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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

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.
  - peteforde 8y ago
    While not everyone on HN is a developer, it does tend to skew that way so I don't feel guilty pointing out how frustrating it is to measure the output of a top programmer. Often, a mature codebase shrinks as code quality improves. This drives the efficiency wonks absolutely bonkers.
    - samirm 8y ago
      >This drives the efficiency wonks absolutely bonkers. what do you mean by that?
      - EnFinlay 8y ago
        I think they're referring to the problem of measuring programmer output (and thus, measuring programmer efficiency). And how the output of that work (lines of code) can actually be reduced, but still considered productive. I'm not putting this very well.
- nkozyra 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. I think it's fair to say they will, but will they do so for their company's benefit? Possibly, but why? This is effectively gifted time.
kbenson 8y ago
> 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. A large part of how America sees work, poverty and wealth was historically influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic, and I think that lingers quite a bit today. I think it's why a lot of people view the poor as lazy (because obviously if they weren't lazy, they wouldn't be poor, right?). If you fervently believe hard work will lead to success, how else do you explain the unsuccessful? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
- testvox 8y ago
  It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any. > The so-called Protestant Ethic then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" might be envied, but he could not aspire to public acclaim; he had to live out his life in the seclusion of his own class.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    Originally, sure, but I think it's been perverted over time (in the USA at least) to the point that it's really only applied to the destitute. Also, I think it's become enough of a cultural norm that the non-religious (or those subscribing to a different religion) still feel some pull towards the concept since they were raised where it was prevalent. It also comes down to it being easier to spot someone in poverty than to spot someone that's rich but hasn't worked for it themselves. That might explain most of it.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any. In theory, but in practice that just means that those with inherited wealth expend some of it on building a personal myth of being self-made independent of their family legacy. It's often paper thin, but as long as they make the gesture to ritually acknowledge the norm, it seems to suffice in practice. Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.
sbinthree 8y ago
Diligence is morally but not necessarily economically valued.
eksemplar 8y ago
With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sql savvy business process people to do BI, but without s fundamental understanding of data efficiency, which we can’t seem to instill in these highly educated people, what they make is often useless because it slows the systems. Programming is completely trivial, but understanding what you’re doing, and why. Is much harder to teach than programming. Especially when you’re working toward productiveness where you can’t just write best practices for everything because best practices are often unnecessary for some systems and necessary for others. I know this wasn’t really that related to the article, it’s just a general observation, and believe me, we tried to decentralize our RPA processes because maintaining them is hell.
- auxym 8y ago
  What is RPA?
  - czl_my 8y ago
    Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath
  - jwally 8y ago
    Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
    - jwally 8y ago
      Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
lwhi 8y ago
When most people or organisations are purchasing a service, they're usually mainly concerned about the value that service will bring them. The amount of effort required to produce that value, helps to dictate market conditions and the amount of competition; aside from this, ultimately I don't think effort matters so much when you consider it in terms of B2B transactions. Eventually, if a service is easy to supply—competition will drive down the price—and the economic system will readjust accordingly. -- Strangely, it's only when you consider an individual in permanent employment that automation seems to present itself as a dilemma. There's definitely a lot being said about automation. We're regularly told via news outlets that a large percentage of the populations' jobs will be replaced by robots. But aside from the idea of universal basic income; I believe there's a more general trend towards working independently, i.e. in a freelance capacity. Maybe automation becomes far less of a dilemma when this is this case?
- tspike 8y ago
  It's because there's a conflict of interest in who reaps the benefits. If the company makes the decision to automate, it's clear that it's the company that reaps the benefits. If a worker chooses to automate, it's ambiguous.
  - lwhi 8y ago
    Exactly - as a permanent employee, are you being paid for time or value?
- jdowner 8y ago
  I think you have hit the nail on the head. Maybe it is only paranoia, but over the course of my career I have seen an increased treatment of the employee like chattel. The rights of employees have eroded, almost by choice, through social media, smart phones, monitoring technology. I, personally, had had enough. I decided to remove myself from that environment. I believed that it was dehumanizing and degrading. I started working remotely on contracts. That worked pretty well for a while. But I started working for one company where slowly they wanted me to become more and more like one of their employees and less of an independent contractor. In addition to the work covered by the contract, I was asked to help on other projects or with interviewing. Initially I didn't mind because I wanted to help. After a while I realized what was happening and that is what prompted me to create my own company to work through and to be paid for the end result rather than the time spent on the result. With respect to the article, there are some things that I think you have to accept as an employee. You probably have signed away the rights to the IP you create at your place of employment. After all, you probably did it on company time with company equipment. But ultimately that is the agreement you entered into so you cannot turn around after the fact and complain. However, my sympathy lies with the person that automates their work rather than the employer. I think that the ethical problem is interesting. Recently I watched the Crash Course on "meta ethics" and the problem they considered was a burglar who intended to steal from a little, old lady but inadvertently saved her life instead. And the question is, 'was the burglar good or bad?' I think there is a parallel to the issue of automating your job. I am no philosopher, but I think this is an interesting question.
dogpuncher 8y ago
> 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. Agreed, there's a lot of meaty ethics and philosophy tied up in this issue. For most of my life I've tended to believe in the nobility of work, that it gives my life meaning and purpose. But as rates of automation increase my children (or more likely their children) may well seek different ways of defining themselves. Before that can happen though there'll have to be some fraught and difficult changes to our societies.
Zarath 8y ago
"is there inherent nobility in work itself?" Nietzsche would hate this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality Working is the opposite of noble in the traditional sense of the word.
- ctchocula 8y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "traditional". Even in the New Testament, you'll find passages like 2 Thessalonians 3:10: 'For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.' There are probably examples from the Old Testament as well. Perhaps Nietzsche, with his critique of traditional Christian values, can be seen as a reaction against Christianity.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    In general the New Testament preaches the idea of being a servant to others (Acts has the apostles living in what's basically a commune). This is a little different than the more unidirectional model of most workplaces.
  - Zarath 8y ago
    True, but as Nietzsche points out, Christianity was primarily responsible for the inversion of what is "good" and "noble".
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Maybe you mean 'Noble' and not 'noble'. Nobles wouldn't work because that was for serfs. But work has for a long time been considered noble, also, if you consider the kind of work we do not as not so much 'labour' i.e. creative endeavor, then it's even closer to both 'nobole' and 'Noble'.
  - gnode 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at with the capitalisation. If it's that "Noble" to mean "of high birth" may only be used as a noun, then that's untrue: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noble https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noble
ddingus 8y ago
I once returned a wallet, cash, everything intact. Called the guy when I found it. He totally panicked. Was odd. When I handed it to him, that face! Worth it. Amazingly, he proceeded to try and give me the cash. Was an effort to decline. At the time, I really needed a warm fuzzy. The lost wallet was a great opportunity, and I got a good one. But, our conversation basically centered on, "who does that?" Indeed. The stories of Japan make me want to visit just to soak a little of that in.
- pferde 8y ago
  I once found a lost cellphone, and after its owner called it, we arranged to meet and I returned the phone. The owner's reaction was very similar to what you describe. I refused any reward - it seems natural to me to just return it - but later that night (it was a Friday night and I was out for drinks with friends), we bumped into him in a winery, and he ended up buying me and my friends a huge jug of very good wine, out of gratitude. :)
  - ddingus 8y ago
    There you go! I much prefer that kind of thing happen myself. I think it all adds up. More of us just need to keep doing it.
- kayge 8y ago
  Hah that's funny... I'm literally sitting here waiting for a call to go meet a guy and return his wallet that I found in the middle of the street. Hope it goes well, not looking for a reward or anything. I've had a variety of lost and found experiences over the years though. Returned a wallet with over $700 to a guy at my gym; he barely even took a second to thank me and just went on with his conversation with someone else. Returned a smartphone to a lady who was mostly shocked (and maybe a little embarrassed about some of the pictures she had on her unlocked phone...). Only regretful experience I've had so far is another time where I turned in a new (at the time) iPhone to a store's customer service counter instead of tracking down the owner myself; I left with a bad feeling that the person behind the counter wasn't going to put as much effort into finding the owner as I would.
the_watcher 8y ago
> 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. I thought about this too. Pretty much everything I've automated turned out to be way easier than I assumed and I ended up feeling dumb for not realizing I could have saved myself time by doing it sooner.
gricardo99 8y ago
the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial. I’d actually argue the reverse. It’s trivial, especially with a little programming background to say “we could automate X”. The devil is in the details. Robustly automating anything of reasonable complexity involves a lot of implementation hickups, dealing with corner cases, gracefully failing, and adding structure and regularity to otherwise disparate, adhoc and unstructured components. It takes skill, experience and a lot of effort to do this without it immediately falling over.
- peteforde 8y ago
  I'd never presume to critique your lived experience, but in my life and career away from core developer circles, the instincts required to recognize the potential for automation were just... not part of the conversation. It's similar to how most people will complain about the traffic while a very small number of people will start companies to dig tunnels for maglev vehicles to travel on. Now, I choose to believe (I'm a realistic optimist) that some of these instincts - to recognize patterns, to ask orthogonal questions, to pay attention to what others take for granted - can be acquired. It's less about training and more about practice. You can decide that you're going to learn how to ask good questions. It's a conscious act, and that is key. Anyhow, there's certainly skill and experience required to automate well. However, it's SHOCKING how many people learn to build simple systems in MS Access or Excel to solve their own problems. They often don't even realize that they are programming.
  - captainbland 8y ago
    > It's similar to how most people will complain about the traffic while a very small number of people will start companies to dig tunnels for maglev vehicles to travel on. Well to be honest there's only a small number of people with the means and connections to even start such a venture.
zhte415 8y ago
> 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. Absolutely. A minor observation I have, living in Operations/Finance. Don't merge cells in Excel. Observing a spreadsheet is a fantastic indicator of an individual's knowledge of automation vs manual process. Someone that uses lists without merged cells is someone that not only can save days of of the year with pivottables, various forms of looking up, but probably has the idea of 'tables' 'if' and 'for' in their head. This is a great kicking-off point for coaching through ugly VBA. I like VBA. It's also often the only choice in corporate environments. But it is an option, and the chance to coach someone that's on the edge of... > I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat. ...to push over that edge.
- maire 8y ago
  It all depends on who is rewarded for the automation. Salaried employees who automate are generally recognized for the productivity that automation provides. Low level data entry people are not rewarded. Your story reminds me of my son who graduated with a liberal arts degree right after the financial crash. He completely automated his first job (using excel and VBA) and was not rewarded. Long story short, he went back and got a masters in EECS and works where productivity is recognized.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    Good for your son. Sadly check-box HR ticks are too often required for being recognised, that's something I have to fight against where operations staff are 3x underpaid compered to developers yet arguably far more agile. Good he found a better employer.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"God wanted them to find it" I think you'll find that most people who 'keep the wallet' are probably not religious and don't think about it the morality of it all that much, whereas those who are regular temple/church/mosque attenders would be among the least likely to 'keep it'.
- Strongerpass 8y ago
  What do you base that on?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    I base that on 40 years of life experience and travel and living in a variety of communities. But there's overwhelming evidence of it, an BTW I'm not saying 'religious' per say, but 'church attendance' which is a much stronger overlap with conscientious behaviours. [1] [2] [3] People who doubt that regular church attenders are more likely to 'return wallets' I think have little exposure to classical religious communities. I don't mean to offend anyone, but I've found so many people who have no exposure to it have weird and cynical ideas about mainline religions. I'm constantly surprised. In the very example given: Japan, where 'nobody keeps found wallets' - this is a culture of 'strong cultural ('small c') conservatism and communitarianism. Obviously with shades of ethnocentrism. They're not religious in the same way Westerners are, but they have a whole set of super concientious behaviours perfectly consistent with those here who are 'religous service attenders' The best analogues in the West are basically agrarian communities, who by the way happen to be religious, or at least 'church attenders'. About 2 generations ago, in the West, most people lived in agrarian communities, even if they weren't farmers, they were tied to that lifestyle, attended service, yada, yada. You lose your wallet there, and nobody will steal it. In my home town, my grandparents generally did not lock the door to their house. My father still generally does not lock his door. Now - 99% of my grandparents and their peers attended Church, but they were mainline religions (I'm in Canada, we don't have a lot of this Evangelical, Baptist or Mormon kind of stuff) - but they were not what we would not refer to as specifically 'religious'. I mean everyone did it, it's just what people did. Nobody ran around talking about 'Jesus' etc. - rather, it's more or less part of cultural tradition. Watch UK television series that are set in smaller towns to get an idea. In my cultural background the thought of keeping someone's wallet is unthinkable. It's obviously and clearly immoral. You probably 'know the person' who lost it anyhow. The oddest thing about making the transition from more agrarian/communitarian cultures to the more urban one's is how self-oriented everyone seems in the city (i.e. how people could possibly consider 'keeping wallets'), but doubly odd is how they are so cynical they can't fathom that there are groups of people for whom 'returning wallets' is normative and moral action, not something of note. And I'm not harping on 'city folk' (I am born and mostly raised urban), and there are many great things here, rather pointing out the agrarian/communitarian's perspective. Tons of data to support the relationship between religion and low crime, but FYI I think they overstate it a little bit, if you look carefully you find again 'attendance' more of a predictor of low crime than even 'faith' for example. I think it's just as much about conscientious behavior. [1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-briggs/no-time-for-crime-study-f_b_4384046.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-briggs/no-time-for-crim... [2] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime_rates http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [3] https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/78/2/192/3089763?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/78/2/192/30...
monkeydreams 8y ago
> You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you didn't write it? I love this article because it changed my mind. I was one of the redditors who urged FiletOFish1066 to fess up to his employers on the basis of some moral high ground I felt I occupied. I see now that I made the mistaken assumption that work == goodness and went on from there.
Stratoscope 8y ago
> ...whether you believe that someone's refusal to work should condemn them to destitution. I don't understand what you're getting at there. If someone refuses to work, that would seem to mean that they are able to work but choose not to. We're not talking about someone who is actually unable to work because of some physical or mental limitation and may need assistance of some sort. We're taking about someone who could work but doesn't want to. What possible obligation do I have toward that person? I don't see any. Of course I don't think they should be, as you put it, condemned to destitution. But what on earth makes it my responsibility to give them anything at all? Do I owe them a living, simply because they refuse to work?
flewkey 8y ago
Having a good worth ethic is respectable. However, working smart can be as effective as working hard. Still, lying about doing work is unethical in my opinion, even if it's clever. Depending on the situation though, I think that letting your employer know that a job can be automated may lead to better opportunities in the future... maybe?
dec0dedab0de 8y ago
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. I have told my work more than once that if they wanted to get the most out of me they should put me on the "front line" for a month or two, and let me decide what needs to be automated. It has always been laughed off as me being cute.
- xorcist 8y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if you found out that some work is useless in the first place. Many people lack the bigger picture of what the purpose of operations really are. That's what easy to miss when thinking in terms of "automation". Automating existing work doesn't move us forward very much. Making the work unnecessary is.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  If your work is "laughing off" your suggestions and putting you down I'd seriously consider finding a better employer.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Managers always think that they are smarter than coders. Lets face it if they admitted that we could make business decision well there wouldn't be much need for them.
    - wartijn_ 8y ago
      Works just as well the other way around. Every time managers are mentioned at HN, some programmer is sure they can do a better job than their/most/all managers.
      - jinfiesto 8y ago
        That's because programmers can do management. It's not unusual to see engineers get tracked into management. I have certainly never seen it go the other way (partially because managers usually make more than engineers I'm sure.)
partycoder 8y ago
> Typically, the code itself is trivial. There are tremendous financial opportunities waiting behind automation of expensive tasks usually performed by developers. For many of those tasks, the moment is right now, and the code itself is not trivial.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  Sure, but that's because developers are expensive, and poorly quantized - In a professional capacity, you can't really hire a developer for a weekend. That requires a direct connection, usually a personal one. There's probably a hundred thousand tasks that could be automated but have never been within ten feet of a developer because it never comes up. Something that you and I would do in ten minutes of perl would likely be someone's full time job. This absolutely increases in complexity as the benefit increases, mostly due to the low-hanging, prime fruit already being picked... but there's still tons of stuff being handled by humans still. Moreover, as techniques and computing power become cheaper and cheaper, stuff that used to be hard (OCR!) becomes easier all the time.
mrodozov 8y ago
"is there inherent nobility in work itself?" there certainly is benefit called experience, who cares about nobility. in certain parts of the world nobility is last concern
emodendroket 8y ago
Necessary work may be noble, but doing busywork for the sake of it is not.
jshowa1 8y ago
The problem is automation is never truly automated in most jobs. There's always things that go wrong, always changes being proposed, always explaining needing to be done. Sure, you may find it easy to automate a report or data entry, but what if that data changes or the format changes? Then you have to fix the code. The code is almost never trivial either. It often involves integrating complex systems and making sure that they work which, if done right, involves writing several unit tests. Using God is a poor excuse to determine ethics because there's no evidence one exists. It's especially a problem when you don't share the code because then, instead of creating improvement to the job for the company as a whole, you've written a pass to be lazy. The real job comes from supporting whatever you write to the masses. If you don't have any interest in that, you're simply selfish. The problem is people react in different ways, but it seems like the most common way is to not tell anyone which in my mind is foolish because even if you do get fired, you've improved your skills enough to find a better job anyway. Not only that, I can just as easily come up with an example of someone getting promoted for automating job tasks.
agumonkey 8y ago
it's almost spiritual: in an ideal world where I automate everything, what do I do ? these days I get brain chills whenever I do something un-intellectual but very sensory-based: crafting wood, molding things, taichi.. Work today is a twisted version of sharing group survival/happiness.

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.
- peteforde 8y ago
  While not everyone on HN is a developer, it does tend to skew that way so I don't feel guilty pointing out how frustrating it is to measure the output of a top programmer. Often, a mature codebase shrinks as code quality improves. This drives the efficiency wonks absolutely bonkers.
  - samirm 8y ago
    >This drives the efficiency wonks absolutely bonkers. what do you mean by that?
    - EnFinlay 8y ago
      I think they're referring to the problem of measuring programmer output (and thus, measuring programmer efficiency). And how the output of that work (lines of code) can actually be reduced, but still considered productive. I'm not putting this very well.
nkozyra 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. I think it's fair to say they will, but will they do so for their company's benefit? Possibly, but why? This is effectively gifted time.

kbenson 8y ago

> 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. A large part of how America sees work, poverty and wealth was historically influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic, and I think that lingers quite a bit today. I think it's why a lot of people view the poor as lazy (because obviously if they weren't lazy, they wouldn't be poor, right?). If you fervently believe hard work will lead to success, how else do you explain the unsuccessful? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

testvox 8y ago
It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any. > The so-called Protestant Ethic then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" might be envied, but he could not aspire to public acclaim; he had to live out his life in the seclusion of his own class.
- kbenson 8y ago
  Originally, sure, but I think it's been perverted over time (in the USA at least) to the point that it's really only applied to the destitute. Also, I think it's become enough of a cultural norm that the non-religious (or those subscribing to a different religion) still feel some pull towards the concept since they were raised where it was prevalent. It also comes down to it being easier to spot someone in poverty than to spot someone that's rich but hasn't worked for it themselves. That might explain most of it.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any. In theory, but in practice that just means that those with inherited wealth expend some of it on building a personal myth of being self-made independent of their family legacy. It's often paper thin, but as long as they make the gesture to ritually acknowledge the norm, it seems to suffice in practice. Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.

sbinthree 8y ago

Diligence is morally but not necessarily economically valued.

eksemplar 8y ago

With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sql savvy business process people to do BI, but without s fundamental understanding of data efficiency, which we can’t seem to instill in these highly educated people, what they make is often useless because it slows the systems. Programming is completely trivial, but understanding what you’re doing, and why. Is much harder to teach than programming. Especially when you’re working toward productiveness where you can’t just write best practices for everything because best practices are often unnecessary for some systems and necessary for others. I know this wasn’t really that related to the article, it’s just a general observation, and believe me, we tried to decentralize our RPA processes because maintaining them is hell.

auxym 8y ago
What is RPA?
- czl_my 8y ago
  Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath
- jwally 8y ago
  Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
  - jwally 8y ago
    Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature

lwhi 8y ago

When most people or organisations are purchasing a service, they're usually mainly concerned about the value that service will bring them. The amount of effort required to produce that value, helps to dictate market conditions and the amount of competition; aside from this, ultimately I don't think effort matters so much when you consider it in terms of B2B transactions. Eventually, if a service is easy to supply—competition will drive down the price—and the economic system will readjust accordingly. -- Strangely, it's only when you consider an individual in permanent employment that automation seems to present itself as a dilemma. There's definitely a lot being said about automation. We're regularly told via news outlets that a large percentage of the populations' jobs will be replaced by robots. But aside from the idea of universal basic income; I believe there's a more general trend towards working independently, i.e. in a freelance capacity. Maybe automation becomes far less of a dilemma when this is this case?

tspike 8y ago
It's because there's a conflict of interest in who reaps the benefits. If the company makes the decision to automate, it's clear that it's the company that reaps the benefits. If a worker chooses to automate, it's ambiguous.
- lwhi 8y ago
  Exactly - as a permanent employee, are you being paid for time or value?
jdowner 8y ago
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Maybe it is only paranoia, but over the course of my career I have seen an increased treatment of the employee like chattel. The rights of employees have eroded, almost by choice, through social media, smart phones, monitoring technology. I, personally, had had enough. I decided to remove myself from that environment. I believed that it was dehumanizing and degrading. I started working remotely on contracts. That worked pretty well for a while. But I started working for one company where slowly they wanted me to become more and more like one of their employees and less of an independent contractor. In addition to the work covered by the contract, I was asked to help on other projects or with interviewing. Initially I didn't mind because I wanted to help. After a while I realized what was happening and that is what prompted me to create my own company to work through and to be paid for the end result rather than the time spent on the result. With respect to the article, there are some things that I think you have to accept as an employee. You probably have signed away the rights to the IP you create at your place of employment. After all, you probably did it on company time with company equipment. But ultimately that is the agreement you entered into so you cannot turn around after the fact and complain. However, my sympathy lies with the person that automates their work rather than the employer. I think that the ethical problem is interesting. Recently I watched the Crash Course on "meta ethics" and the problem they considered was a burglar who intended to steal from a little, old lady but inadvertently saved her life instead. And the question is, 'was the burglar good or bad?' I think there is a parallel to the issue of automating your job. I am no philosopher, but I think this is an interesting question.

dogpuncher 8y ago

> 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. Agreed, there's a lot of meaty ethics and philosophy tied up in this issue. For most of my life I've tended to believe in the nobility of work, that it gives my life meaning and purpose. But as rates of automation increase my children (or more likely their children) may well seek different ways of defining themselves. Before that can happen though there'll have to be some fraught and difficult changes to our societies.

Zarath 8y ago

"is there inherent nobility in work itself?" Nietzsche would hate this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality Working is the opposite of noble in the traditional sense of the word.

ctchocula 8y ago
Depends on what you mean by "traditional". Even in the New Testament, you'll find passages like 2 Thessalonians 3:10: 'For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.' There are probably examples from the Old Testament as well. Perhaps Nietzsche, with his critique of traditional Christian values, can be seen as a reaction against Christianity.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  In general the New Testament preaches the idea of being a servant to others (Acts has the apostles living in what's basically a commune). This is a little different than the more unidirectional model of most workplaces.
- Zarath 8y ago
  True, but as Nietzsche points out, Christianity was primarily responsible for the inversion of what is "good" and "noble".
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Maybe you mean 'Noble' and not 'noble'. Nobles wouldn't work because that was for serfs. But work has for a long time been considered noble, also, if you consider the kind of work we do not as not so much 'labour' i.e. creative endeavor, then it's even closer to both 'nobole' and 'Noble'.
- gnode 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you're getting at with the capitalisation. If it's that "Noble" to mean "of high birth" may only be used as a noun, then that's untrue: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noble https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noble

ddingus 8y ago

I once returned a wallet, cash, everything intact. Called the guy when I found it. He totally panicked. Was odd. When I handed it to him, that face! Worth it. Amazingly, he proceeded to try and give me the cash. Was an effort to decline. At the time, I really needed a warm fuzzy. The lost wallet was a great opportunity, and I got a good one. But, our conversation basically centered on, "who does that?" Indeed. The stories of Japan make me want to visit just to soak a little of that in.

pferde 8y ago
I once found a lost cellphone, and after its owner called it, we arranged to meet and I returned the phone. The owner's reaction was very similar to what you describe. I refused any reward - it seems natural to me to just return it - but later that night (it was a Friday night and I was out for drinks with friends), we bumped into him in a winery, and he ended up buying me and my friends a huge jug of very good wine, out of gratitude. :)
- ddingus 8y ago
  There you go! I much prefer that kind of thing happen myself. I think it all adds up. More of us just need to keep doing it.
kayge 8y ago
Hah that's funny... I'm literally sitting here waiting for a call to go meet a guy and return his wallet that I found in the middle of the street. Hope it goes well, not looking for a reward or anything. I've had a variety of lost and found experiences over the years though. Returned a wallet with over $700 to a guy at my gym; he barely even took a second to thank me and just went on with his conversation with someone else. Returned a smartphone to a lady who was mostly shocked (and maybe a little embarrassed about some of the pictures she had on her unlocked phone...). Only regretful experience I've had so far is another time where I turned in a new (at the time) iPhone to a store's customer service counter instead of tracking down the owner myself; I left with a bad feeling that the person behind the counter wasn't going to put as much effort into finding the owner as I would.

the_watcher 8y ago

> 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. I thought about this too. Pretty much everything I've automated turned out to be way easier than I assumed and I ended up feeling dumb for not realizing I could have saved myself time by doing it sooner.

gricardo99 8y ago

the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial. I’d actually argue the reverse. It’s trivial, especially with a little programming background to say “we could automate X”. The devil is in the details. Robustly automating anything of reasonable complexity involves a lot of implementation hickups, dealing with corner cases, gracefully failing, and adding structure and regularity to otherwise disparate, adhoc and unstructured components. It takes skill, experience and a lot of effort to do this without it immediately falling over.

peteforde 8y ago
I'd never presume to critique your lived experience, but in my life and career away from core developer circles, the instincts required to recognize the potential for automation were just... not part of the conversation. It's similar to how most people will complain about the traffic while a very small number of people will start companies to dig tunnels for maglev vehicles to travel on. Now, I choose to believe (I'm a realistic optimist) that some of these instincts - to recognize patterns, to ask orthogonal questions, to pay attention to what others take for granted - can be acquired. It's less about training and more about practice. You can decide that you're going to learn how to ask good questions. It's a conscious act, and that is key. Anyhow, there's certainly skill and experience required to automate well. However, it's SHOCKING how many people learn to build simple systems in MS Access or Excel to solve their own problems. They often don't even realize that they are programming.
- captainbland 8y ago
  > It's similar to how most people will complain about the traffic while a very small number of people will start companies to dig tunnels for maglev vehicles to travel on. Well to be honest there's only a small number of people with the means and connections to even start such a venture.

zhte415 8y ago

> 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. Absolutely. A minor observation I have, living in Operations/Finance. Don't merge cells in Excel. Observing a spreadsheet is a fantastic indicator of an individual's knowledge of automation vs manual process. Someone that uses lists without merged cells is someone that not only can save days of of the year with pivottables, various forms of looking up, but probably has the idea of 'tables' 'if' and 'for' in their head. This is a great kicking-off point for coaching through ugly VBA. I like VBA. It's also often the only choice in corporate environments. But it is an option, and the chance to coach someone that's on the edge of... > I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat. ...to push over that edge.

maire 8y ago
It all depends on who is rewarded for the automation. Salaried employees who automate are generally recognized for the productivity that automation provides. Low level data entry people are not rewarded. Your story reminds me of my son who graduated with a liberal arts degree right after the financial crash. He completely automated his first job (using excel and VBA) and was not rewarded. Long story short, he went back and got a masters in EECS and works where productivity is recognized.
- zhte415 8y ago
  Good for your son. Sadly check-box HR ticks are too often required for being recognised, that's something I have to fight against where operations staff are 3x underpaid compered to developers yet arguably far more agile. Good he found a better employer.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"God wanted them to find it" I think you'll find that most people who 'keep the wallet' are probably not religious and don't think about it the morality of it all that much, whereas those who are regular temple/church/mosque attenders would be among the least likely to 'keep it'.

Strongerpass 8y ago
What do you base that on?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I base that on 40 years of life experience and travel and living in a variety of communities. But there's overwhelming evidence of it, an BTW I'm not saying 'religious' per say, but 'church attendance' which is a much stronger overlap with conscientious behaviours. [1] [2] [3] People who doubt that regular church attenders are more likely to 'return wallets' I think have little exposure to classical religious communities. I don't mean to offend anyone, but I've found so many people who have no exposure to it have weird and cynical ideas about mainline religions. I'm constantly surprised. In the very example given: Japan, where 'nobody keeps found wallets' - this is a culture of 'strong cultural ('small c') conservatism and communitarianism. Obviously with shades of ethnocentrism. They're not religious in the same way Westerners are, but they have a whole set of super concientious behaviours perfectly consistent with those here who are 'religous service attenders' The best analogues in the West are basically agrarian communities, who by the way happen to be religious, or at least 'church attenders'. About 2 generations ago, in the West, most people lived in agrarian communities, even if they weren't farmers, they were tied to that lifestyle, attended service, yada, yada. You lose your wallet there, and nobody will steal it. In my home town, my grandparents generally did not lock the door to their house. My father still generally does not lock his door. Now - 99% of my grandparents and their peers attended Church, but they were mainline religions (I'm in Canada, we don't have a lot of this Evangelical, Baptist or Mormon kind of stuff) - but they were not what we would not refer to as specifically 'religious'. I mean everyone did it, it's just what people did. Nobody ran around talking about 'Jesus' etc. - rather, it's more or less part of cultural tradition. Watch UK television series that are set in smaller towns to get an idea. In my cultural background the thought of keeping someone's wallet is unthinkable. It's obviously and clearly immoral. You probably 'know the person' who lost it anyhow. The oddest thing about making the transition from more agrarian/communitarian cultures to the more urban one's is how self-oriented everyone seems in the city (i.e. how people could possibly consider 'keeping wallets'), but doubly odd is how they are so cynical they can't fathom that there are groups of people for whom 'returning wallets' is normative and moral action, not something of note. And I'm not harping on 'city folk' (I am born and mostly raised urban), and there are many great things here, rather pointing out the agrarian/communitarian's perspective. Tons of data to support the relationship between religion and low crime, but FYI I think they overstate it a little bit, if you look carefully you find again 'attendance' more of a predictor of low crime than even 'faith' for example. I think it's just as much about conscientious behavior. [1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-briggs/no-time-for-crime-study-f_b_4384046.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-briggs/no-time-for-crim... [2] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime_rates http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [3] https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/78/2/192/3089763?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/78/2/192/30...

monkeydreams 8y ago

> You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you didn't write it? I love this article because it changed my mind. I was one of the redditors who urged FiletOFish1066 to fess up to his employers on the basis of some moral high ground I felt I occupied. I see now that I made the mistaken assumption that work == goodness and went on from there.

Stratoscope 8y ago

> ...whether you believe that someone's refusal to work should condemn them to destitution. I don't understand what you're getting at there. If someone refuses to work, that would seem to mean that they are able to work but choose not to. We're not talking about someone who is actually unable to work because of some physical or mental limitation and may need assistance of some sort. We're taking about someone who could work but doesn't want to. What possible obligation do I have toward that person? I don't see any. Of course I don't think they should be, as you put it, condemned to destitution. But what on earth makes it my responsibility to give them anything at all? Do I owe them a living, simply because they refuse to work?

flewkey 8y ago

Having a good worth ethic is respectable. However, working smart can be as effective as working hard. Still, lying about doing work is unethical in my opinion, even if it's clever. Depending on the situation though, I think that letting your employer know that a job can be automated may lead to better opportunities in the future... maybe?

dec0dedab0de 8y ago

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. I have told my work more than once that if they wanted to get the most out of me they should put me on the "front line" for a month or two, and let me decide what needs to be automated. It has always been laughed off as me being cute.

xorcist 8y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if you found out that some work is useless in the first place. Many people lack the bigger picture of what the purpose of operations really are. That's what easy to miss when thinking in terms of "automation". Automating existing work doesn't move us forward very much. Making the work unnecessary is.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
If your work is "laughing off" your suggestions and putting you down I'd seriously consider finding a better employer.
- collyw 8y ago
  Managers always think that they are smarter than coders. Lets face it if they admitted that we could make business decision well there wouldn't be much need for them.
  - wartijn_ 8y ago
    Works just as well the other way around. Every time managers are mentioned at HN, some programmer is sure they can do a better job than their/most/all managers.
    - jinfiesto 8y ago
      That's because programmers can do management. It's not unusual to see engineers get tracked into management. I have certainly never seen it go the other way (partially because managers usually make more than engineers I'm sure.)

partycoder 8y ago

> Typically, the code itself is trivial. There are tremendous financial opportunities waiting behind automation of expensive tasks usually performed by developers. For many of those tasks, the moment is right now, and the code itself is not trivial.

freeone3000 8y ago
Sure, but that's because developers are expensive, and poorly quantized - In a professional capacity, you can't really hire a developer for a weekend. That requires a direct connection, usually a personal one. There's probably a hundred thousand tasks that could be automated but have never been within ten feet of a developer because it never comes up. Something that you and I would do in ten minutes of perl would likely be someone's full time job. This absolutely increases in complexity as the benefit increases, mostly due to the low-hanging, prime fruit already being picked... but there's still tons of stuff being handled by humans still. Moreover, as techniques and computing power become cheaper and cheaper, stuff that used to be hard (OCR!) becomes easier all the time.

mrodozov 8y ago

"is there inherent nobility in work itself?" there certainly is benefit called experience, who cares about nobility. in certain parts of the world nobility is last concern

emodendroket 8y ago

Necessary work may be noble, but doing busywork for the sake of it is not.

jshowa1 8y ago

The problem is automation is never truly automated in most jobs. There's always things that go wrong, always changes being proposed, always explaining needing to be done. Sure, you may find it easy to automate a report or data entry, but what if that data changes or the format changes? Then you have to fix the code. The code is almost never trivial either. It often involves integrating complex systems and making sure that they work which, if done right, involves writing several unit tests. Using God is a poor excuse to determine ethics because there's no evidence one exists. It's especially a problem when you don't share the code because then, instead of creating improvement to the job for the company as a whole, you've written a pass to be lazy. The real job comes from supporting whatever you write to the masses. If you don't have any interest in that, you're simply selfish. The problem is people react in different ways, but it seems like the most common way is to not tell anyone which in my mind is foolish because even if you do get fired, you've improved your skills enough to find a better job anyway. Not only that, I can just as easily come up with an example of someone getting promoted for automating job tasks.

agumonkey 8y ago

it's almost spiritual: in an ideal world where I automate everything, what do I do ? these days I get brain chills whenever I do something un-intellectual but very sensory-based: crafting wood, molding things, taichi.. Work today is a twisted version of sharing group survival/happiness.