
Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018) - PythagoRascal
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/
======
alistairSH
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.

~~~
stoicShell
> _This all presupposes the employees aren 't inherently lazy. But, that's
> been my experience - "lazy" developers aren't generally lazy, just bored._

In fact, afaik, it's kinda 'proven' _loosely_ in psychology studies that
"laziness" isn't a _bad_ trait per se. In fact, from our ancestral laziness
comes our drive to build things (systems, organizations, machines,
civilization!) to do our job for us, anywhere from 'streamlining' to
'automating'.

Many great developers are self-reportedly very ambivalent between laziness and
the drive to make things — alchemy notably happens when what you make today
will let you be lazier tomorrow (you probably need to be at least 25 to 'feel'
it though).

Of course, being a nerdy creature, you'll rinse and repeat indefinitely —
there probably never will be a shortage of things to automate in your lifetime
— but that's the spirit. As you said, we gotta keep ourselves busy to balance
the lazy. ;-)

~~~
rurp
I hadn't thought of the evolutionary benefits before but this makes a lot of
sense. Related to this, I have noticed that I really like efficiency for sake
of efficiency, which is probably a trait many other tech people share.

As a silly example, I was hiking at night recently and my headlamp had gotten
a little dull because the batteries were starting to get low. Even though I
had a spare set, I didn't swap them out because the old ones still had hours
of power left, albeit at reduced output. The cost of a few batteries is
trivial, but the thought of throwing them away while still useful bugged me
more than the reduced light output. My partner thought I was crazy for this,
and I don't disagree, but for whatever reason little efficiencies matter a lot
to me.

~~~
stoicShell
> efficiency for the sake of efficiency

Oh dear rurp, you don't want to get me started on that! ;-)

Your hiking example is a textbook page of my life, I do things like that all
the time. Partner openly jokes that I'm crazy / weird / funny — all in good
spirits, I concur that it's not exactly statistically average (i.e. 'normal')
behavior. — _" but why do you do this like that?"_, eyes usually roll before I
even finish my elevator pitch; but every once in a while I catch her
imitating. Good times, haha. Small victories, you know.

That being said,

I have a gazillion justifications for this. From ancient Zen and Stoicism (you
guessed it) to modern scientific organization of work / tasks / labor, passing
by cognitive science and physics and what-have-you.

It's. Just. More. Efficient. To. Be. Efficient!..

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But it's also a delusion, to some degree (when you mistake the means for the
ends I suppose, when it becomes a zero-sum rat race from a 3rd person
perspective). Hence a healthy distance with the concept, I treat it as one
parameter/rule of our universe — _nature favors the efficient ones_ — but I've
learned to just shrug at the general inefficiency of my civilization.
Sometimes, I admit I'll even take pleasure and find beauty in a wildly
inefficient thing that nonetheless passes the threshold of "it works", however
barely. Politics, states, institutions feel like that to me: it _should_ all
collapse under its own weight and complexity, and yet it goes on...
fascinating feat. It's like e.g. Windows (the biggest codebase in existence,
at least as reported a few years ago, 50 million lines iirc?), you have to
revel at the wonder that it even works.

~~~
alistairSH
This is my life.

My wife does pretty much everything in a way that simply blows my mind.
Probably once a day, I start to mutter "But, why....?" Most of the time she
just looks at me like I'm the broken one, meanwhile I swear it's her!

Packing for a trip is the worst. For me, it's hours of over-analysis and
optimization. Packing everything into a minimal volume. Ensuring nothing
unneeded makes it way into a bag. For her, it's grab an armful of {whatever},
toss it in a suitcase, and assume it'll all work out. And yet, we both love
traveling and we're equally as likely to forget something.

Life is strange.

------
turc1656
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
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.

~~~
turc1656
Glad to hear things are working well for you as well. Any halfway intelligent
manager wouldn't be stupid enough to just toss you or anyone like you. They
see value/skills that can be put to use elsewhere. Anyone with a growth
mindset would use that human capital productively. I think only in a very
stagnant, established business with no growth opportunities would they let
someone go after automating a lot of things. Because they wouldn't be able to
put you to use so the only way to capitalize on your improvement would be to
gain your compensation back.

Yeah, the level of autonomy I was given is pretty rare. I think it was because
of two main factors. First, I had several bosses over a short period of time
(lots of "structural changes" at that company during that time and it was a
bit hectic) and the current boss then was in London and had other issues to
deal with. Second, I don't think they knew precisely what to do with me in
general but since I had built up a substantial amount of good faith/reputation
in such a short amount of time and surprised everyone, I think they just
decided to just let me figure out what I wanted to do since I wasn't shy about
telling them what I was interested in.

It was a good situation but at a company that was very messy and all over the
place. A lot of things were constant fires and battles (both internally and
externally). Thankfully, I had good managers when I was there who had a lot of
good sense. Otherwise, someone else probably would have just clamped down on
me and dictated everything they wanted me to do with this new found time.

------
proverbialbunny
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
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
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
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.

~~~
datashow
Sorry I did not make it clear. What I meant the automation tool is something
like Autohotkey. Let's say I made a private software XAuto (like Autohotkey)
many many years ago with tons of efforts, and then I wrote a XAuto script
(like an Autohotkey script) to automate my work. Do I have to give both of the
XAuto script and the XAuto software to my employer?

~~~
triclops200
That would depend on contract, but, assuming you have a decently sane
contract, you'd have to hand over the script, but not the software itself.
However, it now sounds like you've landed your first paying customer for a
license for your software.

------
newshorts
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
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
> 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.

~~~
Jolter
It does grow bigger, assuming that the education level of workers is
increasing. This is one of the founding tenets of Scandinavian social
democracy. Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least
college. This becomes more or less tenable with tuition-free higher education.

~~~
me_me_me
> Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least college

This is not a personal dig, but you clearly did not brush with the real world.
There are a lot of smart people out there that through no fault of their own
couldn't go to collage, but there are others that would not get far
anywhere...

That's just how the cruel distribution mistress works.

~~~
Jolter
Well you're clearly no Swedish Social Democrat...

------
celeritascelery
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.

~~~
Ididntdothis
There is this clear split in companies between people who benefit from more
efficiency and people who are viewed as pure cost factor to ideally being
eliminated. That’s why I am telling young people to look for jobs in companies
where top management understands and values your job.

~~~
chii
> look for jobs in companies where top management understands and values your
> job.

or values your intelligence and trust in you to create value. This usually
only happens if the boss is intelligent enough to see the value in trusting an
employee like that in the first place.

------
bencollier49
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
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.

~~~
pintxo
I‘d argue using yahoo finance in the first place as data source is the issue
here.

~~~
buzzkillington
Excel is the issue because it hid that dependency in the right most column
(ABB) on the 4th sheet of the excel file.

~~~
bencollier49
Excel didn't do that, the person who wrote the spreadsheet did that!

------
tehjoker
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.

~~~
WalterBright
Employees can join together and start their own company any time they want to.

~~~
leetrout
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.

~~~
rumanator
While OP's comment points out the fact that in a liberal economy you are free
to start any business as you see fit, your comment simply is intentionally
absurd and pointless. You are in fact free to launch your own company or
cooperative. That's an undisputable fact. If your labor is so critical and all
managers are useless tyrants then why are you choosing to give away your means
of production to useless tyrants? By your logic wouldn't it be obvious that
starting your own company is the solution to all of your problems?

~~~
truckerbill
Companies usually require a lot of capital to get off the ground, I think
that's the subtext there but I could be wrong. Being able to operate at a loss
for an indeterminate amount of time and equipment being two costs that come to
mind.

~~~
WalterBright
I started my first business when I was 8. It cost nothing to start it. There
are tons of companies you can start for nothing or next to nothing. There are
books filled with ideas on such you can get from Amazon.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>I started my first business when I was 8

How much of your upbringing was atypical? How much of it was due to familial
influence? Or a unique environment? It's interesting how people tend to be
blind to their own privilege.

There's this pervasive idea that those who are entrepreneurs are better than
the rest and therefore justifies their wealth and status. There's this other
equally pervasive idea that we're all exactly equal and therefore "if I did
it, you could have as well".

~~~
WalterBright
I did it on the sly because my parents didn't want me doing it. They were
pretty angry with me when they inevitably found out.

What I did was order greeting cards through the mail and sell them door to
door.

A couple years later, my family moved to Germany, and lived on a US base. I
discovered that German candy wasn't available in the US, and vice versa. So I
contacted my best friend in the US, and we'd ship each other the missing candy
and sell it to the other kids at school. If I'd been less of a dimwit, I could
have made quite a bit more money at this than I did.

> There's this pervasive idea that those who are entrepreneurs are better than
> the rest and therefore justifies their wealth and status.

It has nothing to about being better. It is about entrepreneurs are willing to
take the risk and make the effort, and that justifies their returns.

If you're not willing to take the risk and make the effort, that's your
choice, not your lot (at least in America).

------
CareyB
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
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
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
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.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I know it pays off but you can’t put all responsibility on engineers.
Management should also accept that they have a responsibility to learn what
they are dealing with. Even worse, it’s perfectly acceptable to brush off
technical information as “nerdy”.

In my company a lot of big projects are set up for failure from the start
because the big guys often listen to slick salesmen (preferably from the
outside because they don’t trust their own people) and not to the people who
raise concerns that are valid but hard to understand. Some things can’t be
dumbed down but they are just complex.

In my view a lot of dysfunction in tech projects comes from the fact the
higher ups don’t want to understand what’s going on and also don’t want to
listen.

------
jdblair
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
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
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
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.

~~~
jdblair
I'm not misinterpreting. I am able to buy more equity in other companies using
the cash from my salary than I ever earned directly through equity sharing.

~~~
chii
> earned directly through equity sharing.

That's because the business that is giving you some equity as compensation is
underpaying you, and instead choose to pay with a cheaper alternative (cash).

The fact that the business is able to pay you such high cash rates means that
the business is very profitable. I'd argue that the business is extracting
some 90-95% of all the value you create, and leaving you a tiny bit (which is
still high, and therefore, you get a good salary). But look at the people who
owns the assets you create as part of your job - their networth is growing
tremendously - much more than yours is through enumeration. This is only true
because you are underpaid relative to the value derived from your work.

------
_bxg1
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.

~~~
kaustyap
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
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.

------
noyesno
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
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
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.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
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
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.

------
f2000
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
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
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.

------
ptero
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.

------
dxbydt
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)

------
DyslexicAtheist
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)

~~~
1996
[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

------
systematical
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?

~~~
protonimitate
> 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).

~~~
systematical
I just find it interesting that the audience of this site, can't fathom
engineers being replaced by AI. Not even in the next 50 years? That would put
me in my 80s.

My Dad will be in his 80s in 15 years. If we look at the landscape of
computers when he was my age, 30s, the big thing was still mainframe
computers. The internet barely existed. Smartphones? Nope. What was the big
programming language in 1990? Was it Pascal, BASIC or C++? Java wouldn't even
come out for another 5 years. 15 years before that he was still loading punch
cards into machines.

I guess we will just see. I won't be the surprised one though.

------
r34
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).

------
PerilousD
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
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.

------
smsm42
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.

------
amflare
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).

------
ticmasta
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.

------
Emanation
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.

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

------
piterdevries
Can't automate meetings, can we?

~~~
Apfel
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.

------
m23khan
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.

------
neilobremski
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
I keep trying, but shit just keeps piling up. It's like programming skills are
generally useful or something.

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

------
janpot
I really hate the word "coder"

