Consequential Efficiency

Nina learned a valuable lesson that day: never show your boss how much time you actually need to produce results.

Sign of a shit manager/boss, usually.

Good boss who sees this will go "oh thank God now you have your time freed up to do that thing you've been telling me we really need to get around to doing", cuz there's always at least like, 5 to 10 of those on the backlog anyways.

Seriously this.
Been in the industry for going on 15 years. Never happened the way this comic makes it out to be.
There is always work to be done. That employee ends up being a tech lead or IC and promoted.
Companies don't fire a whole team. They'll find ways to maximize that solution that automates a lot of work. Oh, you can automate a DB? Can you automate more things or train others to do the same?
And the whole team gets better and more creative work. I've watched my team evolve over and over. Ive jumped to a bunch of companies and continue seeing it happen.
It's hard enough getting good devs, so unless you work at a shit company, many hire real slow and often don't fire devs unless they're real bad apples.
And finally - Who the fuck wants to spend 8 hours making SQL queries manually? If your 40 hour job can be automated with a script, you're going to be unemployable regardless.
- Yes, this is completely unrealistic. No tenured IT professional is just going to announce that they've doubled workflow efficiency overnight. They'll slow play the improvements until it becomes absolutely necessary to reveal them, and then act like they've been putting in extra work when in reality they've been spending 6 hours a day writing new Quake 3 mods.
If they really needed to get around to doing that, the boss would've already hired another employee to do that task.
Not doing so implies that paying someone just for that task wouldn't be worth it.
That does not change when a worker becomes available from somewhere else.
- If they really needed to get around to doing that, the boss would’ve already hired another employee to do that task.
  This one made me laugh pretty hard, very great joke hahahaha
  (Almost always, no, no one was hired to do the thing, its been on the backlog for a year now but everyone is way too busy to do it)
- You missed the part where the employee was the one saying it was important, not the boss. And a lot of those tasks aren’t things you can just hand off to a new person, anyway - e.g., tech debt on software.
There are no good bosses.
The system is shit.

My job never wanted to fire people. They just made working conditions so poor that people quit.

This is what most places I've been at did even when I was the newbie in the OP
"Oh, you helped us with some basic IT knowledge and can do even more for us later if we keep you and don't treat you like shit? How about I get 6in or less from your face and scream so loudly that your ears ring a little when I'm done?"
- Next time they do that, get a hammer, and wreck his fucking mouth.
  Abusing your employees should hurt in ways doctors can't fix.
- That's assault. Record that next time and get yourself a settlement.

Never give more than 70%

- The thing is, you can just use whatever resources you don't need for your job in some place where the principle you mentioned applies.
- This is an interesting perspective. I've seen both sides of the coin. I've personally had hard work pay off significantly and at the same time it is what I wanted to do personally to challenge myself. I didn't have to.
  I've also seen incredibly hard workers lied to and promised things only later to be told did you get it in writing?
  It is hard to have your perspective when the job is menial, imo. Not a ton of personal growth as a garbage man or general laborer.
- Nice, Cradle in the wild. I'm two books down currently

never do more work than you need to. only do enough work to not get fired.

I don't find this comic funny. Too real.

Cute cartoon (*♡∀♡).

Can we please make this a meme-free space?

For the person now jobless, sure.
- And an increased efficiency. Having an automated system instead of a person entering data into tables manually means data processing is done faster, serving the customer better. There's a reason humanity didn't stay with tribalism and industrialized instead.