Been seeing all the news about Malaysia's economy growing, attracting FDI, and creating "high-value" jobs. But then I look at my own day-to-day, and I have to wonder, is this true?

I see so many of my friends and colleagues in professional roles with those canggih-canggih titles – Analysts, Specialists, Executives, and bla bla bla.

But honestly, when we talk about our actual work, a common theme emerges: massive amount of our time is spent on manual work.

Manually copy-pasting everything, line by line, into our internal systems.

Double-checking everything by eye, just hoping there is no typo.

Sending the same follow-up emails over and over.

I have talked with my friends in similar roles and it is the same story, sometimes even worse in the SMEs.

So it got me thinking... maybe this is why many of us feel stuck at the lower chain of the job. We, Malaysian seen as "efficient" because our labor is cheaper, not because our processes are actually smart. Our value is measured by how fast we can do the manual work, not how much we can improve the process.

I am genuinely trying to figure out if I am just in my "comfort zone" surrounded by these kinds of jobs, or if this is a really common thing for professionals in Malaysia.

So, I wanted to ask everyone here:

How much of your job is actually 'thinking' work that requires your brain vs just manual, copy-paste grunt work that makes you feel like a robot?

If this is a common thing, why do you think it's still like this? Is it just the classic culture of 'it's always been this way'? Are the bosses kedekut to pay for better software? Or do they just not know how much time this stuff really takes up?

And for those who have managed to escape this cycle, I really want to know: What is your 'life hack'? What software, crazy Excel macro, or new process did you find that actually worked? And the million-dollar question: how did you convince your boss to actually approve it?

Keen to hear your thoughts. Is it just me being siok sendiri here, or is this a shared frustration for many of us? Would be great to hear from all angles too. If you are a decision maker or tauke, what are the real challenges in changing these old processes?

If I can earn a good salary, I honestly dun mind those manual copy paste, eye checking and follow up work. It's simple work if the pay is good

If you are a programmer and needs to solve issues and bugs... you can't just cut and paste... you need to understand the program, the flow of information and debug the issue. But sadly a lot of half passed six 'programmers' out there that also just cut and paste without understanding the underlying process and when issues cropped up and they could not solved it, they just shift company.

Anyway you need to move up the job chain. There is always a ceiling pay for certain jobs. Move up the job market. Don't get stuck with the same job title doing the same thing again and again and expect the salary to increased exponentially. Move up to manage people.

when you got into senior or management role your job scope will be different. It really depends on which sector your in also. I dont mind doing work checking and stuff...its part of the job responsibility

sometimes not just about manual jobs. It's people management if no ppl management why need managers right, just executive and boss enough.

This post has been edited by blmse92: Aug 21 2025, 09:37 AM

summary: pick the right job

if u pick the job that only doing repeat and routine job ..then either wait until someone implement automation or even AI then can bye bye your role

I think the bottom line is all about figures & KPI.

As long as hit the KPI, don't care with what method, if by copying and paste and manage to hit the KPI, then it's all good?

Of course if you want to achieve more, than set a higher KPI?

Jump/change job every 3/5 years ..
U ll get there...

sooner or later AI will take over everything...There is no safe job exists

But the problem is, copy-paste and simple tasks don’t pay well...

Then that is really bad, any idea what range of salary earned?

that is 2020.

now AI write the code, u giving command,

programmer need to become train master or project manager already.

sad true.


as of now, u don't even need to know any coding already can easily build a apps or software or html with AI.

you want to think? go into manufacturing production or quality assurance and deal with production nonconformance and customer complaints. be good enough and get training in iso standards you'll probably be promoted to regulatory affairs, which ironically is back to copy paste

I completely agree what you said in terms of personal development. However, that still doesn’t change the fact that there are many low value-added jobs in the market, which is one of the main reasons our salaries remain stagnant, right?

agree..thats why now i am creating more AI to patch all the gaps (and make myself jobless)

jobless when ai replace you.

u will remain job if u able to control the ai to do your job.

which field you are in now? and what post?

If u want more money, the real question is, are u actually worth it?
If u are just repeating your job every year for 5 years, doing the same thing every day, are u really more valuable then 5 years ago in term of skillset?
It's not that u had X years experience so u should get X pay, its the matter of the value u can provide.

One of my annual checklist, in my profession career, am I more capable thn last year? Can I resolve something which I cant on my previous year? Did I learned something that I never knew last year? If u wanted to nego for more salary, the only thing really matter is your value, X years of experience is unconvincing

One of my life quote
"Doing the same thing every day won't make tomorrow different."

Reason salary is stuck is because Malaysians are not doing high value work. I worked both in Malaysia, and Europe for many years now.

Unfortunately low cost is just not good enough. First, it's difficult to compete with other low cost countries such as India for IT and China for manufacturing.

Next is Malaysia doesn't really offer a lot of good skilled workers to solve complex problems. Working in UK now, I do most of the design and solution while I offshore the actual work to staff in India and Malaysia

If you can provide high value work it might be more beneficial to move to a place that can make use of your skills because having better opportunities doesn't just happen overnight

Chicken and egg problem. High value work exists in places with highly skilled employees, and if a place have shortage of such people it is likely to receive less skilled work.

I'm in FMCG Manufacturing and this field really requires a lot of thinkers. Weekly production meeting is always a warzone and it's interesting to see the different minds collaborate.

Example we suddenly have a shortage of supply of critical raw materials from China because yada yada murica send some warship near one of their ports and distrupt shipment. Next month's production thrown to disarray.

Sales starting to come in and demand their customers are given a priority. Each claiming their customer is the most important and critical.
Warehouse and Materials begging Finance to let them purchase more buffer stock and airfreight, but Finance refuse because it cost money and result in more loss. Ask sales tell customer to suck it.

Purchaser start to make calls around to see which is the nearest alternative supply. See which alternative materials they can secure. From there everyone collaborate again to see which customer to save and which customer to give them the middle finger. Sales makes a pitch of each customer's prospect to justify which order to fulfill.

I would say most of those people in the meeting room and their key assistant are well paid. AI will struggle to replace these function because every situation is unique. There's a lot of emotion, broad strategic thinking which AI simply cannot replicate.

This post has been edited by Mixxomon: Aug 21 2025, 06:14 PM

I have only worked in Malaysia and Singapore to compare.
Working in Malaysia have 2 extreme sides. Companies which are too comfortable with what and how they are doing things, will not improve. Therefore I have been doing the ‘same thing’ despite being in IT field. These are usually GLC.
Companies where the bosses keep changing and flipping their mind always, the staff need to change strategy or direction every other month before seeing that fruit. End results are the same…both do not progress. Keep beating round the bush at the same spot.

Then comes Singapore…I think it’s the culture of Singaporean to keep learning and keep improving (could also be the reason why they complain a lot). They complain but they work to find a solution for it. The companies have vision and they actually want to improve. Always in discussion about optimisation, improve quality and increase productivity or efficiency.

Apart from currency, I think it’s the value that you get from the employee. In Asia we have offshore offices in Malaysia, China and Vietnam. The brain is in Singapore and a few key positions are in China. Malaysia and Vietnam is just kaki tangan…and between the 2, the malaysia office productivity is lower.

I have a thinking job coz when I was doing stuff like what you are doing now, I always thought about what I am doing and try to improve it. I always made out of the box suggestions when the term "out of the box" was not yet prevalent in the business world. Other than identifying problems, I also came up with potential solutions.

I was not very good at selling myself or speaking up in meetings which is why my growth was a bit slow. If you are an extrovert and willing to speak up and throw ideas, your chances of moving up the value chain would be better and faster too.

Always learn as much as possible about the underlying things that you are working on. This is the biggest problem with most people, other than basic follow SOP stuff, they don't understand what and why they are doing certain things. Grasping the nuances, and the 5Ws will get you far.

our sistem pendidikan want you work and debt until die.
18 tahun sudah pandai BNPL
65 tahun masih lagi tak boleh pencen.

have the right mindset. the more valuable problems you solve for the company, the better your pay. map your growth by seeing what your superior has that you don’t, and work towards it to move up. since your tasks are repetitive, try using AI to boost speed and accuracy. i often rely on autohotkey, excel vba and python scripts for this. just explain what you need to chatgpt, get a script, and fine-tune it through trial and error.

Process is not a technology problem.

Its a people problem.

Many of our GLCs for example, its a culture of incompetency. So they build processes around it, expecting each person to be a monkey. Then if you're a competent person, you'll find the processes too restrictive

The talents then all leave the company and eventually you get the same monkeys designing the processes. That's how you get super inefficient processes

Being the top 2 in my company in terms of seniority and salary, i can tell you the higher you go the less manual work you're doing.

As Elon once said, his role is just to make 1-2 important decision a day and plan mid and long term strategic directions.

Wait until you ask it to do a real maintainable code. It will fall apart. The amount of code is simply too overwhelming.

what kind of poor company in 2025 not using copilot.

data entry, data validation, cleanup of erronous data, follow up emails all done by copilot

Copy pasting is not the hard part. It's whether the copied thing is correct or not. Same applies to AI. It is just a tool to help you brainstorm.

In the end you'll be the one to be responsible for the thing you get from it

Personally for me, my career jumped after I get into a MNC company that has sky high growth, after they've been impressed with the cert I got from a 1 year training program from Peneraju (unfortunately for bumi only..)

EMS industry, senior analyst

I only the market rate in Penang EMS industry.
MNC junior position 3k to senior position 9.5k

Data entry, data validation, data cleanup, and follow-up emails are all done by Copilot? Really? Mind sharing more? I am really interested to know about this.

salary low so management profit high, plus

malaysian government dun want smart people who can think analytically and act on it

cause they will be out of government

out of government means no crony projects

no crony projects means cannot retire overseas with a millions

This post has been edited by Redhunt: Aug 22 2025, 12:49 PM

everyday i hear my managers talk bullshit because AI gives them bullshit.

AI rots the brain.

if copy paste and manual check i can earn rm9.5k, unker will be damn happy leh

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot-outlook


https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot-excel

for the data stuff i mostly use copilot and power automate.

once business user gets data, power automate will fill in the data to central source, copilot will then take and see where to put this data in excel

can do basic data analysis too now

example is Microsoft forms data, from the responses, you can just tell copilot to "send teams link to all who want to join online, and send calendar invite for meeting room 1 for those who want physical meeting" end to end it can do

Yup we still have lots of low value-added jobs in the market that has a ceiling to their salaries. These jobs are usually entry levels and usually get you started to gain experience and should be considered as a stepping stone to move on to other jobs but sometimes the process is quite complicated, it ended up being the main job with very little progress. That's when the person got stuck with the stagnant job and salary.

actually i know some company in cambodia, fully using Ai Agent to do the programing already

they been develop a software for 2 years with 20 developer, scrapped it and redo with Ai Agent + a LLM.
done in 2 months with 10 developer running 24/7 coding.

now the software already sold to bank..........

What you are referring to is scaling the process, or scalability...

Scalability has its pros and cons... When you talk about mass-production, products / work may be pushed fast in controlled quality, but scalability can and most often come with the limitation of lacking niche-based innovation.

For example, technology / system that is commonly used in the world is like Proton cars... The same way as you are scaling with the stated tech, it doesn't separate you from using Proton...

So, this is where certain form of manual work comes in.. Much like Nissan GTR or even Bentley, these kinds of laborous work building a car can offer a different form of standard and performance versus the widely-produced deliverables.

My job is both thinking (architectural planning), automated, and also manual... I am also mostly the decision-maker in the digital ecosystem for the MNC situated here...

Like any firms you work in ---- big-sized MNCs or small ---- you would be bound to have limitations of financial and operational controls....

As such, not every systems can be sought due to budgeting reasons or whatsoever out there...

But again, you would also have to consider long-term trajectory (or competition) in thought... I am working in a field where there are major and established players with heavily-stacked investments worth hundreds of thousands to millions poured-in by our own competitors individually, and we are late into the manufacturing market... With all these stacked up, and with the current team you possess, you need to consider if scaling is truly needed, or if slow, but technically-centered innovation is preferred... In my case, I chose the latter, and mostly now it's manual effort but it's taken us to greater heights and have yielded the much-wanted results...

This post has been edited by Hastebreak: Aug 25 2025, 02:00 AM

Boss needs to buy Mercedes, government needs to suck boss to buy Lamborghini, that's why we get peanut as our salary.

Have fun maintaining it down the road.

this i no idea, hahaha