Management is cutting my job after I automated 15 hours of weekly work, do I have to document it for them?

[u/Claptrap_5Z]

When I took this coordinator job, our team was losing fifteen to twenty hours every week just updating client logs and manually formatting spreadsheets.

I built a few simple macros and formula templates that cut all that data entry down to an hour. I thought saving twenty hours a week would free me up for higher-level projects.

instead, my manager called me into a meeting last Friday. She told me that because our administrative workload dropped, they are merging my role with a part-time position and letting me go. To get my severance check, they want me to write step-by-step documentation for every macro I set up.

I literally worked myself out of a salary. I should of just kept doing the data entry by hand like the last person.

Do I ACTUALLY have to document processes I created that were not in my original job description?

[u/mathimati]

Or just minify/obfuscate the code for “efficiency”, but making it near impossible to edit in the future. Maybe hardcode a bunch of references that don’t need to be hardcoded. Or reverse that and make a bunch of hardcoded references into offsets. Whichever one makes it more obnoxious.

[u/MortCrimm → u/mathimati]

Add local file path references where the "calculations" are. They wont know why it doesnt work on their computer and if they change file locations, it breaks...

[u/kindofanasshole17 → u/MortCrimm]

For dealing with a group of users with minimal Excel skills this is actually kind of genius.

Sounds like OP has enough coding skills they could even step it up a notch, burying a reference or two in macro code, maybe breaking up the path into multiple parts and doing some weird string manipulation. Lot of possibilities.

[u/MortCrimm → u/kindofanasshole17]

I am well versed in dealing with idiots who "use excel professionally".....Or as they refer to it "The Database"

[u/ABenGrimmReminder → u/MortCrimm]

Professional Co-Pilot askers.

[u/Boring_Holiday9874 → u/mathimati]

Minify can be undone easily using AI. 

[u/topturo77 → u/Boring_Holiday9874]

Hide some instructions in there somewhere that makes whatever AI they feed it into output incorrect simplified instructions. These people think Excel is dark magic, they won’t ever be able to catch that. 

[u/Nimos → u/mathimati]

overall usefulness of AI for code aside, de-obfuscating minified code is something that it does really well. Even puts in sensible names for symbols most of the time.

[u/numbersthen0987431 → u/mathimati]

I'd just make the code unusable, so they have to go back to the old way of doing it

[u/Aflockofants → u/mathimati]

Let’s not pretend it wasn’t AI that did it in the first place.

[u/Minimum_Possibility6 → u/mathimati]

You can fragment the code so it calls another parcel of the code, but do it by calling a sheet and pulling the block from there. 

What you do is spread the sheets around all sorts of different locations 

Naturally the next person will likely want to optimise it by putting them all in one folder ,

Which will invariably break it