While jobs in the 21st century are at the risk of being replaced by robots and automation, a Reddit user, who went by the moniker FiletOfFish1066, automated his job and got fired for it. The Reddit user, who had signed up for a software testing quality assurance, managed to automate his job eight months in and was caught and fired after six years.
FiletOfFish1066 had reportedly spent each day surfing Reddit, playing the video game "League of Legends," basically doing what he wanted. He had posted a question on the CS Career Questions subreddit asking about his future career prospects where he shared the details of the incident that led to him getting fired from his job.
The account and the details of the post have all been removed, but BoingBoing quoted the Redditor as posting: "From around 6 years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For 40 hours each week I go to work, play 'League of Legends' in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past 6 years I have maybe done 50 hours of real work. So basically nothing. And nobody really cared. The tests were all running successfully. I s*** you not, I had no friends or anything at work either, so nobody ever talked to me except my boss and occasionally the devs for the software I was testing. Yesterday my boss fired me. I guess IT found out after 6 years or so what I was doing and reported it to my boss. I explained I had automated my own job, but was still updating the automation tool, which was a lie. Anyway, I was fired."
FiletOfFish1066's concern was that over the last six years he had completely forgotten how to code. While Interesting Engineering called his tone despondent, it also reported that the Redditor had been paid about $95,000 a year and had saved close to $200,000.
FiletOfFish1066 also admitted that slacking off on the job had left him with a video game and alcohol addiction along with no marketable career skills.
The Reddit community offered its words of encouragement and suggested future courses of action FiletOfFish1066 could pursue to get back on the saddle.
Before deleting his account and the entire story, the user had posted that he would get back to learning how to code and start applying for jobs.
