Hacking Work #1
Earlier on today, while @ Borders, I was browsing books and I came upon a book titled Hacking Work Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results. Intrigued by the title, I decided to read a few pages of the book.
In it, the authors discussed about people who hacked their work in order to deliver efficiency and increase productivity. Inspired by the book, I would like to share a few of my experiences as well.
Here's my first recollection of these experiences, in no particular order.
I was given 2 tasks: upgrading a database, and its associated application that ran on the upgraded database. Sounds easy right? Indeed it was! The only problems to this were:
- There were a few hundred machines scattered across a few locations,
- I had already written the database upgrading script into a Windows application,
- I had only a few days to do this, and
- I wasn't the system nor network administrator.
- No Remote Desktop available.
The project manager knew nothing technical about the machines, except that they were Windows and networked. Nothing was mentioned about how I was going to go to the different locations and machines to upgrade the databases and applications, and whether I'll be reimbursed, etc.
Eventually, I figured out a way to do so. I wrote an application that can create a Windows administrator account, utilized some social engineering and got the application executed. Afterwards, from my own workstation, using the Windows administrator account, I deployed the database upgrade application to all the remote workstations and remotely executed the upgrade. I then also deployed the new application.
Instead of days, it took me only hours to get the work done! I used the time saved to perform another activity which helped the company to save over $250,000 that year!