r/careerguidance • u/Claptrap_5Z • 18h ago

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

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?

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u/hightrix 17h ago

This is brilliant. Pages and pages of tech slop that will read like a real user manual to a layman.

Just make sure that it isn’t actually correct. Tell Claude to add some errors purposefully because this is a “document review test for a candidate” where the candidate has to spot the errors in each macro definition.

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u/lostintransaltions 15h ago

Just going by that they were wasting so much time every week I think none of them actually knows how to set up macros so as time goes by new clients get added, processes change and no one will be able to adjust the macros. In a year they have a new person entering everything by hand

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u/Plastic_Wrap_1353 14h ago

Plus the OP needs to password-protect the macros so no errors can be introduced accidentally.

Might be a good idea to password protect all the documents until the check clears.

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u/ItWearsHimOut 7h ago

Better yet, sign them with an in-house cert that expires in a year. Modifying the macros invalidates the cert. That'll add an extra tech hurdle that will drive a non-techie insane.

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u/kzin 5h ago

I love this because it’s also a reasonable security measure

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u/Wonderful_Special681 6h ago

This is the way. The macro can be edited with a hex editor.

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u/Ontoshocktrooper 4h ago

This has been the most pleasing of threads to follow. Yall are cruelly effective.

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u/Key_Butterscotch5326 4h ago

I thought I was in r/maliciouscompliance for a sec! Had to check the sub name again 😜

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u/Commercial-Place6793 1h ago

I don’t know what any of this means but I’m here for it. Sounds diabolical.

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u/Warm_Sandwich5038 5h ago

As a person who has been in OPs predicament I fully wish I had thought of this!!!!

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u/Lahorn0124 1h ago

Me, too!!

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u/mrkingkoala 4h ago

Love this.

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u/HeyYouGuyyyyyyys 3h ago

Satan says hi

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u/shoeless_doh 3h ago

(I'm kind of following what you're saying but am hazy on the definition of certification, is this something in the software that will make it actually not work physically at the end of that year or would this rely on someone internal noticing the cert is expired and just telling them they "can't use it" any more prompting an "ok, bud. 👍" From the person being told?

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u/abalt0ing 3h ago

As a PKI person I approve this message.

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u/abalt0ing 3h ago

If I may pile on sign it with a code signing cert, but don’t use a time server!

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u/ManaSpike 1h ago

No, no. Standard practice these days it for all certs to expire in 45 days or less.

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u/Neat-Dig5964 9h ago

Why? Let them introduce errors. The only real problem with this is—and it has happened to me TWICE in my career—the person tasked to do the work likely won’t understand, and they will blame OP for sabotage. I was replaced once with a totally incompetent, inexperienced person. They thought my job was SO easy, anyone could do it. The second time, I was a temp that made things better with spreadsheets, etc. Instead of hiring me on full-time, they hired an outsider. They contacted my rep and said I sabotaged their files. My rep called and wanted me to straighten it out, but there wasn’t anything I could do because I did nothing wrong.

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u/X-Kami_Dono-X 1h ago

LOL. I wrote like 3-4 procedure manuals for one of my old jobs and after they gave me my first write up and called it a third and final and told me that I could not save my job, they were waiting out the 90 day clock with HR to fire me (dumb move really), I just showed up and looked for other jobs. When I finally found one I put my notice in, my boss was pissed because they wanted to fire me. I spent three hours in my exit interview going over my documentation I had been keeping regarding my supervisor’s activities over the last 6 years. I told them when I left it wasn’t “if” he got aggressive with a co-worker, it was a matter of “when” as he was a lying sack of crap. Anyhow, 6 months later I get a call from them telling me he was no longer with the company and was asking me how to do most of his job. I had already written the process and procedure guides but they threw them away because I was “complaining when leaving” and so they did not retain them. I told them my consultant fee for that was $10,000 and they laughed and told me it was a good joke, I told them I was not joking. It was that or give me his job and pretend I had never been fired and give me my 10 years seniority with the company and his salaried position. Needless to say, they never called me again.

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u/_Status_Quo_ 3h ago

You could add a line to your macro which will wait 30 days from now, save the spreadsheet with a .xlsx file extension in the same file path, then add the kill command to delete the .xlsm version with all the macros in it. Your spreadsheet will automatically delete itself in a month and they will never be able to figure out what happened because all the data will still be intact in the .xlsx version, minus the automation.

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u/Historic1006 2h ago

I love this.... I would keep the waiting period at 15 days, not 30. Love this idea!

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u/4mystuff 1h ago

Update the code to use static values instead of variables. For example use 2026 for the year rather than something that reference the current date's year. The software will work when you leave, but will bomb out by years end. Do that shit everywhere.

They'll likely have backups, so could be a temp issue if they realize it, still.

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u/shoeless_doh 3h ago

Oh gosh, that sounds dangerous, what if he forgets the passwords to the macros!

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u/nononsensenotdense 1h ago

The password is only required to be entered every couple of weeks... to keep some security while still allowing for business fluidity

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u/unicornhunter202 14m ago

This is genius

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u/SnooKiwis2161 10h ago

This is exactly it.

I automated a lot of my job using copilot. I told no one. Even if I did, not one is going to be able to reverse engineer it, and a lot of this "vibe coding" i did with AI's help is contingent with all other processes remaining exactly the same forever. But when Jan in accounting decides to add a random new data field or Sven in marketing strategy makes a new marketing segment and of course, none of these brainiacs decide to consult or coordinate with anyone, it will all fall apart because no one outside of me has sufficient curiousity, interest, or ability to ask the right questions to keep the automation going.

I learned a lot in the process but the biggest lesson is no one gives a sh*t enough to do what I did.

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u/RichardBottom 7h ago

I used copilot to build an overlay that now does most of our heavy lifting. It’s just using the API from the tool we all have access to, but it’s aimed right at all our tasks and saves hundreds of hours a week. My team has gotten so dependent on it, when they took the API side of the platform down for maintenance one day, our manager just said we could all log out for the rest of the day and pick up tomorrow, even though the core site and its ui were still running.

The crazy part about this is that it’s all hosted on my own GitHub page.

I don’t think anyone’s gonna mess with me on this team, and if anything does happen it’ll be our whole team getting axed anyway. But it’s still a weird amount of power to wield in my position, where there are people answering phones at a higher pay grade than my role.

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u/KLAM3R0N 4h ago

Ha kinda same here I created a whole MES in a low code platform and I'm the only one who knows how any of it works. Tons of automation and db schemas, API integration , inventory tracking, automated calibration alerts, maintenance tracking, kpi repots, ... everything . Sure they could buy some software and do the same for a few hundred k but I also do my regular role and a few others as well. I'm not sure anyone really understands anything. It's kinda wild. I fear I have made myself something they depend on way more than they realize. And it's only about 40% vibed.

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u/nasir41 4h ago

Honestly, I think that’s the part people underestimate with automation.

The macro itself is probably the easy part. Knowing all the weird little exceptions and knowing when something has changed is the actual skill. You can document the steps, but you can’t really document all the judgment that comes from doing the job for a while.

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u/LessInThought 5h ago

Wouldn't whoever replaces you ask copilot to do the same thing.

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u/4x4ord 5h ago

The problem is you have to know what to ask it, which tends to require an in-depth understanding of all processes in the system, and a functional understanding of systems logic and human behavior....

It's not as simple as "Build be a thing that makes my job easier."

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u/Constant-Concept3927 5h ago

I need someone to help me identify how much of my job could be automated and how to go about doing it - I’m so lost with the AI and automation 😭😭

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u/webcod3r 4h ago

This just helped me understand hubspot segments better for some reason lol

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u/Historic1006 2h ago

There is a word for your strategy - it is "job security"

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u/Medicine-Illustrious 8h ago

That happened to me years ago. My predecessor set a macro that broke. I eventually figured it out. No one cared. It was a calculation I alone did.

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u/Intelligent-Mine-868 2h ago

Im just amazed that anyone still writes macros, what in the 1989!

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u/Latter-Safety1055 15h ago

Be sure to put in a bunch of graphs, charts, and tables that have a lot of different lines looking like spaghetti. It can add aesthetic to the whole thing without telling you a whole lot. Not to mention any sort of Obsidian-style graph of interconnected, breathing nodes that you can interact with.

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u/cooking_question 14h ago

Make all graphs unlabeled but require a legend and should use only different shades of blue.Legend should be as small as possible.

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u/ITstaph 6h ago

Also, on a few graphs just paste the image not loading picture instead of the graph.

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u/cooking_question 6h ago

You and I should be friends. Imagine if we worked together? 

So far my suggestions:

Written at 16+ grade level

Don’t define terms

Throw in some Latin phrases, e.g. Data in receptaculum importare

Explain everything twice but two different sentences with all kinds of jargon like asynchronous agreement of data inputs to further alignment of function protocols.

If spreadsheets are in Excel, use formulas from Google sheets, vice versa.

Tiny table of contents.

Extensive index of words you would never look up like function, cell, row, data, etc. 

Print it out on paper and put it in a Hello Kitty binder. Delete all traces of the digital copy.

Include charts but all the graphs are in different shades of blue, no labels and tiny legend at the bottom. Charts do not correlate to section where they are pasted and are in no particular order.

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u/ITstaph 6h ago edited 5h ago

Use acronyms but never explain what they mean.

For all charts just put (see figure a-1 in appendix I).

Do not label the separate appendixes and do not label the charts or if you do label them put them out of order. Instead of a1, a-2, a-3 make it a-1, b-1, c-1.

Appendixes are printed out and stored in a separate size/color/style binders. Think 3 hole binder for one, 2 hole top bound zip portfolio for the other.

Print some on letter size paper, some on legal size paper, and a couple on folded ledger (11x17) but have multiple pages printed on it.

Duplex every third page. Make sure the rotation is opposite the binding method.

Do not label the binders.

Any hand written notes are made with pilot ball frixion pens, these erase with heat caused by friction and can also degrade if left in direct sunlight or a hot car.

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u/Oliver_the_chimp 4h ago edited 4h ago

Indicate connections between relevant parts of the document with hand-drawn lines in red pencil.

Refer to external reference documents using long urls (with ad parameters) in printed document.

Accidentally include references/sources page from wrong document, which is a guide to arcane uses of psychedelic drugs.

Include a very serious About the Author page at the end, which highlights your expertise as an academic.

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u/nursingintheshadows 3h ago

Not a tech type girl at all, but could you put in hyperlinks? Like not on a digital copy that works but only on the printed document. (I’d not supply a digital copy). Not sure if it could be done, but if they manually type in the hyperlink, maybe have it go to the Never Gonna Give You Up song. It might be the ultimate Rick Roll.

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u/Own-Salamander-4975 3h ago

Make sure it’s a reaaaally long and cumbersome URL for them to hand-type in too — until they finally finish it and reach their destination of Never Gonna Give You Up.

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u/_Phail_ 1h ago

I read about a paper/essay/some form of document that was submitted to... idk, somewhere, yeeeears ago... The first word on each line was the lyrics to NEver Gonna Give You Up 😂

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u/DisposableSaviour 2h ago

That one gets a legible legend.

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u/Warm_Sandwich5038 5h ago

Password protect the legend sheet with a ALT8203 zero width space

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u/hightrix 15h ago

Chefs Kiss - this is a beautiful addition and would really add to the AI slop feel.

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u/Biodiversity1001 10h ago

and make sure to leave off what the ..brain cramp, whatever the axis represent. Like the government graphs.

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u/EmperorGeek 7h ago

You need to leave a few “This Page Left Intentionally Blank” for nostalgic reasons.

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u/TurntNBurnt93 16h ago edited 16h ago

I remember when I was in school, like before highschool, it was a skill to know how to exactly Google certain things. If you wrote the search right it would work really well. A skill. Now days it's writing ai prompts. If you write the prompt just right it'll work. I feel old now. Mastering writing prompts for ai will pay off. And what you said is correct. You have to word it right. Good job

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u/Bladrak01 15h ago

I saw a Twitter post where someone was saying that sometimes while trying to figure out the AI prompt they actually discover the solution. Someone responded, "They have discovered thinking."

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u/zopiac 14h ago

Same thing as explaining to a rubber ducky. Often just have to work through the problem in the right way in order for the solution to practically fall out.

Only with AI you can hit enter on the solution and it can sometimes drag you down the wrong rabbit hole for an hour.

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u/andreortigao 7h ago

I did that many times with stack overflow. By simply typing the answer going through everything Ive tried, I would find what I have missed.

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u/Nice-Environment-502 5h ago

All the time I'll write a prompt for something and get to the end and wonder why the fuck i'm writing a prompt when I could have done that manually 15 mins ago.

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u/Frying 15h ago

Agreed. Good Google skills is the new AI prompting. It used to stagger me how people searched and claim they couldn’t find answers. Same with prompting now.

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u/TheGrolar 14h ago

Worked as an assistant for a top academic research library after grad school, during the pre-Google search era. People who understood Boolean or learned it quickly were a small minority of our total patrons, and remember these were all students at a pretty good university. "This is where it's at," I realized, and that's held true for 30+ years.

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u/TheAmazingHumanTorus 11h ago

God I miss AltaVista.

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u/ryudo9999 5h ago

I was good at Boolean algebra, but sucked at wiring up the circuit boards

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u/DisposableSaviour 2h ago

I miss when Google used Boolean operators.

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u/Alycion 12h ago

Yesterday alone, I ran into 7 questions on a different sub that all they had to do was put in their exact question as a search term to get what they needed. Instead, they post it and get a bunch of smart ass responses. People still can’t search properly. So getting them to use good AI prompts to figure out a mess that was handed to them is low.

I worked places where in the employment agreement, any code I wrote for the job was owned by the company. They wanted me to use code for I wrote for my business for them. I refused. It was my code, not theirs.

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u/Neat-Dig5964 8h ago

I used to pride myself on knowing how to find anything on the internet. If it’s out there, I could find it. Now, they’ve dumbed everything down so it doesn’t really matter. I’m glad I retired.

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u/Acrobatic_Squash_648 14h ago

It's apples and oranges. Because search engines were working with a discrete pile of stuff. LLMs are...mixing those piles together in ways that may or may not make any sense

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u/tkenben 22m ago

Yep. It's now a fuzzy search, but the data set is a self-referencing mosh pit.

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u/TwoAlert3448 12h ago

Wrong way ‘round: AI prompting is the new search query.

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u/CoderPro225 8h ago

SO true. I learned how to Google well decades ago. And now I am applying those same skills to AI prompting. It’s magical.

And so many people just do not get it!

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u/CompetitionNearby108 6h ago

Team, repeat after me, "Google is my best friend!"

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 4h ago

Does this still exist?  I tried to find a very specific filename on Google and it didn't turn up shit.  I had to find it online through other means.

I couldn't figure out if I was the problem or if google just sucks now.

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u/Silent_Conference908 1h ago

That last part, sadly.

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u/hightrix 15h ago

Couldn't agree more. I'm sure we are all in the same boat in that good google skills meant we progress through our careers more quickly. Prompting is the same and learning not only how to prompt but how to coordinate multiple agents through complex agentic workflows is going to really drive home who is an expert and who uses AI like google.

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u/Acrobatic_Squash_648 14h ago

It's apples and oranges. Because search engines were working with a discrete pile of stuff. LLMs are...mixing those piles together in ways that may or may not make any sense, and they don't know how to follow instructions about how exactly to mix the piles, because they don't know what the real world meaning of the piles are.

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u/hightrix 13h ago

You're absolutely correct. What I'm proposing is that the skill that will be rewarded is learning to craft a good prompt, system instructions, skills, etc... to get back relevant information with sources. As anyone shouldn't, I don't trust AI output, I use it as a starting point to then verify with real sources.

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u/Acrobatic_Squash_648 12h ago

in my opinion it ends up just being more work to verify with real sources when trying to automate stuff with LLMs. It's like that episode of Better Off Ted with the colorblind cameras. Every part of the system added creates exponential verification complexity

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u/qaxmlp 11h ago

We use to interview people and see how they used Google!

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u/Acrobatic_Squash_648 14h ago

If you write the prompt just right it'll work.

It's apples and oranges. Because search engines were working with a discrete pile of stuff. LLMs are...mixing those piles together in ways that may or may not make any sense

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u/Remote-Document5634 11h ago

These days you have to Google stuff like an idiot and almost all the useful tricks are gone

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u/vorpal_wombat 6h ago

before high school, it was a skill to know how exactly to Google

BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL

Excuse me, I’ll be crumbling into dust while you’re feeling old now.

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u/TurntNBurnt93 6h ago

Ha yeah, but kids these days, I swear I can barely understand. I work with some younger adults that can't read well if at all. 

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u/marfacza 6h ago

Now days, better than them days.

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u/Expensive-Day-3551 6h ago

Yes I was so good at using search engines. I think it’s because I was able to think like a computer and determine what input they needed. Maybe because when I started using computers you had to do everything yourself

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u/ryudo9999 5h ago

Lol you had to add symbols in to match the key words in your search I forgot what they were, man were old

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u/PeasePorridge9dOld 4h ago

Old?

As a FR in college, it was a requirement that we took a class in how to search in the library. Reading card catalogs and the like…

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u/ISTof1897 14h ago

I tell people that AI is basically at the DOS stage right now. It’s a pretty big piece of shit that isn’t functional enough to be practical, even if it can do some amazing things. Eventually we’ll have Windows 95, XP, etc. and AI will actually be a lot more useful.

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u/Clear_Couple_9848 12h ago

Unfortunately, you know what’s way better than a human at writing AI prompts and reviewing AI plans? An AI program. What’s happening to OP is what they want to do to everyone.

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u/Future_Stranger68 15h ago

Omg, I love this! Make sure to charge a $200/hr consultation with a 5 hour min for any work needed once terminated! Malicious compliance.

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u/No-Candle2610 14h ago

This is actually pointless. There’s a meme about how people read technical docs (person feeds bullets into Claude, Claude creates long form docs, receiver asks Claude to summarize into bullets).

The next person will just have Claude “create a simple step by step of this”

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u/sqrtof2 10h ago

If they were smart enough to do that, they'd have used Claude to write the macros in the first place.

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u/DChemdawg 3h ago

And they wouldn’t be firing the one non-dipshit for doubling his efficiency.

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u/murder_she_burped 12h ago

This is genius and I’m rubbing my hands together like a cartoon villain.

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u/pgh9fan 11h ago

Georgdie LaForge's tachyon fields.

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u/qaxmlp 11h ago

Tell the ai to use the technical style guide for navsea documentation

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u/PigabungaDude 10h ago

You're evil. Let's be friends.

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u/BlueRoses10014 10h ago

THIS IS FABULOUS

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u/Embarrassed-Virus319 9h ago

And print it. Don’t hand in a digital copy for them to copy and paste back into Claude. Make them work for it. I doubt the request said a digital copy of step by step

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u/Evilgood1 7h ago

Also, tell it to skip some parts, but hide it well so the candiate can insert the missing part.

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u/ThrowRA3623235 14h ago

This is brilliant

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u/askaboutmy____ 13h ago

Beautiful! 

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u/CincySnwLvr 7h ago

IME you won’t have to tell Claude to add errors. Just don’t fix the ones it inevitably makes lol

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u/Expert_Garlic_2258 5h ago

Calm down Satan

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u/TheMidlander 5h ago

Yesssss... And have it make flowcharts. Let the hate flow.

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u/Inner-Today-3693 4h ago

Not just any Claude opus 5.

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u/More_Wrongdoer4501 4h ago

This doesn’t work because the next person can just take what was written and have Claude rewrite it concisely.

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u/tanbirj 4h ago

Then offer them a support and maintenance contract on an absurd hourly rate

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u/Double-Profession900 2h ago

Then give it to them in 5 separate documents that do not appear to correlate to eachother

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u/eastbayant 2h ago

Evil. I like it 😈

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u/Intelligent-Mine-868 2h ago

That is diabolical and brilliant!!!

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u/rearadmiraldumbass 1h ago

Also tell it to make the chapter headings an acrostic for FUCK YOU