One of my favorite bits of—obviously apocryphal—Lisp folklore is the story of the invention of macros. The TL;DR is a that some senior Lisp developers got tired of writing the same boilerplate code all the time so that started using abbreviations for the pieces of boilerplate and hired a junior developer to translate the abbreviations into normal Lisp. After a while, according to the story, the junior developer realized he could just write some code to do the translations automatically so he added that code to the Lisp compiler and Lisp Macros were born. It worked so well that he soon saw there was no reason for him to oversee things so he retired to the beach while still getting paid. The senior developers just assumed he was still there slaving away at the translations.
I’ve always loved that story so this real life analog really resonated. It’s an apparently true story of an IT specialist working for a law firm who was tasked with handling digital evidence for the firm. That’s probably more involved than you most of you realize but our hero soon came to realize it was not an 8-hour job. Even more, he discovered that he could automate the whole process with some simple scripts,
So when COVID struck and he started working from home, he simply used his scripts to do the work and spent his time playing computer games and hacking on his side projects. There may be some ethical issues here but there may also not be any. After all, the job he was hired to do is getting done and the firm seems happy.
Regardless, I just love the real life example of the Lisp Macro story. I always considered it a delightful fantasy but it has, it seems, come to life.