His contribution has already had thousands of comments on Reddit, and many media have picked it up: An IT specialist from a medium-sized American commercial law firm, whose Redditor goes by the name “u/Throwaway59724”, reveals to the internet world that a computer script he wrote himself allegedly has taken over his entire position for a year.

So far, his employer has not noticed.

Marcus Young

Editor in Business.

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Nadine Bos

Editor in business, responsible for "Career and Opportunity".

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"I log into the system every day, play video games or whatever, and at the end of the day I look at the logs to make sure everything went smoothly, .

.

.

and log out again,” he admits.

For an average of ten minutes a day, he earns an annual salary of $90,000.

Software replaces humans

The seemingly unbelievable story of "u/Throwaway59724" is unverifiable as the writer remains anonymous - but not implausible either. Because various aspects of the working world correlate with the momentum of the corona pandemic. Professional service providers such as auditors, management consultants and lawyers are using more and more software to relieve employees of standardized work processes. At the same time, the remuneration in many of these professional groups is still based on the “billable hour”, i.e. the hourly rate. And that is coming under increasing pressure from the expectations of customers and clients.

The solution: Where young lawyers used to have to fight through files for a company purchase or a court case, there are now digital data rooms and automated document management. The use of "legal tech" is intended to keep their heads free for creative tasks that can be used to justify increasing fees.

This is where our IT specialist comes into play again. His job, he writes, was to transfer evidence for court cases from local hard drives to a cloud and manage it there. As an administrator, only he was given access rights - and with the corona pandemic, the programmer was instructed to work from home. "That's where the fun started," the post reads. Within a week he wrote a simple script that searches all of the law firm's computers for new files, generates hash values ​​for them, transfers them to the cloud and then checks the data for authenticity. Not "witchcraft" in his view, just "a few lines of code". Does he feel guilty? For a while he blamed himself for his employer, but that quickly passed. "I do exactly thatwhat they hired me to do and the job will be done on time.”

12 million jobs could be lost

Philipp Kolo, partner at the management consultancy BCG in Munich and a specialist in HR issues, believes: "Especially when it comes to routine tasks, automation will actually make many jobs superfluous in the coming years." Professional forecasts support this view: The IT market research company Forrester has about released a new analysis this week that says Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK will lose a total of 12 million jobs to automation by 2040 - but new jobs will also be created. BCG itself also carried out an analysis of automation for Germany last year, which revealed that in 2030 there will be at least one additional new occupation for every six occupations that are fully or partially automated.This is not a gloomy scenario for the labor market, says Kolo, because: "At the same time, the available labor force will be significantly reduced because the baby boomers are retiring." The bottom line is that by 2030, despite all the automation, there will even be too few workers in Germany.

And how likely is it that the change will increasingly affect jobs such as IT specialist in the law firm?

The Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research (IAB) has been pursuing the so-called substitutability of occupations for years.

To this end, experts regularly check which new technologies are ready for the market and assess which professional activities could possibly be automated as a result.

The latest finding: "Increasingly complex activities" will also be affected;

the potential for substitution between 2016 and 2019 increased most in skilled and specialist occupations.

Lots of routine office work affected

Philipp Kolo can confirm this: "Many areas are now affected that are also widely described as white collar jobs - often office work, but still many routine tasks." Automating activities are more accessible.”

That means: In order to generate new automatisms like “u/Throwaway59724”, less and less programming know-how will be required in the future.

But maybe soon not much more than a halfway solid Internet research.