In 2012, I was working for an audiobook publisher on ePub conversion that added audio. For whatever reason, that project got shelved, so I was moved into audio auditing.
The job: For each set of tracks (bible versions included well over 1,000 each), listen to the first and last three seconds of audio for pops/clicks, overprocessing, usw. Flag hot files, combine good ones.
The workflow: Open tracks in VLC, manually advance from start to end for each one.
It was immediately clear this was not going to fly for how I spend eight hours a day. It’s possible to create a less efficient workflow, but it would take significant effort.
Visual Studio was installed on my machine, so I looked at media-control OCXs in VB.NET (this is very much a situation where the user controls were front and center, so the time needed to be spent on form design, not coding). In under a week of “spare time,” it was ready to go.
Track positioning and advancement were by default handled to job spex, but I added other options for edge cases.
New workflow: Select folder in app, note bad audio, concatenate good chapters.
A couple of weeks later, half the department was laid off. My boss invented a fictional scenario in which I’d failed to do what I was told, screaming at me on the floor.
I walked out the door.
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In 2015, I was working at a Gannett hub and was tasked with creating the workflow and overseeing the nascent department being created to bring in external clients. (Clearly an $18/hour role.)
IT had handled CMS ingestion to a point, but malformed XML sends were an ongoing problem I had to manually tackle. Everything else was up to me to design and build out, including managing client expectations as we got our shit together.
When I accidentally discovered that the client’s CMS had your garden-variety security hole of only requiring a sign in to see the landing page by pasting a URL from one browser to another, I was able to automate budget ingestion by creating URLs via concatenation in Excel, extracting the table data and presenting it in a format my team could actually use.
The weekly sheets I created also had event triggers where updating status internally sent email notifications to the client when that step required their attention.
Then came the new centerwide page-volume expectations and heightened reporting requirements — which were so onerous that they were taking fully one-quarter of my team’s production time while the floor for satisfactory output went from 1.5 pages per hour to 2 (as counted over the entire shift). Combined, it meant that in one fell swoop, my designers were expected to go from 12 pages in eight hours to 16 in six. Work quality suffered tremendously, which is not ideal when we’re literally the department corporate is shopping around to bring in new clients.
I tried to find extant solutions, with the obvious one being that we should have API access to our own CMS. All the new data that designers were required to manually provide was already being generated; we just didn’t have access. This was a brick wall at the director level because they thought it entirely reasonable that a vendor would charge extra for us to access our own data, and there was no budget for that.
But losing 25% productivity was apparently a nonissue with over 200 full-time designers. Budget’s there for an extra 50 people, I guess.
So this is where I went off the reservation and added page tracking to the sheet. As designers marked things ready to proof, that timestamp was saved and attached to the user account performing the action, so there was simply no more reporting to do. Each designer ran a menu command at the end of the week to populate their reporting sheet.
My team went back to having 8 hours a day for design, and we were generally a happy bunch, cracking inappropriate jokes just like in newsrooms of old.
In an open floor plan.
This caused two issues. One, the other teams were starting to get pissed that we had this automation and they didn’t. I pressed for a wider rollout several times, revealing the second issue: The directors needed inaccurate reporting for a things like disciplining employees, and without that, they were going to have a hard time justifying what they were being paid to do.
I got a 0% raise for my efforts and was shunted to another department where I couldn’t cause as much trouble. Problem was, that “it could be more inefficient, but I’m not sure how” was even more applicable in this situation.
The job was manual ad placement, and we were a team of three. I spent the first couple of weeks learning the InDesign DOM since I’d just taught myself JS to automate Google Sheets. A month later, total workload was maybe 30 hours a week.
And this is when IT got wind of my repeated automation projects and put the kibosh on anything further. You can’t code at Gannett unless your title indicates that’s your role.
After being strung along for the final 18 months about transitioning into a role in IT, I finally gave six weeks’ notice and left. I’ve never actually heard an HR representative express surprise and dismay about management decisions, but that came out in my exit interview, and she said that given what actually happened in terms of communication vs. what I’d been promised and she’d been led to believe, she’d have quit as well.
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Bringing us to today. Owner and his wife are my direct superiors at a small trucking firm. I make worse money than in journalism in absolute 2017 dollars, to say nothing of inflation-adjusted figures.
Owner told me he’d been wanting to figure out a way to automate trade-show receiving (spending 15 minutes to make $8 isn’t the greatest) for nearly a decade, but everything anyone had come up with met with client rejection on account of the amount of data that would need to be shared and our inability to replicate their receiver forms.
So I got in touch with our point person and asked which portions of the (triplicate … in 2023) receiver forms were actually necessary, created a slimmed-down template I was afraid might deviate too much … and it got immediate approval.
So, I populated that sheet with formulae to pull most needed data from a master sheet that’s, unfortunately, still a manual process involving opening Microsoft Forms results and pasting, but from there, a 10-line script creates all the new receiver forms since it was last run.
The form also has image uploads, so I can pull the remaining information from those, and we have art on hand to send to the customer when there are questions instead of having to pull apart a wrapped pallet or address onsite during show setup.
And instead of the warehouse manually generating truck manifests, as well as scanning the day’s pink copies after close of business, I added the manifest to the show sheet and populated it. I send receivers daily three hours before the old system putting it firmly within client operating hours, and the warehouse prints the manifest at trailer load.
Just had my annual review. $0 raise for that work.
Seriously, I learn new software and skills; I apply experience from several industry fields to create bespoke workflows; those workflows save from 25% to 90% labor. What the fuck else do I have to do to get off the treadmill of losing purchasing power every year?
Thanks for letting me vent.
If you have these skills, have you considered applying to technical roles directly? You might have better luck if you start off in a technical role, either in IT or software development. You could use these projects as experience on your resume, and I’m sure at least one potential employer would see the efficiency gains you provided and be interested to talk with you.
I was unemployed for 30 months after leaving Gannett, finally landing this position because I met the owner in detox.
I got jobs through my cover letters, and those are no longer read at a point in the process that would work to my advantage. My actual work history is rather scattershot because journalism was not a good field to get into, and layoffs every six months were the rule for a couple of years.
Of the 700-plus resumes I sent out (with fucking cover letters) for positions from juuuuuuust this side of my ethical boundaries in communications roles to pure-play coding, I got a single reply (and didn’t get the job). I then got a grant to do a full-stack course after getting frustrated with response levels, and that certificate didn’t move the needle, in addition to the company, which touted its placement services, dropping me like a rock as soon as I was done. A few hundred more resumes proved it did nothing for me.
If there’s a way to get people to accept that someone who has roles in several industries brings a lot of intangibles to the table, I haven’t found it. Coding positions seemed to want me having been in a cube for the past three years and no experience before that because it would make me too expensive.
I’ve gone to several networking events in Austin, tech, tech-adjacent and general purpose, and met three kinds of people at the tech ones:
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We’re not hiring, but you can think in code, and that’s all you need. You won’t have issues finding a job.
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We’re hiring, and it looks like you’ve only used X language for a few months. You need to go back to school.
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What the fuck are you even doing here? Go back to journalism. Editors can’t code.
So, again, outside of having taken coursework to shore things up and networking to the best of my ability, I’m at a loss for how to ever start making decent money. I feel I would be fairly compensated with my current skillset at $80K, and hope to grow from there. But I have to say, getting shown the door for projects that save up to seven figures and being told I’m being unreasonable about what my skills are worth from everyone is not confirmation that this work actually has value, even though others somehow get paid six figures for the same level of acumen and experience.
I am the poster child for what happens when you automate hiring to the point that all boxes need to be checked for any consideration, people with more than a couple years out of college are round-filed, and there’s no opportunity to sell yourself with a story.
Did I mention that all of this stuff is not where I’ve won national awards? Those are for writing … but only when I believe what I’m writing.
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I make a couple hundred dollars an hour as a freelancer doing these kinds of automations for businesses. Spin up a side gig consulting company and start networking. Build it up over time and once you get busy enough, drop the day job.
Alright waited until the weekend so I could write this one because it might be long we’ll see.
First off, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this bullshit. I changed jobs last year, and even as someone who was getting interest and interviews in my search, it still made me want to scream pretty much the whole time, and it took like 9 months at varying levels of intensity. I can’t imagine how frustrating putting in all that work and getting what seems to be worse than nothing back has been.
Second, I want to echo some of the comments in this thread emphasizing that some less traditional career paths may be open to you. The idea to apply at LMG is great, as is the possibility of freelancing. If you haven’t already, you could also consider contract roles. When I was looking there were lots of recruiters trying to pick people up for technical jobs on 6-12 month contract. That may be different now, or you may have your reasons for not considering them just like I did, so I understand if it’s not an option or if you’ve already considered it. If it works for you though, an employer may be less strict on what they think is the “right” background for a role if they know it’s only for a shorter time. Also, I think I saw some discussion from you about considering a van lifestyle, which could be pretty compatible with freelancing or moving place to place for contract work, so that is something to account for as well.
Third, I want to encourage you not to give up. Employers frankly suck, and in the absence of better labor organization, changing jobs is the best way to get what you need. Even if all you can do for a week or a month at a time is the super simple instant apply stuff on places like LinkedIn, that’s still progress. Or if you need to take a break for a while to keep yourself sane and make sure you’re at your best when you do have a new opportunity, that’s also a valuable use of your time. And if you represent yourself even half as well in interviews as you do in your writing I’m sure you can make a good impression, the challenge is getting in front of the right people.
Lastly, I actually want to thank you for this post. Job hunting is a super important aspect of personal finance that I’m not super able to write my own posts on since I’m pretty early in my career. I have been thinking of making a weekly discussion thread for this community, so if you want to continue to vent or journal about your search then it would be great to have more posts, either as standalone posts like this one or comments on the discussion thread.
you may have your reasons for not considering them just like I did
May I ask what your reasons were and how/why they changed? You’re correct that I posted about exiting the “real property” market completely, so I’m seemingly open to reconsidering things of late.
That may have been unclear. I didn’t consider contract roles and am working a remote, direct hire role currently. The reasons contract roles were not for me are:
- A lot of contract roles wanted me to move. While in my line of work I can be remote with no issues, my wife can’t move her work for another few years at least, so moving is not really an option. I also want to work from home since that’s essentially all I’ve done in my career due to starting during the pandemic.
- I’m a pretty risk averse person, so the idea of taking a job knowing I’d possibly have to do more job hunting in the future because the contact ended was not appealing. Of course, if I hadn’t seen much interest from direct hire opportunities this probably would have been negotiable.
- My wife has some pretty expensive specialty medication that she can’t go off of, and it seemed to me like health insurance benefits for contract work are not as good. Sometimes this extended to other benefits like 401k, but sometimes health insurance was the main aspect that was lacking.
