this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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At my first job, they hired me to do some really boring, repetitive stuff, but they weren't too particular about how I did it. So I taught myself how to get real good at Excel and VBA and automated most of my work. They noticed and then they made that my job.
Ten years later, after several organizational shifts, most of my work was back to being boring, repetitive stuff. My workload was split evenly between running manual reports and maintaining old, bloated projects. But this time it was worse because my manager was hostile towards me and literally could not understand what it meant for me to write code in VBA. Like, no matter how many times I showed him what I could do, he still thought I was just clicking "record" and automating things that way. Ultimately, he just didn't like me. My performance reviews weren't getting better, and there was no more future in the role.
So I automated the reports and didn't tell anyone. It bought me several hours per day to work on whatever I wanted, like my resumé. When I eventually left (for like a 60% pay raise), I sent all the automation to the other person on my team who ran those reports. I don't know what she did with it.