16 ms·

Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

180 points by PythagoRascal 7y ago

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
post needs a (2018) label in the title. last discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120322
- PythagoRascal 7y ago
  Thank you, I updated it.
- 1996 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18136371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18136371 Some jobs are better not doing yet egos are allowed to dominate
_bxg1 7y ago
I don't think the programmer is in the wrong for not disclosing the automation. I also don't think the company is in the wrong for firing them over that. Here's the thing: for the foreseeable future there will always be new work to do with this skillset. As one blogger put it, "we are in the business of eliminating jobs". And it will be a long time before we eliminate all automatable work, if we ever do. Even if you automate one job for yourself you could find something else with which to continue growing and challenging yourself. You could also kick back and continue to (truthfully) fulfill a transaction you've made with your employer: X compensation for doing Y work. Nothing wrong with that; you don't owe them more than that. You may be taking a risk, but that's your decision to make.
- mLuby 7y ago
  Tired: compensation = pay_per_job * jobs_completed Wired: compensation = pay_per_job * log(jobs_completed) Use those sweet sweet economic incentives.
- kaustyap 7y ago
  When company fires such an employee who is innovating and cutting costs, it's like killing golden goose. I am not sure why any employer would think of loosing such valuable asset when in fact they can get more automation done from him.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    True, if they can convince him or her of that then that could be a third option. On the other hand, the employee did display a willingness to be deceptive. Again, it's all up to the parties involved.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  When companies find out their employees have automated their jobs but are at the end of their useful output they don't even blink before kicking them out on their ass but saving their sweet-ass automation. Honestly why is it the employees duty to give their employer information which would have been to wholly the employer's benefit and none of his own when the employee is the less powerful party here? Employer basically had no choice but to fire him even if he was worth keeping in isolation just because they can't normalize getting gamed by their employees. There's often political downsides for the employee as well for automating their job. You become an existential threat to incompetent employees and/or employees doing automatable jobs. If you're TOO productive people may go hardball and attempt to crush you with their social connections. So you have political incentives to herd your productivity to something in proportion with other employees by reducing your actual hours working.
bencollier49 7y ago
They don't discuss the flip side of this, which is the hell of an organisation groaning under the weight of thousands of unsupportable Excel VBA scripts and Access databases (oh, and now UIPath jobs!) whose authors have left the business, and which could fail at any moment when an upstream dependency just goes away...
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  I had one job which could at best be described as 'Excel VBA DevOps' it was in a bank. Someone had cost the company millions when yahoo finance changed the end point for currency conversion and no one noticed it was using stale data for a few months.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I have to rewrite my accounting code every year to deal with Paypal CSV files because they change the way they work. A constant nuisance.
  - pintxo 7y ago
    I‘d argue using yahoo finance in the first place as data source is the issue here.
    - buzzkillington 7y ago
      Excel is the issue because it hid that dependency in the right most column (ABB) on the 4th sheet of the excel file.
      - bencollier49 7y ago
        Excel didn't do that, the person who wrote the spreadsheet did that!
  - kimjongtrill 7y ago
    this is staggeringly hilarious. wow.
tehjoker 7y ago
If the employees owned the company, they would not fear automation and would reap the benefits. The problem is that the company is owned by tyrants.
- z3t4 7y ago
  The buisness model is often to buy a good or service and then sell it for a higher price. Customers might pay for human hours, or explicitly want the work to be manual. Then it would be wrong to charge 10 hours for something that only took 1 hour. And the market/demand might not be big enough for 10x output.
  - btbuildem 7y ago
    We're not talking about bespoke loafer stitching, more like menial and mind-numbing excel sheet collation or something of the sort.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I think a lot of engineers make the mistake of thinking that "cost-plus" is the most appropriate way to price a product/service. Do I care whether Dunkin makes a nickel or $0.75 on the donut they sell me? No. Is it "unfair" for them to have 4x margins on donuts? No. Relatively few services are sold by the hour. Most spreadsheet mining is done for the value derived, not for the human labor input.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Employees can join together and start their own company any time they want to.
  - leetrout 7y ago
    Poor people can stop being poor whenever they want to. They just need to get a better paying job. It’s not that simple at all and your comment is disingenuous.
    - 7y ago
jdblair 7y ago
At my place of work "engineer yourself out of a job" is a mantra. The end goal isn't to actually lose our jobs. The goal is to raise our individual productivity by changing the nature of our job until, over time, its a new job.
- chii 7y ago
  except human cognitive ability eventually declines. If you cannot extract surplus value out of your job to pay for your eventual retirement, then there's no end to this cycle. This is why i am a big fan of having a large segment of the population be self-employed - they can extract the full benefits of their labour.
  - jdblair 7y ago
    Not everyone is good at being self employed. I've done it, and I'm putting more money away now that I'm part of a corporation. Someone else may be capturing some of the value of my labor, but the part I capture is bigger in absolute terms than I am likely to accomplish on my own.
    - chii 7y ago
      i think you mis-interpret 'surplus value' when you refer to 'more money' from the corporate employer. When I say surplus value, i really mean equity. Equity in the asset you create when doing work. With the exception of equity payments like shares (which, a lot of tech companies do), most workers do not receive any equity for the work that generates equity value. By making sure equity is generating returns for you, that is how one prevents oneself from being automated out of a job - a job's value is an equity that is fully captured by the employer, esp. if it's a long term asset like code. You only capture this equity if you work for yourself. It is risky - failure means certain death (or realistically, just go back to being a worker, and you lose your chance to get out of the rat race). May be a paradigm shift in society can occur to change this situation, but as i can see it, the only way one can be sure of having a retirement is to ensure one has equity that can generate the funds needed. And the only way to do that is to either work for an employer who will give that equity to you (which a lot of tech companies do), or work for yourself.
newshorts 7y ago
I worked at a ski resort and used an automation script to reduce my night audit role down to an hour of work per night. I used the remaining 7+ hours to learn how to code. Then I got a job in tech. I have been automating my roles since I started working and have never had a problem telling people about my tools. Never seemed wrong to me to become more productive through automation. I estimate my tools replace 15 hours of work per week. I still end up working well above 40 hours per week so these tools just keep me barely above water. The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again.
- grugagag 7y ago
  Fair point. But let’s think again. When you automated the audit role you took advantage of the remaining time so you could learn programming. You had an opportunity and seized it. Now a new guy like you won’t have the oportunity because you did it first. You inadvertently kicked the ladder. Before long all the low hanging fruits will be collected and newcomers will have a hard time getting an opportunity because things are already automated, no need for a new guy. Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point. Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...
  - chii 7y ago
    > You inadvertently kicked the ladder....no need for a new guy. and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so). The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.
    - 7y ago
proverbialbunny 7y ago
I worked a job productionizing models. It was a startup and the company wanted the work done quicker every time. I didn't really know how to say no, so I automated the task of converting from one programming language to another. It had a side effect of reducing the amount of bugs I'd put into code. My boss once confessed I was the fastest dev he had ever had bumped into. I hadn't really thought about it as "automation". It was a work from home gig, where the quicker the work was done the happier my boss was, yet at the same time I only had one task, so it was socially acceptable to not have work for weeks at a time and still get paid.
- czechdeveloper 7y ago
  I was worried whole time that you will tell your boss about your automation and you and whole team will get fired and replaced by it.
  - datashow 7y ago
    But do you have to give the automation tool to the company? My impression is that the automation tool is not part of the job.
    - mcv 7y ago
      But it's related to your job, and if your contract specifies that anything you write that is related to your job belongs to your employer, they own the automation script.
      - Dumblydorr 7y ago
        How automated though? I have an automated script that is really easy for me to run, but I'm not sure others would easily pick up the pieces if I was fired out of the blue...its automated but not simple.
        mcv 7y ago
        I was in a similar position in my first job. We got an extremely detailed functional description of what the software was supposed to do. It was so detailed, I had a couple of scripts and macros that created most of the code for me. I was always the first to be done with my work. I wouldn't have minded sharing those macros, in fact. Those macros were specific to that particular project, though. I was eventually fired from that job (I suspect my boss didn't like seeing me lean back and watch my scripts and macros run), and this never came up. I think the real value here is the skill and desire to automate these things, not the automation scripts themselves.
f2000 7y ago
On some occasions I've found ways to significantly automate large parts of my coding job - usually with DSLs plus code generation, an interpreter, or eval() ( evil() ? ) In most of these cases, rest of team was none too happy. Upstream teams would need to speed up to keep me busy, and downstream teams need to speed up to stop new work from queueing up. Best policy was to just keep speed up on the down-low and selectively deliver faster only when politically advantageous - e.g. under the gun by management.
- kimjongtrill 7y ago
  i am surprised by the amount of people smart enough and capable enough to understand how to automate chunks of their work but not understand this right here. dl automation is sometimes worth more.
buboard 7y ago
Lots of programmers don't want to automate their jobs because they have to be present at work, and their work pays too damn well to quit. There 's also the possibility of building an automatic SaaS or other kind of service and be financially independent, which they might be missing out (or opting out of, considering that it doesn't pay as well, especially in the current year). I agree with the article that automating your job is completely ethical. What's unethical is wasting people's time keeping them at work after they have delivered the value they 're hired for.
celeritascelery 7y ago
I think this really highlights one of downsides of being an employee. If you were the founder of company and you found a way to automate a job, all that economic benefit would go directly to you. If you are an employee, your employer gets all of it.
- youomakei 7y ago
  Not if you don’t tell them/give it to them
  - ElFitz 7y ago
    Or if you somehow manage to keep some of the benefits. Could be higher compensation associated with a shift in role, equity and / or reduced working hours / days, depending on what you're looking for.
- paganel 7y ago
  > , all that economic benefit would go directly to you. One of the Marxist theories of work/value is that most probably that automatization of work will also be done by your direct competitors, at pretty much the same costs, at which point both you and said direct competitors will have the same lower and lower margins for that work that has just been automated. At which point extracting higher margins that will allow you to differentiate your company from your competitors goes back to extracting "value" from manual work (or "exploiting workers", as the marxists would put it) not yet automated. You could say that much of today's so-called "stagflation" is caused by the powers that be (or the "capitalists") not being able to find enough manual work to extract value from (some of the economists are a little euphemistic in their language and call this phenomenon "under-employment").
  - chii 7y ago
    > direct competitors will have the same lower and lower margins for that work that has just been automated. and thus society is enriched because a goods/service has just been made cheaper, so more people can afford them. The problem comes when the workers made redundant has no opportunity to retrain/reskill into something else.
noyesno 7y ago
Which online courses and books would you recommend to build competence in automation within the MS Office ecosystem? I'm not a coder but I would like to automate some of the more mechanical/repetitive aspects of my work, e.g. generating reports from csv files, pulling comments from Word files into a separate document, dashboard creation of live data in Power BI etc.
- scandinavegan 7y ago
  I haven't read it in detail, and I don't know how difficult it is, but there's a free book on how to (among other things) automate Office applications with Python: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ Chapter 12-14 look relevant to you (Excel, Word, and CSV).
  - npmaile 7y ago
    I have read it, and it has become my most recommended book for someone trying to get into programming or technology in general. It won't tell you how to do every single thign in the universe, but it can give a great starting point for automation and programming in general.
- Ramiuz 7y ago
  If you're not a coder, I highly recommend Flow (https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/) Which is an automation platform designed to be used with MS office products. There are also a lot of options in Azure , but they require a little bit more of coding (They are incredible powerful nonetheless).
- anon9001 7y ago
  You can get really far just by using macros, so don't overlook that, but the language is called VBA and its documentation is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/ The documentation may look daunting, but VBA isn't that difficult to do useful things with. You'll be mostly copying/pasting from google like most professional coders :) You can start with a macro and turn it into VBA, which is sometimes useful.
piterdevries 7y ago
Can't automate meetings, can we?
- Apfel 7y ago
  I hate meetings with a passion, and I work in HR data for a very large (40k+ employee) government employer in Western Europe. I got myself in a bit of trouble by attempting to produce an automatically generated "meeting cost" report to dissuade people from having meetings. The script pulled salary data for attendees of each meeting (pulled from Outlook calendar), length of meeting and even used the Bing maps API to capture travel costs for each attendee. When I mentioned it to my manager, he promptly killed it. Although he is very much anti-meeting, he pointed out that it could easily be targeted by a Freedom of Information request and used as a political weapon.
alistairSH 7y ago
The premise of this essay seems flawed. As a manager, I actively encourage my employees to automate their jobs. Almost every sprint, there is at least one task on the board to automate some mundane detail of their jobs. I'm happy to have them do it. It frees them to do more valuable work. "Pushing buttons" isn't valuable (we can't sell it). And like most good developers, they hate sitting around pushing buttons - they'd rather work on more stimulating problems. It's win-win. My boss sees us doing more with less. The sales team gets more new features to sell. The employees have more rewarding days. This all presupposes the employees aren't inherently lazy. But, that's been my experience - "lazy" developers aren't generally lazy, just bored.
- brightball 7y ago
  That's a solid approach. I may try it with my teams too. I always try to be very conscious of anything that will create / remove future interruptions in the decisions that we make around our work but haven't yet made a point to get "automate something" in regularly.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    I've found it's far easier to build this into sprints/backlogs/whatever than rely on the team to automate on their own. Benefits include: better understanding of the problem, testing (is the automation robust, etc), and making time for formal sharing with other teams. Also, some developers want to automate, but might not feel enabled - they want to stick to the rules (sprint plan, etc).
- kemiller2002 7y ago
  This is absolutely the right way to do things. My time, and my developer's time is far too important to handle mundane tasks, and if we're manually doing those tasks, that just another thing I need to double check to make sure I did correctly, and that seriously wears on me. I'm paid a lot of money to solve problems, not write code. Is code involved? Yes, of course, I'm a programmer, but my job is to solve issues. I have never been at a place where I've though, "you know if I automate this button, I don't have a job anymore." There is always WAY too much work to do that actually requires my attention.
systematical 7y ago
When most engineers automate repetitive work flow, they seek praise and then find other useful things to do. I think automating, then being lazy, is an exception rather than rule for most. With that said, I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime. Particular ones like me, that create run of the mill relational systems for SMBs. I didn't need to go to school or get a fancy CS degree to do what I do. Nothing cutting edge. AI will cut deep into development like everything else eventually. A lot of what we do is converting business rules into code, storing that data, returning it, and performing some useful operation with it. The remainder is making the systems easy for humans to develop on (be it DevOps or clean design). That whole last part doesn't matter to AI, in fact it's really a waste of time when you remove human engineers. Even still, AI can figure out SOLID principals, cyclomatic complexity, style guidelines, and general human readability if it needed to, but why?
- bachmeier 7y ago
  > I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime AI can't replace a developer, it can only perform the tasks that developer currently does. The developer can go do something else. The possibility that AI can make humans obsolete in the next 100 years is extremely unlikely IMO. By doing the low-level tasks, AI opens the doors for humans to spend their time on more important things.
  - tbyehl 7y ago
    It was roughly 70 years from the demonstration of the first working transistor until a sufficiently large collection of transistors could pilot a commercially-reasonable car on public streets. I can't begin to imagine what the next 100 years will bring.
- neillyons 7y ago
  Only when I can see a human shaped AI put a duvet cover on a duvet would I be worried about AI.
- protonimitate 7y ago
  > With that said, I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime. I don't see this happening. I don't believe AI is anywhere near sophisticated enough to tackle the majority of problems that developers are solving on a day to day basis. Even if we somehow manage to have a major breakthrough with AI, it's not going to be commercially available/viable enough for average-joe dev shop to implement it. I'm far more worried about AI replacing lower income jobs and widening the pay gap even more than I am about tech workers losing their jobs. >A lot of what we do is converting business rules into code, storing that data, returning it, and performing some useful operation with it. Sure, but you still need someone to make those business rules. I don't see AI being able to interpret the direction of MBA filled meeting rooms without some sort of translation later (i.e., developers). AI is hype right now. I have not yet been convinced of its practical application, or anyone's real desire to invest in it (other than the handful of companies who would benefit off of its implementation).
Emanation 7y ago
I've been attempting to automate making api's at work. Now I'm pretty close to deploying an entire aws backed api/storage using a graphql schema. Unfortunately, my boss constantly changes his mind concerning what the architecture should look like. Lol It's okay though, a lot of functionality can be reutilized across architectures. Oh well. Some day I'll be tasked with making an api, write out a gql schema from a requirements doc, then deploy the thing in some rogue amount of time, only known to me, and anyone else who reads my confluence docs.
ptero 7y ago
First, as humans, we should not really be doing many jobs that the machines do well (cleanly, cheaply and reliably). That is not always how the world works. Technology adoption lags and there is a big gray area in the definition of "well" or "well enough" that means humans get to do a lot of machine-ready jobs for a while. But "knowledge workers" especially should not expect to be doing "machine ready" jobs forever and be paid a lot of money for it. But done right, "programming yourself out of a job" is a significant job advantage, not a disaster that the article paints it to be. Many managers highly appreciate smart engineers who can do a good job on heir assignments (if yours does not, find another one even if your job is not machine-ready). And delivering a reliable, automated solution for your own task is one of the strongest indicators that you are one of those engineers. One way to do it is, once your solution is ready, to have a one-on-one with your manager and tell him that you can build a fully automated solution in, say, two months while keeping your current load. Would he be interested? If so, what would be his plan for you after you complete your task? You are interested in X / career path to Y / etc. Use free time to start ramping up on new role. One benefit of this "soft transition" is to have a fallback if you feel the new project is not the right fit / not welcoming you. You can always go back and say that automation is not ready yet and ask for a new project / another couple of months. My 2c.
CareyB 7y ago
I’ve been in IT since the early nineties, and I see this as symptomatic of a more basic issue; putting non-IT managers in charge of IT. This used to be chronic. I’d be in board meetings trying to explain to the entire company brain trust the difference between a hit, and a page view. When they realized - after about nine months - that there were over 30 hits per page view, their entire business model went out the window. There are other fun, and unaware stories out of that job, but I’ll leave it there.
- ptero 7y ago
  On the flip side, the problem might not be with the non-IT manager. I know nothing about your specific cases, but many managers are smart enough to understand the statement that there are 30+ hits per page view, especially when it is demonstrated with a simple webpage example with two counters (or even a clean chart). Why did it take 9 months to explain? A requirement for almost any management role is to be able to explain things clearly to non-specialists. I have seen many engineers writing good code but hitting a wall trying to explain a simple concept to someone who does not share their exact terminology. It is a painful, toe curling sight. Let's keep those engineers writing code, they should not be managing other humans. My 2c.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    You are making some good points but from my experience there is also a reluctance for non tech people to learn anything tech related. It gets brushed off the same way learning a language or math gets brushed off by people. They claim from the start that it’s too hard and not even worth trying. And that behavior is socially acceptable. You can come up with a lot of easy to understand analogies but often you will regret that because often then the analogies get stretched to a point where they don’t make sense.
    - ptero 7y ago
      That is a good point. In a perfect world, managers managing technology would make an effort learning it. But it is always better to assume that they did not (assume they focus on potentially harder skills needed to manage humans and teams). Instead of lamenting this imperfection, it is better for an engineer to learn how to talk effectively to non-specialists who are friendly, smart, but clueless in the topic you want to explain. This effort will pay off in spades.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
PerilousD 7y ago
Created a system that took report requests from a mainframe and ran then on a PC version of the system (saving the company more than double my salary every year). When the IT application support was outsourced (big 3 letter mainframe and PC computer company). The contracted cost per year to support the system that I wrote and up till then was still maintaining was 5 times my annual salary - companies have their own weird logic.
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  Your salary is not your total cost to the company. Having said that, 5x your salary is a bit high. It may be including other costs.
dxbydt 7y ago
Amazing amount of cognitive dissonance in these comments. Simultaneously happy to pat oneself on the back for automating some task yet thinking same can’t happen to you because ... ? Don’t spear & shield yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox
chooseaname 7y ago
If I don't automate parts of my job, I can't move on to other projects due to time constraints.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
It's a shame there's no room for people who want to work less. Some people see that they can do a job faster and think of the higher productivity they now have space for. They expect higher compensation for their new ability to do more work in the same hours. Other people see that they can do a job faster and think of the extra free time they now have space for. They expect the same compensation and the same amount of tasks, but fewer butt in chair hours. The system we live in only has room for the former, and often people don't even get the higher comp for being extra productive. They have to take the new skills and leave for a different job. Nobody gets to (openly) work less.
- stoicShell 7y ago
  I think you need to become more independent from the 'system' you describe; i.e. go freelance / contractor / consultant / remote etc., some variation of these. I think I really don't trust the author of Rich dad poor dad but the one thing he got right is the ESBI system ("cashflow quadrants"). — I'll let you google but the gist of it is simple: there are only two limited resources, money and time, and any work is a trade of one for the other. You want to be in a position wherein you generate 'enough' money to 'buy back time' essentially. That means being either a business owner (B quadrant) and/or an investor (I quadrant). Freelancing is the "S" (specialist) quadrant, you don't want to be there forever — because revenue only comes from putting in hours, it's a neverending grinding wheel, however profitable it seems. What you want is to setup your 'freelancing' as a 'specialist' to grow into hiring people and thus become a business. Never forget that more than 80% of GDP in rich countries is made by small businesses. Groups of 2, 5, 10, 20 people make up the effective wealth of our economies. Deep down that's what The Millionaire Fastlane or The 4-Hour Week expose to the general public, this idea of relative independence combined with a business model that cumulatively earns you ever more time — and hiring is key to unlocking that, multiplying manhours around your activity, sharing the load, not being "required" yourself for the business to run. A group of well-organized devs could probably wrap 30-hours weeks and still make a ton of money.
neilobremski 7y ago
Where can I find these people who have automated everything about their jobs? (Assuming their jobs were complex at all) I would like to hire them ...
- reificator 7y ago
  I keep trying, but shit just keeps piling up. It's like programming skills are generally useful or something.
turc1656 7y ago
In my personal experience this generally isn't an issue. If you have the necessary skills to automate your own job, chances are your employer has other work they want you to do. I worked at a fintech company for a few years a while back. I started in an entry level role doing daily operations stuff within their proprietary system. It was boring but I could see that most of it could be automated if enough effort was put into it. We were 4 people at that time. No way our dev team had the time to do it as they were always slaughtered with an endless list of demands from other teams and higher-ups. And no budget would ever be assigned to this. So I took it upon myself to learn how to do it through code. Six months later I had a solution up and running which automated about 80% of the daily work for the four of us. Did they fire the other three people and just leave me to do that remaining 20%? No, they took me and another one of the technically savvy people from the team and took us off the boring daily stuff entirely and put us on a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow. They promoted me. They also promoted the person who had been there the longest to make them the manager of a new Dallas team that was being created for us to pass off the remainder of the boring stuff do, as well as new initiatives that they weren't able to capitalize on because lack of headcount to handle the work. The fourth member of the team also migrated into different projects around the division. Basically, it freed everyone to do a bunch of stuff the business wanted to do but didn't have the budget for or did have the budget for but standard corporate bullshit got in the way of. This was like a godsend to them because they viewed it as getting 3 people just thrown in their laps for free. Win-win for everyone.
- lioeters 7y ago
  Great story of how automating one's own job led to more meaningful productivity, rather than being made redundant. > a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow Sounds wonderful - and surprising too, since businesses typically seem afraid to trust their own teams this way. What's striking is the autonomy given to the team, after the boring stuff got automated. This kind of higher-level decision making is exactly what cannot be automated (at least for now) - to diagnose areas that need improvement, and to plan and self-organize to implement it. --- In my work, I've also been putting much effort into automating parts of my job, i.e., build/deployment and remote management of applications. Far from making myself redundant, I'm trusted by the company with more (and higher) responsibilities, and more autonomy to manage my own work and its direction. Also, with the increase in efficiency and productivity, we're able to hire more people.
janpot 7y ago
I really hate the word "coder"
r34 7y ago
The "feeling of doing something wrong" - as mentioned in the article - when automating your tasks is somehow relevant but not in current context of alienated work. For natural working context (e.g. a team) it's normal to look for something else to do once you finished your tasks or got rid of them completely by automation. It is because the natural flow of profits considers you as as beneficient. Dooing good for your team, company, etc. = doing good for yourself. On the other hand in current working context that feeling arises as an error (like non-adaptive-anymore feature of organism, not yet cancelled by evolutionary processes).
m23khan 7y ago
so far what seems to capture people's imagination is news about automation taking work of IT workers/developers as well as jobs belonging to service industry and manual/labor intensive jobs. However, the game changer will be when automation starts to replace legions of lawyers, insurance Professionals, underwriters, traders, Capital Partners, Accountants, etc. To the point the judges and doctors would be relying completely on automation to simply operate/serve as human checkpoint.
amflare 7y ago
This seems to be mostly non-tech jobs being automated. The expected result of hiring these people is whatever menial work they were doing (not trying to be insulting, menial work is where automation thrives). Tech jobs, are already about automation (to a degree) and that is the expected result of hiring a dev. Therein lies the fundamental difference. If a dev automates, they are doing what they are being paid to do, if a non-dev automates, they are no longer doing what they are being paid to do (in the eyes of the company of course, we can have a whole different argument about whether they are being paid for effort-input or value-output).
smsm42 7y ago
I wish it was even 10% true. There's still so many mundane tasks in software engineering that I need to waste time on doing manually... I regularly waste significant amount of time on setting up deployments, configuring logging, monitoring and alerting, organizing data for tests, and a myriad of other mundane non-creative tasks that take time from real fun job - like designing and implementing new algorithms, functionality, features, etc. Most of these not only not automated to a significant degree - they are small and varied enough that automating them wouldn't probably even be possible without spending inordinate amount of time. Those rare happy circumstances where it is scriptable, it gets scripted and it's a huge help, but never in my multi-decade career as software developer I ever wondered if what I do can be done by a script. I'd be happy if even 1% of it could be - I'd have 1% more time for the fun stuff - but we not even there yet.
ticmasta 7y ago
Over a decade-plus consulting career I always tried to either discourage spurious new projects or work myself out of current engagements. While this was locally sub-optimal it led to long-term relationships that meant meaningful work, strategic initiatives and more money. You could also try hoarding knowledge in an effort to maintain your value but this strategy also has a limited shelf-life. I'd politely suggest you don't focus on solely optimizing the status quo until you're near the end of your career and ready to ride it out. Otherwise you will be in trouble down the road.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I had a nightmare once, where I was sitting at a desk in a small room coding. Somebody asked me what I was doing. "I'm writing Cobol Printer Drivers. Its the last programming job in the world, because they've got machines to write everything else". A person walked in the door with a box, and set it on my desk. "What's that?" "Its a device to write Cobol Printer Drivers." I got up, walked to the door and opened it. Outside was nothing -just a grey fog. Then I woke up sweating.

180 points by PythagoRascal 7y ago

post needs a (2018) label in the title. last discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120322

PythagoRascal 7y ago
Thank you, I updated it.
1996 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18136371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18136371 Some jobs are better not doing yet egos are allowed to dominate

_bxg1 7y ago

I don't think the programmer is in the wrong for not disclosing the automation. I also don't think the company is in the wrong for firing them over that. Here's the thing: for the foreseeable future there will always be new work to do with this skillset. As one blogger put it, "we are in the business of eliminating jobs". And it will be a long time before we eliminate all automatable work, if we ever do. Even if you automate one job for yourself you could find something else with which to continue growing and challenging yourself. You could also kick back and continue to (truthfully) fulfill a transaction you've made with your employer: X compensation for doing Y work. Nothing wrong with that; you don't owe them more than that. You may be taking a risk, but that's your decision to make.

mLuby 7y ago
Tired: compensation = pay_per_job * jobs_completed Wired: compensation = pay_per_job * log(jobs_completed) Use those sweet sweet economic incentives.
kaustyap 7y ago
When company fires such an employee who is innovating and cutting costs, it's like killing golden goose. I am not sure why any employer would think of loosing such valuable asset when in fact they can get more automation done from him.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  True, if they can convince him or her of that then that could be a third option. On the other hand, the employee did display a willingness to be deceptive. Again, it's all up to the parties involved.
TheOperator 7y ago
When companies find out their employees have automated their jobs but are at the end of their useful output they don't even blink before kicking them out on their ass but saving their sweet-ass automation. Honestly why is it the employees duty to give their employer information which would have been to wholly the employer's benefit and none of his own when the employee is the less powerful party here? Employer basically had no choice but to fire him even if he was worth keeping in isolation just because they can't normalize getting gamed by their employees. There's often political downsides for the employee as well for automating their job. You become an existential threat to incompetent employees and/or employees doing automatable jobs. If you're TOO productive people may go hardball and attempt to crush you with their social connections. So you have political incentives to herd your productivity to something in proportion with other employees by reducing your actual hours working.

bencollier49 7y ago

They don't discuss the flip side of this, which is the hell of an organisation groaning under the weight of thousands of unsupportable Excel VBA scripts and Access databases (oh, and now UIPath jobs!) whose authors have left the business, and which could fail at any moment when an upstream dependency just goes away...

buzzkillington 7y ago
I had one job which could at best be described as 'Excel VBA DevOps' it was in a bank. Someone had cost the company millions when yahoo finance changed the end point for currency conversion and no one noticed it was using stale data for a few months.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I have to rewrite my accounting code every year to deal with Paypal CSV files because they change the way they work. A constant nuisance.
- pintxo 7y ago
  I‘d argue using yahoo finance in the first place as data source is the issue here.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Excel is the issue because it hid that dependency in the right most column (ABB) on the 4th sheet of the excel file.
    - bencollier49 7y ago
      Excel didn't do that, the person who wrote the spreadsheet did that!
- kimjongtrill 7y ago
  this is staggeringly hilarious. wow.

tehjoker 7y ago

If the employees owned the company, they would not fear automation and would reap the benefits. The problem is that the company is owned by tyrants.

z3t4 7y ago
The buisness model is often to buy a good or service and then sell it for a higher price. Customers might pay for human hours, or explicitly want the work to be manual. Then it would be wrong to charge 10 hours for something that only took 1 hour. And the market/demand might not be big enough for 10x output.
- btbuildem 7y ago
  We're not talking about bespoke loafer stitching, more like menial and mind-numbing excel sheet collation or something of the sort.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I think a lot of engineers make the mistake of thinking that "cost-plus" is the most appropriate way to price a product/service. Do I care whether Dunkin makes a nickel or $0.75 on the donut they sell me? No. Is it "unfair" for them to have 4x margins on donuts? No. Relatively few services are sold by the hour. Most spreadsheet mining is done for the value derived, not for the human labor input.
WalterBright 7y ago
Employees can join together and start their own company any time they want to.
- leetrout 7y ago
  Poor people can stop being poor whenever they want to. They just need to get a better paying job. It’s not that simple at all and your comment is disingenuous.
  - 7y ago

jdblair 7y ago

At my place of work "engineer yourself out of a job" is a mantra. The end goal isn't to actually lose our jobs. The goal is to raise our individual productivity by changing the nature of our job until, over time, its a new job.

chii 7y ago
except human cognitive ability eventually declines. If you cannot extract surplus value out of your job to pay for your eventual retirement, then there's no end to this cycle. This is why i am a big fan of having a large segment of the population be self-employed - they can extract the full benefits of their labour.
- jdblair 7y ago
  Not everyone is good at being self employed. I've done it, and I'm putting more money away now that I'm part of a corporation. Someone else may be capturing some of the value of my labor, but the part I capture is bigger in absolute terms than I am likely to accomplish on my own.
  - chii 7y ago
    i think you mis-interpret 'surplus value' when you refer to 'more money' from the corporate employer. When I say surplus value, i really mean equity. Equity in the asset you create when doing work. With the exception of equity payments like shares (which, a lot of tech companies do), most workers do not receive any equity for the work that generates equity value. By making sure equity is generating returns for you, that is how one prevents oneself from being automated out of a job - a job's value is an equity that is fully captured by the employer, esp. if it's a long term asset like code. You only capture this equity if you work for yourself. It is risky - failure means certain death (or realistically, just go back to being a worker, and you lose your chance to get out of the rat race). May be a paradigm shift in society can occur to change this situation, but as i can see it, the only way one can be sure of having a retirement is to ensure one has equity that can generate the funds needed. And the only way to do that is to either work for an employer who will give that equity to you (which a lot of tech companies do), or work for yourself.

newshorts 7y ago

I worked at a ski resort and used an automation script to reduce my night audit role down to an hour of work per night. I used the remaining 7+ hours to learn how to code. Then I got a job in tech. I have been automating my roles since I started working and have never had a problem telling people about my tools. Never seemed wrong to me to become more productive through automation. I estimate my tools replace 15 hours of work per week. I still end up working well above 40 hours per week so these tools just keep me barely above water. The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again.

grugagag 7y ago
Fair point. But let’s think again. When you automated the audit role you took advantage of the remaining time so you could learn programming. You had an opportunity and seized it. Now a new guy like you won’t have the oportunity because you did it first. You inadvertently kicked the ladder. Before long all the low hanging fruits will be collected and newcomers will have a hard time getting an opportunity because things are already automated, no need for a new guy. Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point. Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...
- chii 7y ago
  > You inadvertently kicked the ladder....no need for a new guy. and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so). The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.
  - 7y ago

proverbialbunny 7y ago

I worked a job productionizing models. It was a startup and the company wanted the work done quicker every time. I didn't really know how to say no, so I automated the task of converting from one programming language to another. It had a side effect of reducing the amount of bugs I'd put into code. My boss once confessed I was the fastest dev he had ever had bumped into. I hadn't really thought about it as "automation". It was a work from home gig, where the quicker the work was done the happier my boss was, yet at the same time I only had one task, so it was socially acceptable to not have work for weeks at a time and still get paid.

czechdeveloper 7y ago
I was worried whole time that you will tell your boss about your automation and you and whole team will get fired and replaced by it.
- datashow 7y ago
  But do you have to give the automation tool to the company? My impression is that the automation tool is not part of the job.
  - mcv 7y ago
    But it's related to your job, and if your contract specifies that anything you write that is related to your job belongs to your employer, they own the automation script.
    - Dumblydorr 7y ago
      How automated though? I have an automated script that is really easy for me to run, but I'm not sure others would easily pick up the pieces if I was fired out of the blue...its automated but not simple.
      - mcv 7y ago
        I was in a similar position in my first job. We got an extremely detailed functional description of what the software was supposed to do. It was so detailed, I had a couple of scripts and macros that created most of the code for me. I was always the first to be done with my work. I wouldn't have minded sharing those macros, in fact. Those macros were specific to that particular project, though. I was eventually fired from that job (I suspect my boss didn't like seeing me lean back and watch my scripts and macros run), and this never came up. I think the real value here is the skill and desire to automate these things, not the automation scripts themselves.

f2000 7y ago

On some occasions I've found ways to significantly automate large parts of my coding job - usually with DSLs plus code generation, an interpreter, or eval() ( evil() ? ) In most of these cases, rest of team was none too happy. Upstream teams would need to speed up to keep me busy, and downstream teams need to speed up to stop new work from queueing up. Best policy was to just keep speed up on the down-low and selectively deliver faster only when politically advantageous - e.g. under the gun by management.

kimjongtrill 7y ago
i am surprised by the amount of people smart enough and capable enough to understand how to automate chunks of their work but not understand this right here. dl automation is sometimes worth more.

buboard 7y ago

Lots of programmers don't want to automate their jobs because they have to be present at work, and their work pays too damn well to quit. There 's also the possibility of building an automatic SaaS or other kind of service and be financially independent, which they might be missing out (or opting out of, considering that it doesn't pay as well, especially in the current year). I agree with the article that automating your job is completely ethical. What's unethical is wasting people's time keeping them at work after they have delivered the value they 're hired for.

celeritascelery 7y ago

I think this really highlights one of downsides of being an employee. If you were the founder of company and you found a way to automate a job, all that economic benefit would go directly to you. If you are an employee, your employer gets all of it.

youomakei 7y ago
Not if you don’t tell them/give it to them
- ElFitz 7y ago
  Or if you somehow manage to keep some of the benefits. Could be higher compensation associated with a shift in role, equity and / or reduced working hours / days, depending on what you're looking for.
paganel 7y ago
> , all that economic benefit would go directly to you. One of the Marxist theories of work/value is that most probably that automatization of work will also be done by your direct competitors, at pretty much the same costs, at which point both you and said direct competitors will have the same lower and lower margins for that work that has just been automated. At which point extracting higher margins that will allow you to differentiate your company from your competitors goes back to extracting "value" from manual work (or "exploiting workers", as the marxists would put it) not yet automated. You could say that much of today's so-called "stagflation" is caused by the powers that be (or the "capitalists") not being able to find enough manual work to extract value from (some of the economists are a little euphemistic in their language and call this phenomenon "under-employment").
- chii 7y ago
  > direct competitors will have the same lower and lower margins for that work that has just been automated. and thus society is enriched because a goods/service has just been made cheaper, so more people can afford them. The problem comes when the workers made redundant has no opportunity to retrain/reskill into something else.

noyesno 7y ago

Which online courses and books would you recommend to build competence in automation within the MS Office ecosystem? I'm not a coder but I would like to automate some of the more mechanical/repetitive aspects of my work, e.g. generating reports from csv files, pulling comments from Word files into a separate document, dashboard creation of live data in Power BI etc.

scandinavegan 7y ago
I haven't read it in detail, and I don't know how difficult it is, but there's a free book on how to (among other things) automate Office applications with Python: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ Chapter 12-14 look relevant to you (Excel, Word, and CSV).
- npmaile 7y ago
  I have read it, and it has become my most recommended book for someone trying to get into programming or technology in general. It won't tell you how to do every single thign in the universe, but it can give a great starting point for automation and programming in general.
Ramiuz 7y ago
If you're not a coder, I highly recommend Flow (https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/) Which is an automation platform designed to be used with MS office products. There are also a lot of options in Azure , but they require a little bit more of coding (They are incredible powerful nonetheless).
anon9001 7y ago
You can get really far just by using macros, so don't overlook that, but the language is called VBA and its documentation is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/ The documentation may look daunting, but VBA isn't that difficult to do useful things with. You'll be mostly copying/pasting from google like most professional coders :) You can start with a macro and turn it into VBA, which is sometimes useful.

piterdevries 7y ago

Can't automate meetings, can we?

Apfel 7y ago
I hate meetings with a passion, and I work in HR data for a very large (40k+ employee) government employer in Western Europe. I got myself in a bit of trouble by attempting to produce an automatically generated "meeting cost" report to dissuade people from having meetings. The script pulled salary data for attendees of each meeting (pulled from Outlook calendar), length of meeting and even used the Bing maps API to capture travel costs for each attendee. When I mentioned it to my manager, he promptly killed it. Although he is very much anti-meeting, he pointed out that it could easily be targeted by a Freedom of Information request and used as a political weapon.

alistairSH 7y ago

The premise of this essay seems flawed. As a manager, I actively encourage my employees to automate their jobs. Almost every sprint, there is at least one task on the board to automate some mundane detail of their jobs. I'm happy to have them do it. It frees them to do more valuable work. "Pushing buttons" isn't valuable (we can't sell it). And like most good developers, they hate sitting around pushing buttons - they'd rather work on more stimulating problems. It's win-win. My boss sees us doing more with less. The sales team gets more new features to sell. The employees have more rewarding days. This all presupposes the employees aren't inherently lazy. But, that's been my experience - "lazy" developers aren't generally lazy, just bored.

brightball 7y ago
That's a solid approach. I may try it with my teams too. I always try to be very conscious of anything that will create / remove future interruptions in the decisions that we make around our work but haven't yet made a point to get "automate something" in regularly.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  I've found it's far easier to build this into sprints/backlogs/whatever than rely on the team to automate on their own. Benefits include: better understanding of the problem, testing (is the automation robust, etc), and making time for formal sharing with other teams. Also, some developers want to automate, but might not feel enabled - they want to stick to the rules (sprint plan, etc).
kemiller2002 7y ago
This is absolutely the right way to do things. My time, and my developer's time is far too important to handle mundane tasks, and if we're manually doing those tasks, that just another thing I need to double check to make sure I did correctly, and that seriously wears on me. I'm paid a lot of money to solve problems, not write code. Is code involved? Yes, of course, I'm a programmer, but my job is to solve issues. I have never been at a place where I've though, "you know if I automate this button, I don't have a job anymore." There is always WAY too much work to do that actually requires my attention.

systematical 7y ago

When most engineers automate repetitive work flow, they seek praise and then find other useful things to do. I think automating, then being lazy, is an exception rather than rule for most. With that said, I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime. Particular ones like me, that create run of the mill relational systems for SMBs. I didn't need to go to school or get a fancy CS degree to do what I do. Nothing cutting edge. AI will cut deep into development like everything else eventually. A lot of what we do is converting business rules into code, storing that data, returning it, and performing some useful operation with it. The remainder is making the systems easy for humans to develop on (be it DevOps or clean design). That whole last part doesn't matter to AI, in fact it's really a waste of time when you remove human engineers. Even still, AI can figure out SOLID principals, cyclomatic complexity, style guidelines, and general human readability if it needed to, but why?

bachmeier 7y ago
> I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime AI can't replace a developer, it can only perform the tasks that developer currently does. The developer can go do something else. The possibility that AI can make humans obsolete in the next 100 years is extremely unlikely IMO. By doing the low-level tasks, AI opens the doors for humans to spend their time on more important things.
- tbyehl 7y ago
  It was roughly 70 years from the demonstration of the first working transistor until a sufficiently large collection of transistors could pilot a commercially-reasonable car on public streets. I can't begin to imagine what the next 100 years will bring.
neillyons 7y ago
Only when I can see a human shaped AI put a duvet cover on a duvet would I be worried about AI.
protonimitate 7y ago
> With that said, I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime. I don't see this happening. I don't believe AI is anywhere near sophisticated enough to tackle the majority of problems that developers are solving on a day to day basis. Even if we somehow manage to have a major breakthrough with AI, it's not going to be commercially available/viable enough for average-joe dev shop to implement it. I'm far more worried about AI replacing lower income jobs and widening the pay gap even more than I am about tech workers losing their jobs. >A lot of what we do is converting business rules into code, storing that data, returning it, and performing some useful operation with it. Sure, but you still need someone to make those business rules. I don't see AI being able to interpret the direction of MBA filled meeting rooms without some sort of translation later (i.e., developers). AI is hype right now. I have not yet been convinced of its practical application, or anyone's real desire to invest in it (other than the handful of companies who would benefit off of its implementation).

Emanation 7y ago

I've been attempting to automate making api's at work. Now I'm pretty close to deploying an entire aws backed api/storage using a graphql schema. Unfortunately, my boss constantly changes his mind concerning what the architecture should look like. Lol It's okay though, a lot of functionality can be reutilized across architectures. Oh well. Some day I'll be tasked with making an api, write out a gql schema from a requirements doc, then deploy the thing in some rogue amount of time, only known to me, and anyone else who reads my confluence docs.

ptero 7y ago

First, as humans, we should not really be doing many jobs that the machines do well (cleanly, cheaply and reliably). That is not always how the world works. Technology adoption lags and there is a big gray area in the definition of "well" or "well enough" that means humans get to do a lot of machine-ready jobs for a while. But "knowledge workers" especially should not expect to be doing "machine ready" jobs forever and be paid a lot of money for it. But done right, "programming yourself out of a job" is a significant job advantage, not a disaster that the article paints it to be. Many managers highly appreciate smart engineers who can do a good job on heir assignments (if yours does not, find another one even if your job is not machine-ready). And delivering a reliable, automated solution for your own task is one of the strongest indicators that you are one of those engineers. One way to do it is, once your solution is ready, to have a one-on-one with your manager and tell him that you can build a fully automated solution in, say, two months while keeping your current load. Would he be interested? If so, what would be his plan for you after you complete your task? You are interested in X / career path to Y / etc. Use free time to start ramping up on new role. One benefit of this "soft transition" is to have a fallback if you feel the new project is not the right fit / not welcoming you. You can always go back and say that automation is not ready yet and ask for a new project / another couple of months. My 2c.

CareyB 7y ago

I’ve been in IT since the early nineties, and I see this as symptomatic of a more basic issue; putting non-IT managers in charge of IT. This used to be chronic. I’d be in board meetings trying to explain to the entire company brain trust the difference between a hit, and a page view. When they realized - after about nine months - that there were over 30 hits per page view, their entire business model went out the window. There are other fun, and unaware stories out of that job, but I’ll leave it there.

ptero 7y ago
On the flip side, the problem might not be with the non-IT manager. I know nothing about your specific cases, but many managers are smart enough to understand the statement that there are 30+ hits per page view, especially when it is demonstrated with a simple webpage example with two counters (or even a clean chart). Why did it take 9 months to explain? A requirement for almost any management role is to be able to explain things clearly to non-specialists. I have seen many engineers writing good code but hitting a wall trying to explain a simple concept to someone who does not share their exact terminology. It is a painful, toe curling sight. Let's keep those engineers writing code, they should not be managing other humans. My 2c.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  You are making some good points but from my experience there is also a reluctance for non tech people to learn anything tech related. It gets brushed off the same way learning a language or math gets brushed off by people. They claim from the start that it’s too hard and not even worth trying. And that behavior is socially acceptable. You can come up with a lot of easy to understand analogies but often you will regret that because often then the analogies get stretched to a point where they don’t make sense.
  - ptero 7y ago
    That is a good point. In a perfect world, managers managing technology would make an effort learning it. But it is always better to assume that they did not (assume they focus on potentially harder skills needed to manage humans and teams). Instead of lamenting this imperfection, it is better for an engineer to learn how to talk effectively to non-specialists who are friendly, smart, but clueless in the topic you want to explain. This effort will pay off in spades.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

PerilousD 7y ago

Created a system that took report requests from a mainframe and ran then on a PC version of the system (saving the company more than double my salary every year). When the IT application support was outsourced (big 3 letter mainframe and PC computer company). The contracted cost per year to support the system that I wrote and up till then was still maintaining was 5 times my annual salary - companies have their own weird logic.

SamuelAdams 7y ago
Your salary is not your total cost to the company. Having said that, 5x your salary is a bit high. It may be including other costs.

dxbydt 7y ago

Amazing amount of cognitive dissonance in these comments. Simultaneously happy to pat oneself on the back for automating some task yet thinking same can’t happen to you because ... ? Don’t spear & shield yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox

chooseaname 7y ago

If I don't automate parts of my job, I can't move on to other projects due to time constraints.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

It's a shame there's no room for people who want to work less. Some people see that they can do a job faster and think of the higher productivity they now have space for. They expect higher compensation for their new ability to do more work in the same hours. Other people see that they can do a job faster and think of the extra free time they now have space for. They expect the same compensation and the same amount of tasks, but fewer butt in chair hours. The system we live in only has room for the former, and often people don't even get the higher comp for being extra productive. They have to take the new skills and leave for a different job. Nobody gets to (openly) work less.

stoicShell 7y ago
I think you need to become more independent from the 'system' you describe; i.e. go freelance / contractor / consultant / remote etc., some variation of these. I think I really don't trust the author of Rich dad poor dad but the one thing he got right is the ESBI system ("cashflow quadrants"). — I'll let you google but the gist of it is simple: there are only two limited resources, money and time, and any work is a trade of one for the other. You want to be in a position wherein you generate 'enough' money to 'buy back time' essentially. That means being either a business owner (B quadrant) and/or an investor (I quadrant). Freelancing is the "S" (specialist) quadrant, you don't want to be there forever — because revenue only comes from putting in hours, it's a neverending grinding wheel, however profitable it seems. What you want is to setup your 'freelancing' as a 'specialist' to grow into hiring people and thus become a business. Never forget that more than 80% of GDP in rich countries is made by small businesses. Groups of 2, 5, 10, 20 people make up the effective wealth of our economies. Deep down that's what The Millionaire Fastlane or The 4-Hour Week expose to the general public, this idea of relative independence combined with a business model that cumulatively earns you ever more time — and hiring is key to unlocking that, multiplying manhours around your activity, sharing the load, not being "required" yourself for the business to run. A group of well-organized devs could probably wrap 30-hours weeks and still make a ton of money.

neilobremski 7y ago

Where can I find these people who have automated everything about their jobs? (Assuming their jobs were complex at all) I would like to hire them ...

reificator 7y ago
I keep trying, but shit just keeps piling up. It's like programming skills are generally useful or something.

turc1656 7y ago

In my personal experience this generally isn't an issue. If you have the necessary skills to automate your own job, chances are your employer has other work they want you to do. I worked at a fintech company for a few years a while back. I started in an entry level role doing daily operations stuff within their proprietary system. It was boring but I could see that most of it could be automated if enough effort was put into it. We were 4 people at that time. No way our dev team had the time to do it as they were always slaughtered with an endless list of demands from other teams and higher-ups. And no budget would ever be assigned to this. So I took it upon myself to learn how to do it through code. Six months later I had a solution up and running which automated about 80% of the daily work for the four of us. Did they fire the other three people and just leave me to do that remaining 20%? No, they took me and another one of the technically savvy people from the team and took us off the boring daily stuff entirely and put us on a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow. They promoted me. They also promoted the person who had been there the longest to make them the manager of a new Dallas team that was being created for us to pass off the remainder of the boring stuff do, as well as new initiatives that they weren't able to capitalize on because lack of headcount to handle the work. The fourth member of the team also migrated into different projects around the division. Basically, it freed everyone to do a bunch of stuff the business wanted to do but didn't have the budget for or did have the budget for but standard corporate bullshit got in the way of. This was like a godsend to them because they viewed it as getting 3 people just thrown in their laps for free. Win-win for everyone.

lioeters 7y ago
Great story of how automating one's own job led to more meaningful productivity, rather than being made redundant. > a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow Sounds wonderful - and surprising too, since businesses typically seem afraid to trust their own teams this way. What's striking is the autonomy given to the team, after the boring stuff got automated. This kind of higher-level decision making is exactly what cannot be automated (at least for now) - to diagnose areas that need improvement, and to plan and self-organize to implement it. --- In my work, I've also been putting much effort into automating parts of my job, i.e., build/deployment and remote management of applications. Far from making myself redundant, I'm trusted by the company with more (and higher) responsibilities, and more autonomy to manage my own work and its direction. Also, with the increase in efficiency and productivity, we're able to hire more people.

janpot 7y ago

I really hate the word "coder"

r34 7y ago

The "feeling of doing something wrong" - as mentioned in the article - when automating your tasks is somehow relevant but not in current context of alienated work. For natural working context (e.g. a team) it's normal to look for something else to do once you finished your tasks or got rid of them completely by automation. It is because the natural flow of profits considers you as as beneficient. Dooing good for your team, company, etc. = doing good for yourself. On the other hand in current working context that feeling arises as an error (like non-adaptive-anymore feature of organism, not yet cancelled by evolutionary processes).

m23khan 7y ago

so far what seems to capture people's imagination is news about automation taking work of IT workers/developers as well as jobs belonging to service industry and manual/labor intensive jobs. However, the game changer will be when automation starts to replace legions of lawyers, insurance Professionals, underwriters, traders, Capital Partners, Accountants, etc. To the point the judges and doctors would be relying completely on automation to simply operate/serve as human checkpoint.

amflare 7y ago

This seems to be mostly non-tech jobs being automated. The expected result of hiring these people is whatever menial work they were doing (not trying to be insulting, menial work is where automation thrives). Tech jobs, are already about automation (to a degree) and that is the expected result of hiring a dev. Therein lies the fundamental difference. If a dev automates, they are doing what they are being paid to do, if a non-dev automates, they are no longer doing what they are being paid to do (in the eyes of the company of course, we can have a whole different argument about whether they are being paid for effort-input or value-output).

smsm42 7y ago

I wish it was even 10% true. There's still so many mundane tasks in software engineering that I need to waste time on doing manually... I regularly waste significant amount of time on setting up deployments, configuring logging, monitoring and alerting, organizing data for tests, and a myriad of other mundane non-creative tasks that take time from real fun job - like designing and implementing new algorithms, functionality, features, etc. Most of these not only not automated to a significant degree - they are small and varied enough that automating them wouldn't probably even be possible without spending inordinate amount of time. Those rare happy circumstances where it is scriptable, it gets scripted and it's a huge help, but never in my multi-decade career as software developer I ever wondered if what I do can be done by a script. I'd be happy if even 1% of it could be - I'd have 1% more time for the fun stuff - but we not even there yet.

ticmasta 7y ago

Over a decade-plus consulting career I always tried to either discourage spurious new projects or work myself out of current engagements. While this was locally sub-optimal it led to long-term relationships that meant meaningful work, strategic initiatives and more money. You could also try hoarding knowledge in an effort to maintain your value but this strategy also has a limited shelf-life. I'd politely suggest you don't focus on solely optimizing the status quo until you're near the end of your career and ready to ride it out. Otherwise you will be in trouble down the road.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I had a nightmare once, where I was sitting at a desk in a small room coding. Somebody asked me what I was doing. "I'm writing Cobol Printer Drivers. Its the last programming job in the world, because they've got machines to write everything else". A person walked in the door with a box, and set it on my desk. "What's that?" "Its a device to write Cobol Printer Drivers." I got up, walked to the door and opened it. Outside was nothing -just a grey fog. Then I woke up sweating.