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Coders Automating Their Own Job

• buboard 8y ago
  This is a non-issue. They should be talking instead about what an antiquated concept the 8 hour office work day is, especially for knowledge workers.
• browsercoin 8y ago
  when I did this at my last job they were like cool, can you automate this and this.... I learned that I was taken advantage of.
  • vajrabum 8y ago
    Hopefully you put that experience on your resume and got a higher wage at your next job putting your automation skills to good use.
• jmathai 8y ago
  I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought. We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements. This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspects of our current job. Build systems, pipelines, workflows, etc. It's nice to kid ourselves and think of it as work intended to improve productivity but from a company's point of view the value is decreasing overhead and cost which comes in the form needing 1 person to do the work instead of 10. Cross your fingers that you're the 1 and not one of the 9 :).
  • pathseeker 8y ago
    > I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought. You've just described the purpose of the entire software industry. Did it really not occur to you that writing systems to automate tasks would displace anyone doing those tasks manually?
    • jmathai 8y ago
      It did occur to me....at my last job.
  • cellularmitosis 8y ago
    No need to cross your fingers. The demand for software is still out-pacing the creation of new developers. Those 9 have nothing to worry about, other than perhaps dusting off their resume.
  • gitgud 8y ago
    Replacing yourself with something you built is what engineers should strive for. Engineering problems just move higher up in the stack. Few people are coding assembly code now days, and in the future few people would be writing in other low level languages.
• JakeWesorick 8y ago
  Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain. Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.
  • kyleblarson 8y ago
    https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/spanish-public-servant-skipped-work-for-a-decade/news-story/e7623219ac39c696812b368269b5ef59 https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/spanish-public-...
    • jlarocco 8y ago
      Not justifying what he did, but that's not possible without a major management failure.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
    It may or may not be a waste, but why do you believe it to be unethical? The employer employee job is a contractual one. When it is the company that sees me as an inefficiency I will be eliminated for the companies gain. Similarly when I the employee see an inefficiency in the company, I can eliminate (automate) it for my gain. This is the symmetry in the contractual relationship. To say that this relationship should be asymmetric is to grant even more power in the employer-employee relationship to the employer.
  • stronglikedan 8y ago
    It's only unethical if you're being paid hourly, where you're being paid to work a certain amount of time, and you're just sitting around goofing off while your scripts run. If you're getting paid salary, then you're getting paid to get the job done, regardless of how you do it. However, if part of your salaried job description is to find ways to do things more efficiently, and you don't share your efficiency implementation, then I can see how that would be unethical, but that is usually at the executive level, not the coder level.
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  If you're coding for a non-technical business, i.e. one in which they're not directly selling your productive output, then it's not hard at all to get to a point where your daily tasks don't take more than a few minutes a day. After all, it's other people that are actually driving the revenue. You can ask for more duties, but their capacity to define tasks for you is never going to outpace your ability to deliver. My advice is to not fight this state of affairs. Figure out your own way to stay productive. Divide up your spare time between coming up with ideas for your employer and doing side projects. Take long lunches with your coworkers and leave at 4. You can find happy professional nirvana but you have to believe in it first.
  • proverbialbunny 8y ago
    imho a great sweet spot is turning most of that free time into learning new skills. It's fun, productive, and not frowned upon, even if the class has nothing to do with the current job.
  • 3pt14159 8y ago
    The key for this type of setup is to make sure that they understand your job is like that of a security guard. You're there for when all your carefully coded alarms start going off. You're not there to help shovel the sidewalk because then you might miss your alarms. As long as that is properly understood you can get a contract that is permissive enough to allow you to work on something else at work when nothing is burning. Even if you have to offer a reduced salary, it's worth it. Another option is to go the work on OSS route, especially on tools you use for work. After a couple years of doing semi-fulltime OS work you'll be commanding double the salary.
    • vinceguidry 8y ago
      The key to this, and I meant to edit this into my comment, is to be super-responsive to any requests. Always be willing to drop whatever you're doing at a second's notice and help whoever it is that thinks you might be able to help them out. The word gets out and everyone in the company just loves you.
• anonu 8y ago
  As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into nothing... In practise, achieving some sort of "steady state" or status-quo doesn't work for a few reasons: 1. Inherent system complexity ensures something always breaks. Human attention is always needed. 2. Markets evolve rapidly due to technology changes, regulatory changes and the very nature of markets: Strategies and ideas that worked in the past cease to work in the future.
  • tynpeddler 8y ago
    A system that requires no outside intervention to perform its job optimally is equivalent to a solved problem. So quants will be out of a job once we understand how to perfectly trade on the stock market.
    • TheAlchemist 8y ago
      Which by definition is impossible... Once two different traders discover how to 'perfectly' trade, the game changes and as they say 'here we go again'
      • munk-a 8y ago
        I disagree, the solution to remove stock market traders is to figure out a way to examine financial data and projections to such a fine degree that stock trading is no longer a sensible thing. Imagine a currency trader focused on USD & CAD, what would happen to their job if Canada decided to permanently pin their currency on the USD with a guaranteed exchange of .5 USD for 1 CAD, the markets surrounding arbitraging the currency would dissolve as .5 USD would always be 1 CAD (now in the real world there might be stability speculators, if Canada was viewed as politically unstable there might be a purpose to purchase .4 USD for 1 CAD, but ignore that for the purpose of the scenario).
• darawk 8y ago
  The employer is paying you for the product, not the effort. I see no moral quandary here, nor any compulsion to notify the employer. They're getting what they want, that should be the end of it. EDIT: And I would add, for anyone that has automated their job in this way...what you should really be doing is scaling it up, and finding other companies who are probably paying employees to do the same thing. Then start your own company that does whatever this task is as a service.
  • knorthfield 8y ago
    Maybe we both have loose morals but I don't see it as cheating the employer anymore than one "cheats" an employer by driving to work instead of walking.
    • hon 8y ago
      >I don't see it as cheating the employer anymore than one "cheats" an employer by driving to work instead of walking Can you expand on this? I don't understand the anology
      • reificator 8y ago
        It seems like they're accounting for commute in hours worked, which doesn't make any sense. Perhaps they're saying that the employer has to (indirectly) pay for a parking lot to accommodate them?
        • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
          I'd say it's that driving is easier for you, but they get the same result - you attend as necessary. They shouldn't care how you get there as long as you do your job.
  • pathseeker 8y ago
    >and finding other companies who are probably paying employees to do the same thing. Then start your own company that does whatever this task is as a service. Careful, if it gets out that you wrote the code to automate your job as a coder while actually at your job, your company most likely owns that IP.
• eindiran 8y ago
  I've automated large chunks of my job away, but I've never felt that I ended up not having things left to do as a result. There are always more tasks to automate and more problems to solve. I get the impression from these stories that the dishonest part of what the self-automaters are doing is that they could do other tasks and use automation to increase their productivity, but instead chose to keep their productivity the same and relax with the extra downtime.
  • zyang 8y ago
    Just curious, what's in your automation toolbox?
    • eindiran 8y ago
      I usually write scripts in Python or Bash, depending on the task. I've had a fair amount of success using a cron for scheduling, but I've come to really enjoy using Jenkins for automated tasks. A lot of tasks make sense to trigger off of events other than the time and Jenkins is quite flexible in that regard.
      • gaius 8y ago
        Some kinds of automation only create more work. Looking at you, Chef.
        • __blockcipher__ 8y ago
          Heh. I’m an intern on the ops team at a small-medium company (just under 150 employees, at least 50 or so engineers, ~$20 mil rev), and we use Chef for configuration management. I’ve observed that some members of the ops team are actually afraid to converge servers. I also find the precedence rules, node variable (?) rules etc to be horrifically confusing. I haven’t worked with Ansible before, but it sounds more similar to how I would implement it if I hacked away at the problem for a few months (my understanding is ansible basically just lets you run arbitrary scripts thru ssh). Being able to have chef integration tests (or are they considered unit tests?) seems really powerful. But holy fuck does Chef have a ton of (what feels to me like) cruft
• wvenable 8y ago
  It should be noted that programmers are not automating themselves out of programming jobs. They're automating themselves out of data entry, or testing, or any number of other mindless tasks easily done by computers.
  • thaumaturgy 8y ago
    We may not (yet) be able to automate ourselves out of programming jobs, but we can certainly leverage smart development practices into making the job a lot less labor-intensive. I'm experiencing a shift in that thinking right now. I write reusable, modular, tested code. My co-workers don't. I use a project management system (Phabricator, on my own personal server, which I maintain); the company doesn't. For most of the last year, I've used these to produce more and better code than others have, but my responsibilities have only expanded while my pay hasn't. I've vocally evangelized these practices and I'd love nothing more than to see them get adopted by the other developers, but so far it's not getting any traction. So I'm shifting towards logging the value of the work I produce -- regardless of whether I'm just copying in a file from my extensive library -- rather than the time it took me to accomplish the task. And starting to look for a new job.
    • dropit_sphere 8y ago
      Hopping or starting a company to sell your work are becoming the fastest ways to get "promoted."
      • kradroy 8y ago
        I was going to suggest this from my experience. I hate to burst GP's bubble, but the attitude and environment at his next job probably won't be any better in regard to "best practices." It's extremely difficult to gauge how your attitude toward development compares with a prospective team's after an hour of chatting. I became a manager last year and quickly discovered that changing others' behavior and habits is next to impossible. And if he does happen to find a new team that matches his work ethic he can be certain that 1 or 2 years down the line it won't any longer. I think the only two ways to avoid this is to become a contractor and switch gigs every 2 years, or start your own company and hope the people you hire share your attitude.
• jtcond13 8y ago
  Inter Alia, this article is another piece of evidence that a lot of pretty smart people are stuck in jobs that aren’t very complex. The accumulated cost of this to the rest of us is quite high...
• amarant 8y ago
  The real story is that management didn't hire someone to automate these tasks in the first place! That's what we have software for, do boring stuff so we don't have to! By automating these people proved themselves to be developers, and not just software-in-a-meatbag, or SIAM, if you will.
• JoblessWonder 8y ago
  One of the only discussions I've "Favorited" on Hacker News was related to this: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job? " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
• sharadov 8y ago
  I see this possible in only 2 kinds of organizations 1. Very large - where you are a practically a number and work in a department buried deep. 2. Small - where there is a reasonable amount of technology but no desire or budget to upgrade. It's working, so don't touch it.
• meritt 8y ago
  I look forward to the blog post in a few years with someone detailing how they're earning $1M/yr because they have 20 data-entry jobs they've fully automated.
• carapace 8y ago
  I once landed a job by telling the CEO something like, "If you're doing it right, programming is all about replacing yourself with automation." In Cybernetics there is a formal measure called Variety which is something like a limit or measure of complexity of a system. Programming can be considered the art of extracting the low-variety parts of a process into automation, leaving the high-variety parts to the (high-variety) humans. This process itself is low-variety. Therefore, from first principles, programming is automatable. Our programming environments will eventually look like automatic systems that we instruct with our intentions, and then they consult us as oracles to determine the high-variety parts of the necessary process, having automatically computed the low-variety parts. In fact, this is already happening as fast as people can accept it. The limiting factor is not in the machines (they are already superbly fast) but in the psychology of the people involved. Most of the research and much of the technology already exists and is in many cases decades old. (Cf. "The Mother of All Demos" and Prolog.) As time goes on, given the exponential nature of the meta-process, it will feel like a step function for many of us: one day relevant and employable, then the next day replaced by a machine and unemployable, and unable to learn the next thing fast enough to beat the masses of your peers competing against you in the same boat. I realized all this years ago, and have been asking peers and coworkers, "If you could write a program that could replace yourself, would you?" However, to date, no one has taken the question seriously. I find this article, appearing in a non-geek publication, to very heart-warming. Maybe people are finally catching on? Anyhow, this is why e.g. Universal Basic Income is important: You're going to need it sooner rather than later. Unless there is some essential economic activity that humans can perform that machines can't we are all on the "discard pile" of history. I actually think we'll just mellow out and enter a Golden Age, but again, only as fast as we can accept it. Certainly the Universe is willing for us to live in peace and harmony, it's up to us to choose to, or not.
  • Kim_Bruning 8y ago
    > "If you could write a program that could replace yourself, would you?" I've done it a bunch of times, sometimes by accident. In one case I was going to be assigned to do testing every evening. But I wanted to go home at 6 every day, so I automated the tests on my first day, then came back in the morning and started 'working on my next task'; never realizing that previously the testing job had been a full time position. I ended up doing about 5 people's worth of work there that summer. Of course, it's probably because the project wasn't particularly organized, and our team was explicitly given a free hand to find inefficiencies and fix them. Still, it's a nice story to tell people ;-)
• gaahrdner 8y ago
  Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
• megamindbrian2 8y ago
  I use a calendar pretty heavily to stay on task. I automatically accepted meeting invites because my job was so boring going to meetings was probably the only good part. My managers found out I accepted them automatically and told me to turn it off. Instead of turning it off I put a 5 minute delay on the invite receipt. I was laid off for "attitude problems".
  • pensatoio 8y ago
    I don’t get it. What’s wrong (morally or otherwise) with automatically accepting meeting invites.
    • megamindbrian2 8y ago
      They said I didn't look at a meeting so they were mad when I'd show up a minute or two late. Of course no one cares when other managers showed up a minute or two late. This was at Charles Schwab. I'd never work or invest there.
  • anticensor 8y ago
    You should have implemented a probabilistic acceptor with probability around ½.
• cortesoft 8y ago
  > Wary self-automators, he speculates, “don’t trust our workplaces. The boss is going to say thank you, good work, now do it again.” Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things. There are an INFINITE number of useful things we need to do as a society, so we shouldn't be upset if we automate one of them away. Move on to the next. Of course, programmers should make sure they negotiate strongly to get compensated fairly for the work. I think it is a bit short sighted, however, to worry that you will end up like the guy who automated his job and was then fired and replaced by a lower skilled guy - who cares, you SHOULD move on at that point if the company doesn't want you to automate something else. There are plenty of companies that will hire you, and you can use the example of the previous company to show you can do it. This time, negotiate better compensation.
  • crispyambulance 8y ago
    > Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things. I think that many of these scenarios are occurring when NON-programmers realize that their jobs are automate-able and they set out to automate them. It means picking up new skills, practicing them and putting them to use without the consent nor permission of management. It is not necessarily an easy path, it takes time, and there's going to be trial and error involved and although the discussion is about automating 100% of a job away, there's many other possible outcomes such as effort-multiplication, getting rid of the grunt work and gaining more time to focus on deeper problems. This is effectively "out-of-band" work that is a great experience for the individual but which _many_ organizations do not condone. A LOT of workplaces don't tolerate workers doing stuff that they're not being "told" to do.
    • m000 8y ago
      What if you automated your job on your own free time?
      • bradknowles 8y ago
        Then they get to pay you less because you work fewer hours to do the same job. Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.
• jefe_ 8y ago
  These days I'm much more inclined to automate my own job than someone else's. It seems many of the times I've taken extra steps to more fully automate other people's tasks, it's had the adverse effect of alerting them that even further automation is possible and they inevitably ask, "why can't you just automate the whole thing?" I then proceed to spend about 7 minutes frustrated and determined to automate their entire job away before cooling down and simply adding them to my list of "non-client people who think I should work hard so they can be lazy."
• yhoiseth 8y ago
  This reminds me of Toyota, which (allegedly) never let anyone off after process improvements, because that would undermine the trust which is necessary for employees to feel safe when suggesting improvements. These stories seem to me like management failures — leaders haven’t built the necessary trust.
• jt2190 8y ago
  We need a HOWTO for Job Automators that addresses things like: * when to automate versus when to quit and start a company * who owns the code, and how to find out * when/if/how to reveal the automation to your employer * etc. (edit: Mentioned in the article was this book: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, by Al Sweigart: https://nostarch.com/automatestuff#content https://nostarch.com/automatestuff#content)
• bpchaps 8y ago
  One thought that keeps me awake at night is that my past automation work has cost others their jobs. I understand that that's "how the world works", but it still deeply affects me that people have lost their livelihoods because of my actions.
  • goshx 8y ago
    Now I'm curious to know what you created.
  • munk-a 8y ago
    I understand this guilt but it doesn't belong to you. We're rapidly entering a post-scarcity economy and most of the western world are employed in service industries anyways. I think the lack of more societal guarantees to survival is a critical issue especially in the US, it'd be nice to see UBI or alternatives explored more and rolled out so that losing one of these tedium jobs isn't devastating on the former employee.
    • bpchaps 8y ago
      Yeah, probably. My career started in a job that could have easily been automated, but never was (intentionally). So in a lot of ways, I feel indebted to it and the idea of entry level tech jobs, because it allowed me to build a career without a degree. From that experience, it feels kind of sad that certain automation can displace potential careers.
  • bigjimmyk3 8y ago
    It's possible that your automation saved jobs by enabling your former employer / client to remain solvent. Sometimes the choice is not "30 jobs without automation or 10 jobs with automation," but rather "10 jobs with automation or 0 jobs without automation."
  • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    That makes no sense. If people were doing jobs that could literally be replaced by automation, they were not great jobs and either soul destroying or they would have gone away anyway. Progress enables productivity which is a net win for everyone, your work has contributed to productivity a LOT more than the work of the people who needed to move on. Without technology we’d almost all be in poverty.
• mikestew 8y ago
  What's disappointing is the opening story of the QA guy who automated his job and then proceeded to spend time playing video games. To each their own how to use new-found efficiency, but if this person had truly automated their job in 50 hours, I'll bet someone within the company could find him something more interesting to do, for a lot more money.
  • auxym 8y ago
    I read r/financialindependence from time and time, and it's not uncommon for me to read about people who have nothing to do at their job. From their account, they ask for more work, but nothing comes, and they spend their days redditing and watching youtube. Thus, they want to retire ASAP as they find this mind-numbing. This is completely bewildering for me. All managers I've had were always eager to pile on more work on my desk when I was starting to look like I was finishing something, sometimes to a fault. Is it a US thing? Have you guys experienced something like that? What is it, something like having to keep people around to justify budgets?
• outworlder 8y ago
  I am currently trying to automate my job. This will allow me to focus on more important issues. In other words, I am automating away the job I don't want to do, to focus on the job that I want to to, and that will bring more value for the company. I don't expect the workload to ever decrease, just that our team will be able to tackle bigger issues.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• monkeydust 8y ago
  I am currently building and selling software that automates fx and fixed income otc traders out of a job.... Or rather....allows them to spend more time on higher value tasks (so goes the theory!) It's fairly addictive automation, I'm finding all sort of functions and jobs that could / should be automated to the growing frustration of my colleagues :-)
• gaius 8y ago
  Many years ago, one of the secretaries was on holiday and the big boss asked me to write a program that, unbeknownst to me at the time, completely automated her job away. When she came back she came to me in tears, couldn't believe I had stabbed her in the back like that. Well this story has a happy ending, the boss did it so he could promote her, he just thought it would be a nice surprise! But ever since then I have been very conscious of the power we have and I try to work on new things, not merely automating away old ones. I make the exception obviously for using automation to bring work back in-house that had previously been outsourced or offshored. Those jobs are already destroyed, and automation always improves the quality and turnaround.
  • onemoresoop 8y ago
    I wonder why you got downvoted as I am always wary of what that kind of (sneaky) direct job automation can cause to the people who are discarded.
• gravy 8y ago
  How do I find a job I can automate away?
  • abledon 8y ago
    look for excel heavy data entry jobs
    • morenoh149 8y ago
      any other tips? what if you have plenty of experience programming, wouldn't it be too obvious?
      • yurishimo 8y ago
        I would imagine that you wouldn't want to disclose that information. There are a lot of businesses out there who want people with GEDs to do simple data entry. That's probably where I would start looking. Maybe craigslist or similar?
      • abledon 8y ago
        - I see your background is heavy in tech... we dont see these types of resumes normally - yeah, i used to work on aproject for 4 years, it never saw the light of day because the people and business processes werent in place. I'm interested in exploring the non-programming side of business , the people relationships, (insert whatever aspects of position your applying for here)
  • undreren 8y ago
    I’ve wondered the same thing. I’d appreciate a 4 hours per week-ish job that I could exploit.
• forinti 8y ago
  It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.
  • Raphmedia 8y ago
    Funny, I've always seen it the opposite way. The employer earns my work by giving me a salary. My work has a value and the employer pays for it. The minute they stop paying me, my offer cease and they lose any future value I might have brought them. Maybe it's because I did a lot of freelance and agency work before working a full time contract.
    • drawkbox 8y ago
      Unless they got you on that non-compete for 2-3+ years on that 6 month contract, at that point you are their value and everything you brought was theirs, nevermind they might not have had the value if you hadn't brought/created it.
      • Raphmedia 8y ago
        You shouldn't sign something like this. Over here (Montréal) there's right to work laws and precedents that makes it so that those clauses are pretty much null if they keep you from working. Non-compete pretty much only protects the employers from having a direct competitor recruiting their employees.
  • riazrizvi 8y ago
    David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, says people have been conditioned to insist that you can't be productive without suffering in the process, and he goes on to makes a case for Universal Income (because modern society is productive enough to feed and house everyone). I think it misses the point. People want a job where they grow as human beings, and you can't grow without suffering/trial. Pointless jobs are depressing. If you figure out how to get paid without doing anymore work, that's cool, but then what are you going to do? If you want to grow and make society a better place, it's better to find something else to do, either with the same company or somewhere better that isn't so dysfunctional.
• stuntkite 8y ago
  "There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first." This was a pretty good article until the conclusion. It's like he's totally unaware that all the information is already shared. I guess it could be a weird plea for some sort of blockchain union or something. Homie should just google "task automation github".
• User23 8y ago
  This is why equity is the best compensation and it’s going to be even more important to negotiate for it as our profession evolves. You can never be automated out of your equity. If you create something that generates continuous value for your employer, you should share in that.
• lucas_membrane 8y ago
  The opposite also happens. Almost fifty years ago at a large insurance operation in downtown Los Angeles, there was a programmer who programmed and maintained a suite of reporting programs. But his programming skills were limited, so he was actually just keypunching the needed reports into his programs as hard-coded data. If you get what you pay for, why care?
• Itaxpica 8y ago
  This can be good when companies and incentive structures are set up to reward it. The entire concept at the core of SRE is "if you have skilled engineers do your ops work, they'll automate as much as possible, freeing up their time to work on bigger and more interesting problems". At Google, automating a huge swath of your own job is one of the fastest ways for an SRE to get promoted.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• imh 8y ago
  If you wanted to only work 2 hours per week, do you think there's a place in the industry for you? Maybe for a freelancer or consultant or anything else where you are outside the company, but there's no place for this internally anywhere, no matter how efficient you are with those two hours. As long as that's the case, people will be incentivized to hide how efficient they can be. The article suggests at the end that these people have a strong position to negotiate, and I wish it were true, but I just don't see it ever happening :(
• amelius 8y ago
  Interesting. Now I want to read about doctors and lawyers automating their own jobs.
• pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  I wonder if management would be happier if you said "I'm going to quit and be a consultant, our company will do my current role for 80% of what you're currently paying me." ? Not only does that release you from the unnecessary expense of going to work, it frees the company some space and employment expenses too. They save money on getting the task completed, so that can be labelled as a management win "we outsourced and saved with no drop in quality". In addition you are free to do the same for other businesses. Or indeed to sell extra seats of your solution and put your former colleagues out of work.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulriddle 8y ago
    It is a smart decision, but still it's better to build something solid before you start consulting: an online presence, a blog, a podcast, network of people who know you, etc. So that your former employer is not your only source on consulting gigs. But even then, most companies would refuse, because it means they have to contact their legal department to draft a contract, and change their workflow to accomodate for you, an external entity. I've seen people transition from employees to consultants for one company, it was very smooth though. It's just that some companies would have a kneejerk reaction of "errr, dude, listen, whatever, man, just if you're leaving, then you're leaving, if not, then not, this consulting stuff, I don't think anybody would approve of, so no, either you stay as you are, or leave, sorry." Because they don't think it's important, they don't value you, and don't really care, so by becoming a consultant you're presenting a problem and additional work for them, they would rather avoid it, especially if avoiding it is the easiest thing to do - nothing. HR will find somebody to replace you. Or it may work out how you described, especially if you sell it to them with charisma and good vibes.
• iamleppert 8y ago
  And what happens when this job eventually ends (as they all do) and the only thing you've had to show for your time spent in industry is your league of legends score? Meanwhile your peers would have likely moved on, gained skills and progressed in their careers in someway. Sounds like a sure-fire way to deadend your career and limit your future prospects.
  • peteforde 8y ago
    One thing that I find maddening about this topic is the assumption that people who automate their jobs won't take the new time they get back and put it to better use. For some, that could be learning skills or working on a startup, and others might just want to spend time with their kids. That said, it seems incredibly wrong to judge someone for being clever enough to relax and get paid for it. And if someone enjoys relaxing as much as I enjoy coding, who am I to say that I'm righteous and they are a loser?
    • iamleppert 8y ago
      I was addressing the exact situation in the article where the guy used the time to play league of legends. But you’re right it’s not for me to judge how others spend their time.
• matiu 8y ago
  It depends if your employer is nice or not. In one job the boss was thankful and made my job more enjoyable (no extra money though). In another I saved the company a million and got demoted (due to politics). It doesn't give any incentive to share next time.
• honkycat 8y ago
  I've never understood the profound lack of drive and ethics it takes to automate your own job and then conceal it from your employer. The worst jobs I have ever had have ALWAYS been the ones where I'm not contributing to my company in an obvious way, or at consulting firms where we consistently kick ass and finish our sprints early, and then goof off for days on end.
  • derefr 8y ago
    > profound lack of drive That assumes you want to be doing the thing you're doing, rather than some other thing (which potentially doesn't generate money.) Professionally, I'm a programmer. I write code for money. But vocationally, I'm an author. You know what the best job in the world would be, for me? One where I'm paid a living wage to do nothing at all. Then I would have the free time, the energy, and the resources to write books. "Why not just become a professional author?" Well, because being a professional author is only a little bit about writing books. A lot of being a professional author is about selling books. Going on tour to signings, appearing on morning talk-shows, and just generally running the business of extracting royalties from your book. But I am not, vocationally, a businessman who happens to be good at writing books, and so sees that as an appealing strategy toward an end-goal of "making money." No, I'm an author. I love writing, not money. I love seeing people's smiles when I reach them with my writing. Money is a means to that end—a way to keep me alive so I can keep doing the thing that makes me happy. If I could be kept alive and functioning and able-to-write without any income, I'd gladly have none. I would say that I have plenty of drive. Just... not for doing the thing that I do for money.
    • honkycat 8y ago
      Honestly, your comment annoys me because it puts words in my mouth, as if I'm doing what I want to be doing. As if I DREAMED of being a back-end developer my whole life. As if I'm some artless drone that can't understand the mind of an artist. > That assumes you want to be doing the thing you're doing, rather than some other thing (which potentially doesn't generate money.) No, it doesn't at all. It means I would rather be doing something more useful than browsing facebook all day for a job I'm being paid to do. It means I don't dump all of my work onto the people around me and be a complete parasite. It means I want stability and praise instead of constant fear of being discovered and fired and ruining my own life. Most of us do not want to work, that is why we are paid for it. The vast majority of people do their job to get by. > But vocationally, I'm an author. You know what the best job in the world would be, for me? One where I'm paid a living wage to do nothing at all. Then I would have the free time, the energy, and the resources to write books. Yes, I would love to hang out at home and read books all day, constantly learning new things. If I could drop everything and not have to care about having a roof over my head, I would be a video game developer or an artist. BUT, I don't have rich parents or anybody to support me. I don't have the privilege of not working, most people do not. So instead I'm a slacker programmer who doesn't work overtime, gets by, and lives his life the best he can in his down time. > I would say that I have plenty of drive. Just... not for doing the thing that I do for money. To be clear: I'm specifically talking in the context of people who are so dysfunctional that they automate their jobs and do literally nothing for years. If I was in their position I would find something more interesting to spend my time on. What do you do after that? Who is going to hire you after being fired for defrauding the company? Also: I believe doing things like this CAN open you up to liability. Also often a company owns everything you do with their computer, or that you do during work hours.
• peteforde 8y ago
  You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you didn't write it? This does a better job than I could have of tieing together a dozen threads of conversation that I've had with various friends for years. I actually believe that there's a culture war implied in this debate; the question of who deserves to reap the gains of automation is more than just philosophy or ethics. The question "is there inherent nobility in work itself?" seems to be just as much a political divide as any of the current popular hot-button issues. Your gut reaction says a lot about the regional values of where you grew up, whether you'd ever support a basic income, and whether you believe that someone's refusal to work should condemn them to destitution. The closest comparison is the attitude people have if they find a wallet. In Japan, you will get your wallet back with cash intact. Yet in the west, there exists a large contingent of people who believe with all of their heart that God wanted them to find it, that the person who lost it should have been more careful, that they are just having a lucky day. Unless God shows up and declares one side to be ethically correct, it will remain a toss-up. One thing I find fascinating about the article is that it's assumed the cleverness was the code written to automate. This is incorrect; the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial. Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat.
  • peteforde 8y ago
    One thing that I find maddening about this topic is the assumption that people who automate their jobs won't take the new time they get back and put it to better use. For some, that could be learning skills or working on a startup, and others might just want to spend time with their kids. That said, it seems incredibly wrong to judge someone for being clever enough to relax and get paid for it. And if someone enjoys relaxing as much as I enjoy coding, who am I to say that I'm righteous and they are a loser?
    • analog31 8y ago
      I wonder if it's possible to turn things around for some people: Sitting around relaxing, and then doing their work in bursts of cleverness, may be a coping mechanism for someone who has a hard time staying continuously busy all day long. Or maybe there's a sliding scale between those extremes. I fall somewhere towards the side that you might guess, since I'm defending it here. ;-) I don't necessarily automate my job, but I depend on things like math and theory, to solve problems that the other engineers tend to solve laboriously through brute force and trial-and-error. I suppose a math equation is a sort of automation. And of course programming is how one does math these days. Maybe I avoid resentment, because I'm doing work in a way that most people hate even more than doing hard work. It's also hard for them to pin down how much I work because they don't know how to estimate it. Hypothetically, if someone wanted to debate with me about the value of work, I'd ask them how work is measured: What are the units of measure? Joules? Hours? Indulgences? How about... dollars? The only time that we don't measure work in dollars is in a social setting, including within the workplace. For instance, we don't give motivational speeches and other kinds of attention such as meetings in proportion to your wages, but tend to treat all workers relatively equally in those things.
• Hysterisis 8y ago
  A few years ago I was working for a QA department and trying to apply my programming skills wherever I could. There was a weekly report that someone in upper management produced to send to their peers, which was basically two filtered and cross referenced CSV dumps. I briefly took over that task while the manager was away, and was able to automate it pretty easily. I even produced a small GUI that made it easy for the manager to use later. Ultimately the manager chose to keep doing it by hand for 40 hours per week. I left that organisation a few months later.
• tialaramex 8y ago
  I've always seen this as the _point_ of what I do. The promise is there in work by Church, Gödel and Turing, but Grace Hopper is the one who made it tangible. She called the thing she's responsible for a "compiler" but today we'd understand it as a linker. Grace understood in engineering terms what Turing et al. grasped only as a mathematical principle. We can get the machine itself to take the tedious parts of programming the machine and automate them, so that we're left only with some higher level task, and then, we can just automate that too, this recursion continues forever.
  • ketzo 8y ago
    just came back from the Grace Hopper Celebration, I love this as a summary of her work! really cool person who I hadn’t known much about before
• IronWolve 8y ago
  Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script
• nerdponx 8y ago
  And no mention of Marx or Socialism? If there's ever an appropriate time to bring up worker-owned means of production, it's this right here. As I've heard it (I have not read the Communist Manifesto myself), Marx viewed automation as one of the ways in which workers can liberate themselves. The merit of welfare economics is predicated on the "winners" being able to compensate the "losers", and thereby obtain a Pareto-optimal wealth distribution. The fact that this compensation does not happen is the reason that aggregate consumer welfare has grown tremendously, but people still have to work 40 hours a week for their food, housing, and healthcare. It's tempting to say that employees ought to be compensated proportional to the value they generate. Let's say every employee is allowed to license their work output in such a way that, if they automate a process, they are entitled to royalties stemming from the automation of that process. Should that license be perpetual? How do you decide how big the royalty should be? How do you determine the actual value generated by a given automation? Edit: wew, instant downvote. Care to clarify?
• derefr 8y ago
  One perspective I haven't seen here yet: these employers are willing to pay an entire person-salary to get this task done. Therefore, if there was a SaaS service that did the same task, the company should be willing to pay a person-salary worth of money for that SaaS product. So why not build the automation in your free time, knock out a little website with a Stripe subscription form to sell it, convince your boss to pay for this SaaS service instead of paying you to do it, and then ask if they have any other work for you to do? If they do, great: now you're making 100% of your salary from the SaaS (and you can grow it from there if you like), and then 100% of your salary again because they've retained you to do a new thing. If not, great: now you can quit and do what you like and continue to receive 100% of your previous salary in passive SaaS-business income.
  • bradknowles 8y ago
    No business would be willing to pay that. Once you've shown them that the job can be done easier/faster/cheaper, they will insist on that as the new standard. Rinse and repeat until you are penniless and they have all the money.
    • derefr 8y ago
      But they were just paying that, in the form of paying you. If they don't think the task is worth paying that much to get done, they would have just been not-doing-the-task. Also, note that I never suggested mentioning that the SaaS service you create should make any mention of its service being automated. Consider an entry in the "cloud bookkeeping SaaS" genre: they sell you on having real accountants looking at your books, with automation to ensure the reliability of those accountants' work. They never mention that they'll also be using automation to make your workload easier to handle, such that each of their accountants is handling the books of 1000 clients. That's an implementation detail.
      • bradknowles 8y ago
        They were paying you that, sure. But then you showed them that they didn't need to pay you that anymore, because you automated that job away. So now they won't pay you nearly so much. You're welcome. Now, get back to work, you slave! ;)
• vmarshall23 8y ago
  Isn't that precisely the job? I had to automate my job when working full time in grad school, otherwise I never would have passed a class. Since I entered the work force, most jobs have been some version of "automate some task for other people (customers) to exchange for pieces of paper representing effort($)" or "automate some internal task so company spends less $ paying meatware to do things saving effort($)". Rinse, and repeat until either: a) company makes $$$$! b) company runs out of $ If you manage to automate all-the-things and haven't hit state a) or b) then you start flame wars on internal mailing lists about how the free company snacks suck or whatever. :-)
• rllin 8y ago
  this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently - usury - patents - copyrights - land - software as a service the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.) the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended consequences (cf. prop 13) the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition of pithy features. i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a more (post) modern marxist.
• vorg 8y ago
  Many programmers who automate portions of their workload will use the extra time they gain to place bugs in the systems. When those systems fail, they quickly fix them and look like a savior. If they are on after-hours standby, they make extra money from the callouts. They thus reduce the stress in their own jobs, but increase the stress in other peoples jobs.
  • korantu 8y ago
    This is borderline criminal, and should be caught with processes / code review. Did you really see a lot of such cases??
    • vorg 8y ago
      When I worked in IT, both in mainframe programming and before that in ops, I saw many cases of this. "borderline" is just another word for "plausibly deniable". Programmers doing it can claim to have made a mistake. Managers turn a blind eye to it because it's easier than getting pay rises for staff they don't want to leave.
  • androidgirl 8y ago
    I can't tell if this is satirical or not. When I have "free time" at work, I put that time towards refactoring, improving/expanding test coverage, and scouting out potential performance boosts through our logs, load records, etc. Do devs in actual programming positions do this?
  • jeandejean 8y ago
    Wow we don't live in the same world here, programmer actually is mainly the job of automating tasks, so when I'm finished automating things, I automate other things. I'm not placing bugs that would be so easy to uncover by my peers using the most rudimentary source control, and make me look like a fraud in front of all the company...
• pgreenwood 8y ago
  >The gains from automation have generally been enjoyed not by those who operate the machines, but those who own them. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the share of income going to wages in OECD nations has been decreasing since the 1970s, while the share being funneled into capital—into things like cash reserves and machinery—has been increasing. In Australia these benefits have largely gone to land owners, as opposed to capital. See this chart: http://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unearned.jpg http://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unearne... Even a scheme such as universal basic income would not help much as the benefits would end up being captured by land owners, via inflation of rents and land prices; unless this was addressed another way, for example with a land value tax.
• godelski 8y ago
  It seems to me that we are coming on a different paradigm of work. It makes sense in the industrial revolution to have assembly line like working. Where workers are "cogs in a wheel". But now we have tons of tools to do those strict tasks. After all, every programmer says you should program repetitive tasks. So what do we shift to? A wider job duty and more creativity? Creativity is the thing that machines still fail at the most and (as far as I know) currently impossible to automate.
• pdimitar 8y ago
  > “They took what I had developed, replaced me with an idiot that they showed how to work it, and promptly fired me for ‘insubordination.’ I had taken a business asset that was making them $30 grand a year profit and turned it into a million dollar a year program for the company, and they fired me for it to save ~30 grand a year on my salary. Job creators my ass.” There's an inherent conflict of interest and power struggles in many organizations. The business people rarely do create value by themselves; they create the opportunities where value can be created -- and not all businessmen. So when they see something that changes the game, they utilize the convenient clauses in the contract and seize that new power which they can utilize and try and gain the upper hand on others like them. Cynical I know, but it's what I observed first-hand and what many others have told me. > Ideally, automation decisions would happen collectively, with colleagues’ and peers’ input, so, the gains could be evenly distributed. Cute, but I don't see this happening anytime soon. Let's face it: most of us fight for scraps from the tables of others, much more rich, people, for most of our lives. Look at a lot of politicians.They start off so idealistic and some of them even strongly believe everything that got them elected. What happens next? We don't know what happens but the end result is that they get more and more disconnected from the problems of the people who elected them. Why do you think that is? I believe it's because they got their hands on money and connections. Additionally, they worked a LOT to get where they ended up eventually. Tell me, would you like to start over in a brand new area and not get your hands on poorly documented money and just work for a meager official salary? All of that when you are 50+? We the people burn out and we need our efforts to lead to a better future where we work less. IMO it's inevitable. What I am saying is that I don't feel the need to share a piece of $500,000 a year consultancy with fellow programmers if I do NOT have several beach houses and apartments in downtown areas of several capitals. And have a healthy reserve of money to last me a economical crysis akin to the 2008. ...Basically, I don't see myself being very generous up until I hit 8 figures of income. I am greedy and I am real about it. I don't feel many others are very benevolent and will STAY benevolent when faced with the choice to live peacefully and leisurely with all the financial security they desire vs. taking risks to finance people who might just be looking for a secure paycheck and don't care about the cause you want to invest your wealth into. This is a very real risk and is the reason for the failure of a lot of startups. But if you have different view I am interested to hear it. > “The system shouldn't be more important than the individuals who helped make that system relevant.” That is unequivocally true. And IMO it will never change anyway. :( The people who collect and get to redistribute wealth are greedy and aren't that stupid that they will invite competition out of a good heart.
• cyberferret 8y ago
  This could be a koan: If you write a program that works so well that it makes your job of programming easier - are you a good programmer or a bad programmer?
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  The article is a red herring. They're asking the question "Is it immoral to fire someone for automating their job?", when the question should be "Why aren't more companies encouraging their employees to automate their job?" Yes, a person can automate their job until they're not doing anything, and yes, a company can punish an employee for sitting idle. But the latter is inherently stupid. Automation both achieves the goals originally set out for an employee, and frees them up to do more work, without any additional cost. The business's goals should include adding value and productivity and reducing cost. If an employee automates their job, they've improved on their job productivity, which adds value to the company at no extra cost. In the article, the company has a choice: A) fire the employee and hire a new one to keep doing the job manually. B) fire the employee and keep the automation. C) keep the automation, keep the employee, train the employee for a new manual job. D) keep the automation, keep the employee, train them for a new manual job, and have them automate that. If the company chooses A), they're just stupid. If they choose B), they're at least eliminating an unnecessary position. If they choose C), they do the same as B), except they also retain a person that is already trained and accustomed to the company, which saves time and money. If they choose D), it's the same as C), plus they can continue to lower costs and add value.
  • jorblumesea 8y ago
    > The business's goals should include adding value and productivity and reducing cost. This is a business goal that rarely translate properly into the real world. For as much as companies tout these values it's rarely played out. Companies plod along, doing the same thing they've always done because cash flow is king and change is scary. It's easy to become complacent and addicted to steady money.
  • gehwartzen 8y ago
    Now look at it from the employees perspective; None of these cases result in the person who did the automation from gaining additional compensation and half of them result in them loosing their job.
    • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
• eslaught 8y ago
  The funny thing about coding is that every time we automate something away, we just go on to take on ever more ambitious projects. We've been automating away our own jobs for decades, and... the jobs haven't gone anywhere. If anything, there is more demand now than ever. Short of strong AI, I don't see this changing. This is actually one of my biggest reasons why I don't think we'll ever develop a true engineering discipline of software. In other engineering disciplines, there's a notion of a routine set of tasks that require skill and displine to perform. In software, whenever we discover routine anything, we automate it away. Therefore there is a relentless force moving against the routinization of our work, that is precisely what has made it so lucrative to be in software. Who knows, maybe some day that trend will end. But at least for a good while, I suspect the more likely possibility is that we'll keep expanding the scope of our work as the tools keep taking on more of the work.
• knurdle 8y ago
  At the first internship I had in the late 90's, part of my job was taking these text files full of data and creating these huge excel reports with them. It was something that would take a few hours to do because of how much data there was. I taught myself VBA and wrote up this little program where you just upload the file and it spit out the report in about a minute. I luckily had a boss who saw the potential in that and while I wasn't promoted, I was just an intern after all, at the end of the summer, I was the only intern the company kept. And they moved me all around the company to different departments and I learned a ton and it was a great experience. I did automate a few departments to the point where people who were doing full time work had their work cut down to couple of hours a day at most. I finally left when my friends who started doing internships at these "internet" companies were getting paid more than I was and I had asked for a raise and didn't get it.
• projectileboy 8y ago
  One thing I find fascinating about our culture is how much we elevate corporations above people. If a corporation found a way to automate production in such a way as to keep their product prices flat but increase their profit margin, most everyone would applaud. This is the exact same thing, but a decent portion of society finds it to be unacceptable behavior.
  • mrcogmor 8y ago
    They wouldn't applaud unless the reduced cost for the business lead to a reduction in the purchase price for consumers.
    • projectileboy 8y ago
      At a minimum, investors would.
• hardwaresofton 8y ago
  I never see anyone suggesting that maybe we should be rethinking the contracts we sign as developers and rethinking how our compensation is determined. Despite how well you think you're being paid, you're being underpaid (this is almost necessarily true economically) -- in addition to that, companies have literally colluded in order to suppress your wages, despite making profits fit for history books. The idea that an employer owns everything (in particular IP, basically the products of your mind) that you generate on their time or yours while you work for them is bullshit -- it's a complex problem but business has chosen to resolve it 100% in their favor and workers just laid down and taken it. Non-competes and strict laws against selling secrets are one thing, but laying defacto claim to everything you generate is ridiculous, yet is the norm. -- rant incoming -- Software Engineers/Developers/programmers are just the bottom rung of this century's gold rush. Half the time the mines they're working in are canary-less coal mines. Some drink the kool-aid and think the "startup" they work for is anything more than an aspiring too-big-to-fail company, after a few years they wise up and by that time they're too bogged down with life to care/change course. I remember reading a post earlier in the week on C-level compensation and noting that CTOs were the least paid of all the C levels, despite being maybe the second most directly tied to the economic value of any tech company (sales might be #1). Despite how smart we think we are, software engineers are fucking stupid. This article is stupid, but only because the premise is stupid (outside of taking ~20 paragraphs to go through random internet musings/anecdata to get to it's point: > Self-automators show that coders are actually in a unique position to negotiate with employers over which automation-derived gains—like shorter workweeks and greater flexibility to pursue work that interests them—should be kept by workers. There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first. People who deliver out-sized value for a company but aren't naive enough to think they'll be anywhere near properly compensated will not share their secrets. The ethics question isn't even on the right side, companies should be paying employees for the value they create properly, this situation exists because that doesn't happen. Companies are "people", yet aren't beholden to ethics and are largely run by people divorced from the realities they impose. Where you land on this issue is basically how your employment contract was written and how you interpreted it, against the backdrop of the culture it's in -- the only difference is that people at the just about always cheat/bend rules or find luck to get to where they are, but preach that they "put in the time" and honestly just worked hard for forever to get where they are. There is nothing inherently noble about doing work -- that's vassal brain fodder. If working was the only way to build discipline and dedication then we should all be working graveyard shifts at 3 jobs, and not wanting to get rich.
• jv22222 8y ago
  When I built my SaaS app Pluggio (a social media dashboard), I'll never forget a conversation I had with a customer, who gleefully explained how much they loved the product! Apparently, before Pluggio they had someone working full time on social media. But now, they were able to fire them and do that same work in 1 hour a week for only the $25/month cost of the app. After further digging, I realized that a lot of my customers had fired people because of the leverage that the app gave them. To this day I don't quite know how to feel about creating products that mean people loose their job. Anyway, it's one (amongst a few other) reasons I decided sell the business and move on.
• EugeneOZ 8y ago
  If you can automate your job, you are not a programmer. Maybe nasty "coders" means exactly this.
• nstart 8y ago
  This article really highlights how odd our methods of valuing output are. Ultimately if someone is idling for 6 years because they've written a program to do their job for them, who cares? They are delivering the same output which hopefully the company deemed was valued at X amount BECAUSE it delivers Y amount of profit/returns. This article is actually touching on a deeper level of dysfunction in how we do things like calculating salaries for people. Instead of making things about how much value is created, we tend to tie things to "seniority" or "experience" in isolation. Just because the two are sometimes correlated with value produced it does not justify making that the measure on its own. I remember going up to one of the senior management people in the company I worked at a long time ago and pointing out how I'd saved the company from having to spend salaries and other overheads on 12-20 more people by automation. If the salary for each person was X, I asked for a salary bump of 3X. They gave me a bump of only 0.5X . I eventually pushed it to 1X but that experience taught me that most of the time, extra value you deliver rarely flows back to you in a reasonable way. And from that point on, I stopped treating my job as an extension of my identity or fulfillment of purpose. It became a place where I primarily had a cold hard contract to deliver X value in exchange for Y returns. And if I was ever to work again in a company with similar opaque practices on salaries, any increase in Y returns would be best negotiated before showing my entire hand on how much I could increase the delivery on value X.
  • someguydave 8y ago
    This is related to Taleb's observation that employment is a kind of "slavery". What he means by this is that you effectively have sold your option to own those to outsized returns in exchange for a regular paycheck.
    • hawkice 8y ago
      That's... not what slavery is. That analogy is extremely poor compared to using securities derivatives, which is a field Taleb is familiar with. Edit: also, is this feature of salaried employment so misunderstood as to require an analogy? You get paid a fixed amount, or with specified bonus structure. It's literally the number one fact people know about their employment contracts.
• FrozenVoid 8y ago
  The people automating their jobs are automating themself out of the job,but freelancers are just simplifying their job. The difference is freelancers aren't obligated to reveal the magic of their work. They just "do it".
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  In the first fire-engines[1], a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his playfellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour. -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_1 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/... 1. The modern term for these devices is the perhaps more familiar "steam engine'.
• meuk 8y ago
  It always bothers me how things could be automated better if people just put in a little more thought. For example, where I work, we use both entity framework and raw SQL scripts. A common chore is to delete all migrations, delete the database, run "add-migration SetupDB", "update-database -script", and save the script (with some added boilerplate) in a specific folder However, the "update-database -script" command does not pipe the script to output, but instead opens a new window in VS with the script. This is part of the reason why I am not a fan of Microsoft/Windows: relying on a GUI makes automation so much harder.
  • yurishimo 8y ago
    Aren't there ways to automate this though? Even if it's not 100%, maybe you could get the first parts, and then get everything setup so you only need to click a window and then "select all, copy, tab, paste" to finish. I'm sure with some clever thought, you might even be able to use a GUI scripting program to work with the VS window. I'm thinking of a series of keyboard shortcuts to reliably set the state of the VS window to where you can script a mouse click in the appropriate spot and then more keyboard shortcuts to copy and save the output.
• flukus 8y ago
  I think a lot more would be automated by now had the right incentive structures been in place, there are still tonnes of low hanging fruit in areas that are to small or too diverse to productize. One example I remember is a company I worked for that had a lot of people doing data entry, basically reading faxes from a variety of sources that could have been 90% automated by OCR and some trivial AI. It was too specialized for any off the shelf system but too expensive for the company to invest in automating. I probably could have built an automated system but it would take a huge time investment to get to a point where they'd be willing to buy it and they would likely not pay enough to support me full time. Now imagine if I could retain some rights to my automation to my automation efforts? I could take one of these data entry positions and with a bit of my own time invested I could probably automate 20% of the work fairly quickly, freeing up enough time to further automate things without sacrificing my own time. Sooner or later enough would be automated that I could start doing multiple jobs if the company were willing to license it. Eventually I could take on another entry level role and start the process over. I would come out in front, the company would come out in front and the world would be more efficient, but the incentives just aren't there.
• dbg31415 8y ago
  Back in the 90s I had a high school summer job where I had to run some scripts against a production database. I was told, "You have to watch it in case there are errors." Boring work. Essentially, I sat for 2-3 hours a day watching a status bar move. I would run a backup script on a production database, then copy the backup over to a local storage drive, then run a sanitation script to clean up customer data, then copy the database again to a public folder where the devs could access it. I would use the time to try and dissect the script and read up on SQL. A few months in, I added a few lines to the script that emailed me if there were errors (and of course this list of errors evolved over time...), and set it to automatically do the download and sanitation work. Then I corrected a few parts of the sanitation script to block out a few more bits of customer data that whomever wrote the original script had missed, and then set it up on a schedule to pull a copy every hour... the devs loved that the data was coming down more frequently. I was so proud of my little automation project, and I showed my boss. I was a little worried he'd be upset that I was running this script on production. He wasn't. He loved it. Then he told me to delete it. "You cost me $8 / hour, but when you go back to school I'd have to hire someone who costs a lot more to maintain this. The budget is already approved for the year, I can't change it. This is great... and I know what I'm asking you to do is stupid... glad you're learning here... but really I just want you to sit and watch the status bar move."
• Iv 8y ago
  I'll weight in from a slightly different angle: I consider my job as a coder to be 90% bullshit. I call it plumbing. Inject that data stream into these input, buffer this, convert that, cache that shit. Launch a thread to do that in parallel, manage a thread pool, poll that stuff, convert that data format into that other, I could go on for pages. My real job is in the 10% remaining: understanding the problem, producing an algorithm or an architecture, optimizing things in a way that require a deep understanding of the data, designing the UI the users really need. I'd gladly automate the plumbing in order to do 80% of interesting stuff instead of 20%.
• jeandejean 8y ago
  Well it seems that if your work can be so easily automated, we shouldn't call you coder in the first place. That's an interesting debate, but basing the article on 2 anonymous reddit posts whose authors couldn't be reached to get the full story is not what I expect from journalists.
• recon517 8y ago
  Easy to understand if you are cheating by automating your job and spending now freed time for leisure: if your contract says that you are paid by an hour or for fixed number of hours a week/month then you are cheating. Of course, not paying you for overtime can also be considered cheating from your employer. The only way to not be cheating by automating your job is to spend now extra available free time for other duties mentioned in your contract, perfecting your professional abilities, or moving to a contract which is goal based, not work-hour based. It is a pity that somebody can be clever enough to automate his/her job but don't see implications regarding the contract signed with the employer.
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  In A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (different one, but still something of a jerk), the rich daughter of a Newspaper magnate who has needed glasses since she was a child gets an eye exam and is declared to have perfect vision and not in need of glasses. Her father says to bill him for one pair of perfect glasses that will never break.
• m00n 8y ago
  A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer. Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree on a fixed price of 10000$. Two scenarios of what happens next: 1) He shows up the next day with a gardening robot you never knew existed and he never told you he would use. The work is done in 30 minutes. He goes home to spend time with his kids. (Or maybe contract more "2 week projects"?) 2) Two gardening people show up every morning to greet you when you drive to work. They leave when you come back and make steady progress every day. On the last day you come home early and witness that actually the daily work is done by a gardening robot in 5 minutes and the two people actually drive home during the day to spend time with their kids. Would you contract this guy again?
  • jamespacileo 8y ago
    - Commissioning a script to automate something is expensive, plus you need to find the talent who can automate it and do a reasonable good job of it. It's sometimes a risky investment. - If ready-made robots (and scripts) were available on the market, the employer would definitely use that instead
    • m00n 8y ago
      Yes, to make the analogy better, say the gardener invented the robot while on your "gardening time". Edit: Writing a script might be expensive, but is the market price of this script really a lifetime of data-entry salary? Seems unlikely, or we would not see as much automation.
  • caoilte 8y ago
    I would be sad that it seems they didn't feel they could trust me, but if they did the job well and for a good price why wouldn't I hire them again? Also, they're not my employee. I contracted them for a one time job. Totally different working relationship.
• Walkman 8y ago
  We automate everything we can, but I never felt for a single moment that I will have no job tomorrow if I do this, there is always so much problems to solve, so much to do.
• caoilte 8y ago
  The real crime is that these very smart data-entry clerks don't quit for programming jobs that pay double.
• astannard 8y ago
  I automated my job at a company. I did not tell management for a week after but was then bored. It took another few months of me nagging them for more work before the believed me and gave me another project. It was a business critical application I inherited that was highly unreliable, my job was to keep it running. I just reworked the code so that it ran reliably and was resistant to outages etc. I also added in a few scheduled tasks etc to keep it ticking over
• 0xfeeddeadbeef 8y ago
  I've read on HN (don't remember exactly) a story about a military service person, who automated his data entry job and told his commanding officer, who scolded him and told him to do what he was supposed to do and "not to be clever". Maybe someone recalls the article I'm talking about?
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  If you are getting money for not working because you automated your job away, good for you. But you should be aware that your company will likely not survive very long because it is being mismanaged. Chances are that it has smarter competitors already. Usually it is just a matter of time before the shit hits the fan. So, you might want to consider using your time preparing for that eventuality. E.g. spend some time learning new stuff or jump ship to a better company.
  • aplummer 8y ago
    I think you underestimate how defensible some businesses are. For example, a supermarket or bank in Australia. “A matter of time” could be your entire career.
    • dbmk 8y ago
      Yes. I worked for a company that has such a moat surrounding its line of products, it will a couple of decades to erode. 70% of the people there were doing very little on a day-to-day.
  • nkozyra 8y ago
    This is a big generalization. Not everyone is looking to automate tasks, so it's not a sign of mismanagement that someone has employed a novel way to reduce work. Efficiency is a goal of management, but not the only one. It's unrealistic to expect a company to pursue and capture every inefficiency. Often it's cheaper to allow aspect of "work" go unabated than to invest in both the feasibility and implementation of its automation. If you're referring to mismanagement due to knowing what an employee is doing, I think that too is a generalization. Dovetailing with the above, if someone is getting a job done, why invest time and resources into auditing how that's done? In 99% of cases that's waste. In the grand scheme of things, big companies are vulnerable to degrees of malice and abuse by their employees (not necessarily ascribing those terms to these actions). But they don't necessarily fail to exist because those vulnerabilities were used.
• jsprenne 8y ago
  Automating data entry work or similar is one thing, there are many companies out there automating a high-value-added work like IT project management. Most of the work project managers do today will be automated in the coming years. Mark my words!
  • snarkyturtle 8y ago
    One thing that PM's do that I don't ever see a computer doing is managing clients/workers. It's the classic idiom: technology is easy, it's people that's the hard problem.
    • jsprenne 8y ago
      You're right about people being the problem but, as you said, technology is easy and in my work, I see how automation manages clients and workers.
• goombastic 8y ago
  Not sure why so many people here are surprised that benefits of efficiency accrue to the owners of capital. That's the basic premise of capitalism in a way. Profits float upwards, hard negotiation pushes downwards on actual workers and managements try as much as possible to reduce what's owed to actual "doers" of work.
• coj337 8y ago
  I used to intern for a large Australian bank and we had a fairly complex access management workflow. A month into the job after I'd figured out how it all works, I spent a week automating it and was promptly told I was allowed to run my scripts do it if it was kept secret from the higher-ups (to avoid the red tape and the intern they don't trust much). This automated a backlog of work that had a team of 5-10 people scheduled on for a good year along with any future requests, a month or two after my internship I bumped into my boss again they told me they had gone back to doing it the slow way because the bosses wouldn't approve it, despite showing a 0 failure rate compared to a pretty big one from the bored employees.
  • gaius 8y ago
    the bosses wouldn't approve it, despite showing a 0 failure rate compared to a pretty big one from the bored employees. A boss’s prestige is in how many people they manage, not how many scripts they run. That’s the key to understanding these kinds of decisions.
• matchagaucho 8y ago
  Moore's Law seems so ingrained in Silicon Valley, that not questioning automation opportunities every 18 months is a guaranteed predictor for obsolescence.
• mrhackerpoland 8y ago
  Once i automated my colleague's job, boss fired her and i got a big raise :) For me programming is run or die. Just automate your colleagues job, then show your boss how you managed to reduce the employee cost and you'll soon be making way more money Boss loves automation because humans are less reliable than algorithms and replica sets :)
• wallstquant 8y ago
  How is a programmers value add usually measured? I am a researcher/trader and I spend a large portion of my time programming, but I am ultimately paid off the change in profitability of the strategies I've worked on and not on the code I've written. It's a means to an end. When someone is working on a purely technical project, how can they successfully argue for the value of their work? How do you measure the value of a purely technical project? Are there other metrics that matter?
• yason 8y ago
  If your work really is so simple that all of it can be automated then it initially sounds like a golden deal: the employer is getting what they're paying for and the employee has a lot of... free time. But the trouble is that most decent programmers just couldn't stand that. They absolutely need to feel they're doing useful work. So they'll either expand their duties in the company (likely with no similar expansion in their pay) or leave for another company (that pays them to do the both challenging and useful work). Another case are companies where you absolutely need to automate lots of stuff to get to do real work. If you fight the system you'll run out of energy sooner than the system ever would, but if you automate the fight you can stay operative yourself.
• mmsimanga 8y ago
  I used to train clients on the BI product the company I worked sold and supported. This was mostly taking users through the demos. The users would follow what I was doing on their training PCs. The problem was that in one class it was possible to have users who might have been exposed to the software before or were just fast learners. Sometimes the software would have issues on the training PCs and I would have to trouble shoot what the error was. In a nutshell it was tough running demos and attending to slow users and issues with PCs. So I automated the demos part by creating screencasts of the demos. I would play the demo whilst I was helping out my students. The first class loved the demos. They asked for copies which I gladly gave them. Management didn't like the idea and I was told not to use my screen casts.
• orbitingpluto 8y ago
  This is a common situation that I've been in several times before, even up to the point of automating the automating. I had one particularly nasty supervisor who gave me a project, then asked me how long it would take to program, then without fail tell me that was unacceptably slow, then tell me that my predecessor could have done it in half the time, and finally question my competence. So one day he brings me a short programming project that previously took anywhere from say 2-3 hours, asks me how long it will take to program, and I respond with, "30 seconds". He then replies, "That's too long. So and so could have done it in 15... wait, what did you say?" I've mostly or completely automated several of my own jobs, and when done with that, proceeded to reduce my co-workers' work load. Usually it does not end well. Either someone higher up in the organization will perceive the automation as wasting time (still can't wrap my head around that), think of you as now redundant, or see little reason to offer additional compensation while moving you into a new position that does nothing but automate. After all, if you were willing to automate in the previous position at the previous level of compensation, why should they have to pay you more now?
  • turtles 8y ago
    “30 seconds”. You should have told him 6 hours. If he needs it done quicker hire someone else. Enjoy your day.
    • orbitingpluto 8y ago
      He wasn't able to successfully pull this stunt ever again. It actually completely changed our work dynamic and almost completely eliminated job stress. It was also the catalyst to deciding that I wanted to move on and I gave a 4 month notice shortly thereafter. Ultimate jerk move, he actually hid a bonus check intended for me in his desk for weeks because he didn't realize I was being so nice with the amount of notice. He thought he could prevent me from getting it entirely. That did not go over well with the president of the company.
      • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        So, theft and fraud eh? Sounds like a lot more than a "jerk". Hopefully, the president canned him and referee his conduct to the police? Seriously, the less poisonous people like that, the better.
• ry4n413 8y ago
  I work in Finance/Investment Industry and was "let go" from one of the companies I worked at because I automated a large portion of my job (among other things). I even wrote an instruction manual for the entire process (not knowing that I could/would be let go). They ended up replacing me with a guy who didn't know how to program, but had 20 years of experience. Live and learn.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    That's one big problem in companies. If you are below a certain level any kind of improvement you make may actually threaten your job and the company will not move you somewhere else.
  • krupan 8y ago
    That should look really good on your resume, or probably could be the basis for a consulting business.
    • ry4n413 8y ago
      Yep, I started a consulting venture ~2 years ago. Funny enough, the guy who "let me go" also said I should start a consulting business. https://www.gotemstl.com/ https://www.gotemstl.com/
• raintrees 8y ago
  It would seem automated coding would be right up "Ditching Hourly" Jonathan Stark's alley... It would instead require a shift in attitude about value and time. It follows in the lazy (automate it) ethic.
• siliconc0w 8y ago
  Businesses are mostly just complicated cybernetic programs that try to turn money into more money. But it's like shitty spaghetti code where you have to understand years of debt to understand why A needs to talk to B, C, D and process the results into some new form E. Maybe they do this manually with a spreadsheet and arcane business rules passed down from generation to generation or maybe those rules are encoded in some awful program written twenty years ago that is terrible by any modern measure but is bespoke tailed to their shop/industry/regulatory environment. You could probably automate this process but it requires a holistic understanding of the whole system which no one may even have, much less someone with the technical skills to automate. Plus it's like refactoring spaghetti code with little to no documentation, no specification except the current output, no tests, and likely involves a some combination of multiple technologies and manual human-powered processing.
• omneity 8y ago
  Shameless plug, I wrote a tool that allows coders to leverage automation a lot more: https://medium.com/p/meta-executable-processes-for-software-development-eea55103e4b0 https://medium.com/p/meta-executable-processes-for-software-...
• _zachs 8y ago
  There's a big difference between a Software Engineer and a Data Entry worker. While I (Software Engineer) can definitely automate certain parts of my job, I cannot automate taking an issue from the board, figuring out how to solve it, writing code to solve it, and getting it reviewed in a PR.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  I don't believe that a salaried employee is duty-bound to work any more hours in a week than is required to accomplish their given assignments. Nor do I believe that the tools they create themselves to do that job more effectively should automatically become the property of the employer. The reason people do not disclose the automation of their own jobs is because they do not believe they can monetize their cleverness more effectively than by keeping secret their shortcuts. They sincerely believe the company will fire them and pay nothing for their automation tools. It is ultimately a "truth to power" phenomenon. If you have the power to plunge me into a lifestyle of deprivation and poverty, I will avoid giving you any reason for doing so. If you have the power to take some of my profits for yourself, I will seek to avoid informing you that is possible. The philosophy of "Office Space" applies. It's a question of motivation. If I bust my ass so the boss makes more money, I don't see another dime, so I just do the minimum amount to not get fired. And we also have to know that the minimum amount of flair is not the actual minimum amount we can wear. I'm sure many of us have seen extra effort go completely unrewarded, or even get punished. That experience takes a toll. Not one of us can trust our employer to do the right thing all the time--even for those of us that are founders! So we preemptively choose for them, and sometimes do the thing that is right only for us. If more companies were capable of more accurately assessing the value of software automation, we wouldn't have to think twice--we'd take the bonus equivalent to several years salary, and start automating something else.
• ovrkil 8y ago
  I work for a financial software company in QA and I have no qualms admitting right after arriving I wrote a program to test the new release code for me. Each release all I have to do is change some variables load and run. I see nothing wrong with using my grey matter to its fullest potential.
• ovrkil 8y ago
  I'm employed at a company that engineers financial institution software. I have no qualms admitting when I moved to QA I quickly wrote a program to do my testing. Now each release I just update the relevant variables compile load and run. I see no problem with using my grey matter to it's full potential.