5 ms·

> I do maybe two hours of work a week This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the company 8 hours a week because somebody was doin

> I do maybe two hours of work a week This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the company 8 hours a week because somebody was doing by hand what I did in a few lines of code. Is that "positive value"? Sure, I made the company more efficient, but what's this person doing now? Did I make their job "more pointless"? I mean, I can't see what I did as a bad thing per se but... I just don't know how it plays out in the end. I feel like there's a huge piece of the "work" puzzle that's missing in our culture.

adtiustErn 10y ago
You are describing the paradox of our work as programmers: when we do our job well, we are automating away tasks so they don't have to be done by hand, so there isn't any more work to do. When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could easily maintain what I had left behind. And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should work; people should think."
mysterydip 10y ago
When I was a contractor, some of the applications and scripts I wrote took hours of work per day off of people. I was actually thanked because now they actually had time to do their "real" job instead of a bunch of tedious data entry or whatever. So while you may be automating some jobs away, you may be freeing others.
patmcguire 10y ago
Yeah, I spent a day writing a tool that saved 5-6 people 4 hours a day, every day. Copying data from one system to another by ctrl+c ctrl-tab ctrl+v over and over again.
jpindar 10y ago
Would you feel the same way if you were an engineer who designed, say, electric saws? Would you then be harming people who used to have to use hand saws?

adtiustErn 10y ago

You are describing the paradox of our work as programmers: when we do our job well, we are automating away tasks so they don't have to be done by hand, so there isn't any more work to do. When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could easily maintain what I had left behind. And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should work; people should think."

mysterydip 10y ago

When I was a contractor, some of the applications and scripts I wrote took hours of work per day off of people. I was actually thanked because now they actually had time to do their "real" job instead of a bunch of tedious data entry or whatever. So while you may be automating some jobs away, you may be freeing others.

patmcguire 10y ago

Yeah, I spent a day writing a tool that saved 5-6 people 4 hours a day, every day. Copying data from one system to another by ctrl+c ctrl-tab ctrl+v over and over again.

jpindar 10y ago

Would you feel the same way if you were an engineer who designed, say, electric saws? Would you then be harming people who used to have to use hand saws?