The IT specialist who automated his job for a year without getting caught

An anonymous Reddit post on an IT professional’s goldbricking hack is breaking the internet, amassing 81.2 thousand votes and over five thousand comments. The viral post details how he automated his work in a week. While he was busy playing video games and having fun while working from home, his code did all the heavy lifting.

In the subreddit – r/antiwork, user Throwaway59724 claimed he was able to write, debug, and perfect a simple script to do his entire job. He would just work for 10 mins every day and let the code do the rest.

He claims to work as an IT specialist at a mid-size law firm. 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 powershell. 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…

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