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Some years back I worked for a large corporation on a team that had a large number of "engineers" doing what seemed like pretty rudimentary work so I wrote a pr

Some years back I worked for a large corporation on a team that had a large number of "engineers" doing what seemed like pretty rudimentary work so I wrote a program to automate about 90% of the job functions. I thought I would be a hero and showed it to my boss. He asked me if it could be our "little secret" because he was afraid the whole team would be replaced including him.

leggomylibro 10y ago
See, the company should really be incentivizing this sort of thing. If you automate your team out of a job, great - you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job. Company saves a lot of money, workers are incentivized to this sort of behavior, and you could probably handle the upkeep by offering to keep one or two employees on at full pay if they'd prefer, or stipulating a day or two a month to perform any necessary maintenance on your automation. But that's probably a pipe dream; it would essentially mean funneling capital to those who produce value, which is apparently a ridiculous concept in this modern economy.
- ohazi 10y ago
  > you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job Boss: "Or, and take a minute to appreciate my cleverness before you respond, how about zero, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!" These improvements eventually materialize regardless of any incentives for this behavior. Perhaps it would come marginally sooner with an incentive. But since non-owner workers will no longer have a relationship where they provide continued value to their employer, the company is (correctly?) motivated to screw them over (think single vs. repeated prisoner's dilemma). The company could even pretend to offer the incentive to get these improvements sooner, and then fire them anyway. The game theoretic optimum for capital owners is to screw over their (soon-to-be former) employees. This is why some suggest a tax on automation -- there's a market externality here that isn't going to magically go away.
- whack 10y ago
  In most successful companies, the guy who came up with the idea and his manager will be heavily rewarded, and taken care of in a meaningful way. Everyone else is given some time to either find a different team to work for, or asked to leave and find another job where they are actually contributing something of value. Although this might seem tragic in the immediate aftermath, it's precisely activities like this which lead to GDP growth and economic prosperity. The biggest gains of course still go to the business owners and executives. Not the working class. Hence why we need higher taxes on the wealthy and a stronger social safety net.
iamacynic 10y ago
at a major legal industry firm, i had an ML project torpedoed even though it showed reasonable promise. i was fairly young at the time but now thinking back, this may have been part of it. i was an hourly consultant and they did pay me handsomely to do that little experiment though. can't complain. the world is a complicated place.
maxxxxx 10y ago
That's the stupidity of companies. Instead of people being afraid to automate their work they should be encouraged and rewarded.
- clarkmoody 10y ago
  Companies don't make decisions. People do.
  - grzm 10y ago
    True, though is the use of synecdoche in this instance make a significant difference?
    - clarkmoody 10y ago
      Yes it does. Disparaging "companies" for bad decision-making adds almost nothing of value to a conversation. Now if you want to talk about perverse incentives for first-line or middle managers in publicly-traded companies, etc, then let's have that conversation.
      - grzm 10y ago
        In your view is synecdoche every justified or useful? If so, can you provide an example?
        clarkmoody 10y ago
        As I understand it, nobody has used synecdoche in this conversation yet. The closest thing is metonymy, and even then, "companies" is way to broad for that. I think toponyms are fun (Silicon Valley / Wall Street).
      - maxxxxx 10y ago
        Personally I think you have added nothing to the conversation. Are you also correcting people who say "the government", "silicon valley", "France" or "the economy"?
Markoff 10y ago
was there significant incentive for you? sure, go for it, let those people lose jobs though it's sad some people do this even without any incentive not thinking about consequences of their actions, they just wanna brag how they improved things, they will not benefit in any way from this improvement, while it will make lives of fired people miserable and only one profiting from it will be company with higher profits for those few owners on top, do you really wanna support such thigs? but yeah, I was once young and idealistic too...
LrnByTeach 10y ago
based on your description of Manger and team, I assume the Team size is 5 to 6 people at least. If that company run so inefficiently that it could not identify 90% of work of a 6 people team can be replaced by bunch of programs, so asume that company or the division may be closed by now ( or severely down sized as competitors took their business ) It would be great if you can find out what happened to that team
Chathamization 10y ago
What's impressive is how much office work, from my experience, could easily be automated away. Not even with anything fancy - very simple scripts would be enough for a lot of stuff. It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  I hear this often, but have yet to see it in practice. I have worked in government and a number of underfunded non-profits who would dearly love to have some of these things automated. But in my experience it just shifts work. It automates something, requiring extra work somewhere else. Or it automates, but then breaks one, mission critical function that needs to be taken care of. I truly don't think this is just about "save my job", because they feel the pinch of lack of personal and funding, but about the difficulty in truly enumerating what the workflow actually is. Once you've paid a consultant to take care of it, you realize you forgot 3 steps in the process or that they were not listening when you described them.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Chathamization 10y ago
    I think a lot of people would be happy to implement this if they had the opportunity. In one office job I had a while back, I let my superiors know that I could write scripts to automate repetitive tasks, and they were more than happy to help me work with people to automate a lot of the processes. I'm talking about very simple operations. For instance, 100 different clients send in information in individual Excel spreadsheets, and the company wants to have a master file with all the info. So they literally have someone open one document, copy all the info on page 1 and paste it to a master file, then copy all the information from page 2 and paste it to the master file, etc. For each page and each file. This is something that's simple to automate, and less prone to error than copy and pasting hundreds of sections by hand. And once a script is made to automate it, it's a simple thing to run it each year. It's not even that organizations don't want to or try to automate stuff like this - check out how some of them multi-nested Excel formula then end up using in an effort to have some kind of automation. They just aren't familiar with much beyond Excel formula's (or perhaps some clunky proprietary software they struggle with). Like I said, in my experience organizations are happy to use automation if you can show them what it can do, but they often simply aren't aware of how much it can accomplish. And you need someone comfortable enough to run the script and make basic changes to it, and if that person leaves they're probably back to doing things by hand. It would be nice if people were taught at least enough about programming that they were able to write scripts to automate simple repetitive tasks.

leggomylibro 10y ago

See, the company should really be incentivizing this sort of thing. If you automate your team out of a job, great - you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job. Company saves a lot of money, workers are incentivized to this sort of behavior, and you could probably handle the upkeep by offering to keep one or two employees on at full pay if they'd prefer, or stipulating a day or two a month to perform any necessary maintenance on your automation. But that's probably a pipe dream; it would essentially mean funneling capital to those who produce value, which is apparently a ridiculous concept in this modern economy.

ohazi 10y ago
> you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job Boss: "Or, and take a minute to appreciate my cleverness before you respond, how about zero, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!" These improvements eventually materialize regardless of any incentives for this behavior. Perhaps it would come marginally sooner with an incentive. But since non-owner workers will no longer have a relationship where they provide continued value to their employer, the company is (correctly?) motivated to screw them over (think single vs. repeated prisoner's dilemma). The company could even pretend to offer the incentive to get these improvements sooner, and then fire them anyway. The game theoretic optimum for capital owners is to screw over their (soon-to-be former) employees. This is why some suggest a tax on automation -- there's a market externality here that isn't going to magically go away.
whack 10y ago
In most successful companies, the guy who came up with the idea and his manager will be heavily rewarded, and taken care of in a meaningful way. Everyone else is given some time to either find a different team to work for, or asked to leave and find another job where they are actually contributing something of value. Although this might seem tragic in the immediate aftermath, it's precisely activities like this which lead to GDP growth and economic prosperity. The biggest gains of course still go to the business owners and executives. Not the working class. Hence why we need higher taxes on the wealthy and a stronger social safety net.

iamacynic 10y ago

at a major legal industry firm, i had an ML project torpedoed even though it showed reasonable promise. i was fairly young at the time but now thinking back, this may have been part of it. i was an hourly consultant and they did pay me handsomely to do that little experiment though. can't complain. the world is a complicated place.

maxxxxx 10y ago

That's the stupidity of companies. Instead of people being afraid to automate their work they should be encouraged and rewarded.

clarkmoody 10y ago
Companies don't make decisions. People do.
- grzm 10y ago
  True, though is the use of synecdoche in this instance make a significant difference?
  - clarkmoody 10y ago
    Yes it does. Disparaging "companies" for bad decision-making adds almost nothing of value to a conversation. Now if you want to talk about perverse incentives for first-line or middle managers in publicly-traded companies, etc, then let's have that conversation.
    - grzm 10y ago
      In your view is synecdoche every justified or useful? If so, can you provide an example?
      - clarkmoody 10y ago
        As I understand it, nobody has used synecdoche in this conversation yet. The closest thing is metonymy, and even then, "companies" is way to broad for that. I think toponyms are fun (Silicon Valley / Wall Street).
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      Personally I think you have added nothing to the conversation. Are you also correcting people who say "the government", "silicon valley", "France" or "the economy"?

Markoff 10y ago

was there significant incentive for you? sure, go for it, let those people lose jobs though it's sad some people do this even without any incentive not thinking about consequences of their actions, they just wanna brag how they improved things, they will not benefit in any way from this improvement, while it will make lives of fired people miserable and only one profiting from it will be company with higher profits for those few owners on top, do you really wanna support such thigs? but yeah, I was once young and idealistic too...

LrnByTeach 10y ago

based on your description of Manger and team, I assume the Team size is 5 to 6 people at least. If that company run so inefficiently that it could not identify 90% of work of a 6 people team can be replaced by bunch of programs, so asume that company or the division may be closed by now ( or severely down sized as competitors took their business ) It would be great if you can find out what happened to that team

Chathamization 10y ago

What's impressive is how much office work, from my experience, could easily be automated away. Not even with anything fancy - very simple scripts would be enough for a lot of stuff. It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.

stinkytaco 10y ago
I hear this often, but have yet to see it in practice. I have worked in government and a number of underfunded non-profits who would dearly love to have some of these things automated. But in my experience it just shifts work. It automates something, requiring extra work somewhere else. Or it automates, but then breaks one, mission critical function that needs to be taken care of. I truly don't think this is just about "save my job", because they feel the pinch of lack of personal and funding, but about the difficulty in truly enumerating what the workflow actually is. Once you've paid a consultant to take care of it, you realize you forgot 3 steps in the process or that they were not listening when you described them.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Chathamization 10y ago
  I think a lot of people would be happy to implement this if they had the opportunity. In one office job I had a while back, I let my superiors know that I could write scripts to automate repetitive tasks, and they were more than happy to help me work with people to automate a lot of the processes. I'm talking about very simple operations. For instance, 100 different clients send in information in individual Excel spreadsheets, and the company wants to have a master file with all the info. So they literally have someone open one document, copy all the info on page 1 and paste it to a master file, then copy all the information from page 2 and paste it to the master file, etc. For each page and each file. This is something that's simple to automate, and less prone to error than copy and pasting hundreds of sections by hand. And once a script is made to automate it, it's a simple thing to run it each year. It's not even that organizations don't want to or try to automate stuff like this - check out how some of them multi-nested Excel formula then end up using in an effort to have some kind of automation. They just aren't familiar with much beyond Excel formula's (or perhaps some clunky proprietary software they struggle with). Like I said, in my experience organizations are happy to use automation if you can show them what it can do, but they often simply aren't aware of how much it can accomplish. And you need someone comfortable enough to run the script and make basic changes to it, and if that person leaves they're probably back to doing things by hand. It would be nice if people were taught at least enough about programming that they were able to write scripts to automate simple repetitive tasks.