This is golden. I've wondered more often than once myself what would it be like to have a "normal" office job. For instance, take some city department or some

This is golden. I've wondered more often than once myself what would it be like to have a "normal" office job. For instance, take some city department or some big firm where things generally flow at a slow pace and require a lot of time spent on work items, doing possibly repeated tasks each week. What would a programmer do? Exactly as described in the article: - learn what kind of tasks the job consists of - identify repeated actions and patterns in work - think of a way to automate the easiest parts, still requiring human to finalise the task - gradually learning more and automating the harder and harder parts and building tools bottom-up based on earlier blocks - finally ending up with a software mechanisation puppet that I can instruct and program to do my work - gradually spend first some of my time doing the automation and as it would slowly take over I could devote more and more of my time automating the rest, and when all is done, I would feel the job is "completed" and get bored. This is something that feels so natural to a programmer: I have dozens of little tools to aid in doing my programming job at work. The goal of a programmer is to program anything that can be automated and only work himself on the hard tasks that can't. It's intriguing to imagine how you could apply those skills outside programming jobs.