant) put in different places in the company. Others stayed on but rather than manually inputting data, they now work with the program he built.
So what do you guys think? Is he a scumbag or a savior for automating his work?
