We all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch in this life. You have to do work to earn your place in this world. One programmer from San Francisco Bay area thought he could do just the opposite. He hit upon a novel idea where he could just while away his time surfing, playing games while a software would do all the work on his behalf.
Reddit user FiletOfFish1066 did just that. Not only he automate his work successfully but managed to get the autobot do his work for six years. As expected, his employers found out and he was fired from his programming job.
It seems from his story FiletOfFish1066 loved the life of gluttony (forgive the pun). FiletOfFish1066 worked at a well-known tech company in the Bay Area where he had a software testing quality assurance job. Once he got the job, he spent eight months automating all of the programming tasks. With all of his tasks fully automated by a computer, he was able to literally sit back and do whatever he wanted.
FiletOfFish1066 than started whiling away his time doing what he always wanted to do. For the whole six years, FiletOfFish1066 did nothing except play League of Legends, browse Reddit, work out in a gym, and basically do whatever he felt like doing. Guess how much his company paid him to basically do nothing for a full six years? $95,000 per year on average.
FiletOfFish1066 describes in his own words what it was like to automate his own job:
“From around 6 years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For 40 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 6 years I have maybe done 50 hours of real work. So basically nothing. And nobody really cared. The tests were all running successfully. I shit you not, I had no friends or anything at work either, so nobody ever talked to me except my boss and occasionally the devs for the software I was testing.”
The whole FiletOfFish1066’s autobot saga sounds childish if you want to try it. But do read irony at the end of it. FiletOfFish1066 whiled his time away so much that he forgot how to code. He completely forgot the thing that helped get the job and build his autobot and now poor FiletOfFish1066 has no marketable skills to get another well paying programmers job.
One good takeaway from his autobot stint was that he managed to saved up $200,000 during his 6-year long “career”. He was able to save up that amount of money because he lived at home, ate whatever his mom cooked for dinner and usually had a cheap fish sandwich and a coke every day for lunch at his job. He admitted he’s currently addicted to the League of Legends game and beer. He also expressed a keen desire to overcome these addictions and get his life back together:
“Time to try and cut my League of Legends and beer addiction…..I’m going to try and practice running through Cracking the Coding Interview as well as a data structures and algorithms book. I’ll also be applying to some jobs. After thinking about it for a while I think once I study everything I forgot, my motivation will come back. I always liked software dev, I just was a lazy ass.”
FiletofFish1066 seems to have deleted his Reddit account as of now but not before leaving a good honest lesson for all those who want a free lunch.
