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:

1. There were a few hundred machines scattered across a few locations,
2. I had already written the database upgrading script into a Windows application,
   
3. I had only a few days to do this, and
   
4. I wasn't the system nor network administrator.
5. 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!