The Covid-19 pandemic changed the dynamics of work for millions of people around the world. While many have struggled to adapt to the new work culture, some have managed to get around it well by coming up with innovative ‘work from home’ ideas.
It is always advised that one should work smart and not always work hard. That’s pretty much what an IT specialist has done to earn $90,000 a year. The professional revealed he was able to earn good money with his fully-automated job.
An automated process is one that uses machines to do the work instead of people. One just has to feed instructions to get a task or multiple tasks done within a stipulated time.
So, instead of spending 8-9 hours working on a laptop, the professional manages to do other things like play video games, run errands, and complete household work.
His company was in the middle of migrating its evidence management system to Cloud, with him in charge. As the only person with admin access to the Cloud, he automated the entire task.
His script, scanned the on-site drive for any new files, generated hash values for them, and transferred them to the Cloud. The code then generated hash values again for fidelity.
The script he wrote is in batch with some portions of power-shell. The base code came from a Google search “.bat transfer files” followed by “.bat how to only transfer certain file types” etc. He wrote in the post, “The trick was making it work with my office, knowing where to scan for new files, knowing where not to scan due to lag (seriously, if you have a folder with 200,000 .txt files that crap will severely slow down your scans. Better to move it manually and then change the script to omit that folder from future searches).”
“The local drive is theirs, the Cloud drive is theirs, the VPN is theirs. The PC that I bought with my own money specifically for this task only runs the script. There are no work files or evidence being stored on my PC. The script is literally the only thing on the PC other than the OS,” he added.
After the post went viral he was buffeted with questions from curious Redditors. One user asked, why not monetize the code?, to which he replied: “Please understand that this is not some high-end program that’s worth millions. This is a few lines of code written in a notepad. It only has value in this situation because the office has no technical skills. This is the type of script people put on GitHub with a $5 price tag linked to their PayPal.”
He also had a good defense for the question, what if he gets caught?“I’ll just get rid of the script. I’m running it on equipment that I own so if they lose me, they lose the work. Creating my own job security,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Technology Express staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
