
Coders Automating Their Own Job - benryon
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/?single_page=true
======
peteforde
You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you
didn't write it? This does a better job than I could have of tieing together a
dozen threads of conversation that I've had with various friends for years.

I actually believe that there's a culture war implied in this debate; the
question of who deserves to reap the gains of automation is more than just
philosophy or ethics. The question "is there inherent nobility in work
itself?" seems to be just as much a political divide as any of the current
popular hot-button issues. Your gut reaction says a lot about the regional
values of where you grew up, whether you'd ever support a basic income, and
whether you believe that someone's refusal to work should condemn them to
destitution.

The closest comparison is the attitude people have if they find a wallet. In
Japan, you will get your wallet back with cash intact. Yet in the west, there
exists a large contingent of people who believe with all of their heart that
God wanted them to find it, that the person who lost it should have been more
careful, that they are just having a lucky day. Unless God shows up and
declares one side to be ethically correct, it will remain a toss-up.

One thing I find fascinating about the article is that it's assumed the
cleverness was the code written to automate. This is incorrect; the cleverness
is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is
trivial.

Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn
a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect
that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly
flat.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
_One thing I find fascinating about the article is that it 's assumed the
cleverness was the code written to automate. This is incorrect; the cleverness
is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is
trivial._

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

~~~
tummybug
I have also asked this, I can't understand why my managers always think its a
joke idea.

~~~
Cthulhu_
It's because they don't want you to do their job. Job protectivism (?) is a
serious thing.

~~~
turnitoff
No. By the time you get hired and you are appointed a set of things to
automate, it's usually followed by a long line of deliberation and resource
management and prioritizing that's determined on the higher up.

There is a thing called "process debt", in the same way as technical debt,
that some things are done manually. This can be mundane routine work, that
might be up to 80% easy to automate, but allows for oversight and flexibility
and often works with systems that are not trivial to work with. Other times
the manual process is just cheaper to maintain than it is to invest in a "good
enough" automation. You can also follow this by looking at the practice of
offshoring and the amount of automation invested into offshored service
centers (who benefit most from these solutions via specialization and
scaling).

So even if the company hires a goddamn genius, if you want to automate stuff
without breaking existing flows, you need quite a few months of understanding
of the environment and the real needs of the process (business wise as well),
etc.

And that's why managers think it's a joke idea.

(And it also comes off as extremely arrogant, because it's essentially calling
your coworkers stupid by saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed
in years!")

~~~
klibertp
> "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!"

There's this saying in my country, roughly translated to "Guest for a second,
sees a mile far" (sorry... it even rhymes and everything in Polish...)

Being immersed in something for a long time has a good chance of limiting your
perspective to that thing only. While it's true that perhaps 90% of newcomers
and their ideas simply miss the intricacies of the current process and would
be disastrous if implemented, the remaining 10% is a genuine innovation which
would never come from the inside.

~~~
soverance
I've always loved this idea, and have found it to be very true in all aspects
- always just known it as "tunnel vision".

------
wvenable
It should be noted that programmers are not automating themselves out of
_programming jobs_. They're automating themselves out of data entry, or
testing, or any number of other mindless tasks easily done by computers.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Development jobs are shifting as more and more towards "plugging APIs
together" and much less end to end development.

Modern web dev is fantastically more productive and efficient than it was 10
or 15 years ago.

Most/many SAAS apps are substitutes for aspects of what previously would have
been part of a developers job to put into place.

~~~
tabtab
Re: _Modern web dev is fantastically more productive and efficient than it was
10 or 15 years ago._

I have to disagree. The esthetical expectations of the user/customer are
higher now. If it's not "in style" they think you are sticking them with old
tech. And you have the desktop/mobile split that frameworks only get half
right and require days of black-box fiddling to get working right on all
devices. And JavaScript gizmos often "break" as new browser versions or
related components come out. It's almost as bad as the "DLL hell" that desktop
applications used to face.

From a purely utility standpoint, I was much more productive back then because
I only had to make it work and be easy to use, not "pretty" and animated with
toys or the latest style fad.

~~~
buboard
> If it's not "in style" they think you are sticking them with old tech

Is that even true? Is there any survey showing that users consider those bad
or old tech? Because with things like the reddit, ebay, paypal, gmail
redesign, the common thing i ve noticed is that nobody asked for those.

~~~
tabtab
That's just my experience. If a customer _pays_ for a new gizmo, they want the
"latest and greatest". If it doesn't look latest and greatest to them, they
feel slighted. I'm not saying it's necessarily rational, only that it's the
way customers on average react. They don't always say it directly, but word
gets around. I've seen it many times. Humans judge books by covers.

As far as old-looking sites like Ebay, if an Ebay competitor appeared with
equivalent services and product choices, yet LOOKED fancier/stylish, Ebay
would start to lose customers. Lucky for Ebay, no such site exists. (If they
appeared, Ebay would probably spend on a visual revamp.)

~~~
buboard
Right, but it seems to me that an entire - and unbelievably rich - industry is
moving along with “just my experience“ when it comes to UIs.

------
nstart
This article really highlights how odd our methods of valuing output are.
Ultimately if someone is idling for 6 years because they've written a program
to do their job for them, who cares? They are delivering the same output which
hopefully the company deemed was valued at X amount BECAUSE it delivers Y
amount of profit/returns. This article is actually touching on a deeper level
of dysfunction in how we do things like calculating salaries for people.
Instead of making things about how much value is created, we tend to tie
things to "seniority" or "experience" in isolation. Just because the two are
sometimes correlated with value produced it does not justify making that the
measure on its own.

I remember going up to one of the senior management people in the company I
worked at a long time ago and pointing out how I'd saved the company from
having to spend salaries and other overheads on 12-20 more people by
automation. If the salary for each person was X, I asked for a salary bump of
3X. They gave me a bump of only 0.5X . I eventually pushed it to 1X but that
experience taught me that most of the time, extra value you deliver rarely
flows back to you in a reasonable way.

And from that point on, I stopped treating my job as an extension of my
identity or fulfillment of purpose. It became a place where I primarily had a
cold hard contract to deliver X value in exchange for Y returns. And if I was
ever to work again in a company with similar opaque practices on salaries, any
increase in Y returns would be best negotiated before showing my entire hand
on how much I could increase the delivery on value X.

~~~
someguydave
This is related to Taleb's observation that employment is a kind of "slavery".
What he means by this is that you effectively have sold your option to own
those to outsized returns in exchange for a regular paycheck.

~~~
hawkice
That's... not what slavery is. That analogy is extremely poor compared to
using securities derivatives, which is a field Taleb is familiar with.

Edit: also, is this feature of salaried employment so misunderstood as to
require an analogy? You get paid a fixed amount, or with specified bonus
structure. It's literally the number one fact people know about their
employment contracts.

~~~
someguydave
> also, is this feature of salaried employment so misunderstood as to require
> an analogy?

I would argue yes. Many professionals like engineers and programmers can point
to contributions they made to the corporation that have been sold for many
times their annual salary. How many of those professionals consider the fact
that they could have sold their design for themselves and pocketed the
revenue?

This is related to Coase's question: why have a firm in the first place? In
modern times it seems that ongoing disaggregation of businesses and reduced
transaction costs in software would cause more professionals to consider
working for themselves, rather than selling their (potential, uncertain,
unlimited) profits for a (certain, fixed) income.

------
vinceguidry
If you're coding for a non-technical business, i.e. one in which they're not
directly selling your productive output, then it's not hard at all to get to a
point where your daily tasks don't take more than a few minutes a day. After
all, it's other people that are actually driving the revenue. You can ask for
more duties, but their capacity to define tasks for you is never going to
outpace your ability to deliver.

My advice is to not fight this state of affairs. Figure out your own way to
stay productive. Divide up your spare time between coming up with ideas for
your employer and doing side projects. Take long lunches with your coworkers
and leave at 4.

You can find happy professional nirvana but you have to believe in it first.

~~~
3pt14159
The key for this type of setup is to make sure that they understand your job
is like that of a security guard. You're there for when all your carefully
coded alarms start going off. You're not there to help shovel the sidewalk
because then you might miss your alarms.

As long as that is properly understood you can get a contract that is
permissive enough to allow you to work on something else at work when nothing
is burning. Even if you have to offer a reduced salary, it's worth it.

Another option is to go the work on OSS route, especially on tools you use for
work. After a couple years of doing semi-fulltime OS work you'll be commanding
double the salary.

~~~
vinceguidry
The key to this, and I meant to edit this into my comment, is to be super-
responsive to any requests. Always be willing to drop whatever you're doing at
a second's notice and help whoever it is that thinks you might be able to help
them out. The word gets out and everyone in the company just loves you.

------
anonu
As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of
a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were
self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market
opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then
eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into
nothing...

In practise, achieving some sort of "steady state" or status-quo doesn't work
for a few reasons:

1\. Inherent system complexity ensures something always breaks. Human
attention is always needed.

2\. Markets evolve rapidly due to technology changes, regulatory changes and
the very nature of markets: Strategies and ideas that worked in the past cease
to work in the future.

~~~
tynpeddler
A system that requires no outside intervention to perform its job optimally is
equivalent to a solved problem. So quants will be out of a job once we
understand how to perfectly trade on the stock market.

~~~
TheAlchemist
Which by definition is impossible...

Once two different traders discover how to 'perfectly' trade, the game changes
and as they say 'here we go again'

~~~
munk-a
I disagree, the solution to remove stock market traders is to figure out a way
to examine financial data and projections to such a fine degree that stock
trading is no longer a sensible thing. Imagine a currency trader focused on
USD & CAD, what would happen to their job if Canada decided to permanently pin
their currency on the USD with a guaranteed exchange of .5 USD for 1 CAD, the
markets surrounding arbitraging the currency would dissolve as .5 USD would
always be 1 CAD (now in the real world there might be stability speculators,
if Canada was viewed as politically unstable there might be a purpose to
purchase .4 USD for 1 CAD, but ignore that for the purpose of the scenario).

~~~
subroutine
To name just a tiny fraction of things that'd be required for a perfect
stalemate between automated stock trading platforms (due to them all being
able to predict the market with perfect accuracy):

* actions of any given platform doesn't meaningfully influence the market

* all have ability to forecast weather with 100% accuracy

* all have ability to perfectly predict human behavior

* all acquire the exact same news at the exact same rate

* all connect to the same exchanges with the same latency

* all have the same amount of capital to leverage trades

Simply put, there are incalculable ways for a trading platform to gain
advantage over another, so I don't think this will be an issue in many
lifetimes.

~~~
anonu
>> * actions of any given platform doesn't meaningfully influence the market

Yes - this... Buying or selling even 1 share in the markets adds information
to this giant calculating engine. Anything you do will alter the course of the
future.

I've never seen a backtested strategy that didn't look great on paper. The
moment you drop it into the market - you can take a steep discount to your
expectations.

------
cortesoft
> Wary self-automators, he speculates, “don’t trust our workplaces. The boss
> is going to say thank you, good work, now do it again.”

Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating
things.

There are an INFINITE number of useful things we need to do as a society, so
we shouldn't be upset if we automate one of them away. Move on to the next.

Of course, programmers should make sure they negotiate strongly to get
compensated fairly for the work. I think it is a bit short sighted, however,
to worry that you will end up like the guy who automated his job and was then
fired and replaced by a lower skilled guy - who cares, you SHOULD move on at
that point if the company doesn't want you to automate something else. There
are plenty of companies that will hire you, and you can use the example of the
previous company to show you can do it. This time, negotiate better
compensation.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things.
    

I think that many of these scenarios are occurring when NON-programmers
realize that their jobs are automate-able and they set out to automate them.
It means picking up new skills, practicing them and putting them to use
without the consent nor permission of management.

It is not necessarily an easy path, it takes time, and there's going to be
trial and error involved and although the discussion is about automating 100%
of a job away, there's many other possible outcomes such as effort-
multiplication, getting rid of the grunt work and gaining more time to focus
on deeper problems.

This is effectively "out-of-band" work that is a great experience for the
individual but which _many_ organizations do not condone. A LOT of workplaces
don't tolerate workers doing stuff that they're not being "told" to do.

~~~
m000
What if you automated your job on your own free time?

~~~
bradknowles
Then they get to pay you less because you work fewer hours to do the same job.

Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

~~~
6nf
> Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

This is the kind of ridiculous thinking I'm talking about in my other comment.
You just made your job into a cheap, automated process. That's the most
valuable thing you could do in a company! If you did that in my company, you'd
get a promotion and you'd be put to work finding other things to automate.
You're the kind of person every company wants! Why would we fire you? If we're
dumb enough to fire someone like you, you're better off at another company
anyway.

~~~
bradknowles
If companies were run in a logical manner, then your thought process would be
reasonable.

Sadly, while there may be some logical people in a company, many companies
(most?) wind up not being run in a logical manner due to a wide variety of
internal politics and societal issues.

What you hope (and pray for) is that the logical people in a company are not
also sociopaths, in which case you are really well and truly screwed.

~~~
6nf
That's crazy, I don't understand how people are so negative about this.
Sociopaths will NOT fire that person, they'd put that person to work
automating other jobs. This is just how you run a business.

------
yhoiseth
This reminds me of Toyota, which (allegedly) never let anyone off after
process improvements, because that would undermine the trust which is
necessary for employees to feel safe when suggesting improvements.

These stories seem to me like management failures — leaders haven’t built the
necessary trust.

------
forinti
It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through
suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge
their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.

~~~
riazrizvi
David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, says people have been conditioned to insist
that you can't be productive without suffering in the process, and he goes on
to makes a case for Universal Income (because modern society is productive
enough to feed and house everyone). I think it misses the point. People want a
job where they grow as human beings, and you can't grow without
suffering/trial. Pointless jobs are depressing. If you figure out how to get
paid without doing anymore work, that's cool, but then what are you going to
do? If you want to grow and make society a better place, it's better to find
something else to do, either with the same company or somewhere better that
isn't so dysfunctional.

~~~
lgessler
I think your observation can coexist with Graeber's take. If you implemented a
UBI, it seems reasonable to expect that most people would take the opportunity
to take on some kind of "work" or self-development that is not tied to how
they meet their basic needs.

------
darawk
The employer is paying you for the product, not the effort. I see no moral
quandary here, nor any compulsion to notify the employer. They're getting what
they want, that should be the end of it.

EDIT: And I would add, for anyone that has automated their job in this
way...what you should really be doing is scaling it up, and finding other
companies who are probably paying employees to do the same thing. Then start
your own company that does whatever this task is as a service.

~~~
pathseeker
>and finding other companies who are probably paying employees to do the same
thing. Then start your own company that does whatever this task is as a
service.

Careful, if it gets out that you wrote the code to automate your job as a
coder while actually at your job, your company most likely owns that IP.

~~~
arif_sohaib
I am still in academics so I have a question about this. If your company owns
this is, what shouldn't they be rewarding you generously for making it? They
are making money out of your extra effort/work. I get that employees who want
their own ip should have the right but if the company is paying you extra and
giving other rewards and removing the headache of managing your own company,
is that not good?

~~~
y4mi
They're entitled to the code without any extras though. That is what
employment is.

~~~
s73v3r_
Only if your employment agreement says so. Most people hired as programmers,
yes, that's true. People who are hired as other things, and end up automating
things, well, that's not so clear.

------
pbhjpbhj
I wonder if management would be happier if you said "I'm going to quit and be
a consultant, our company will do my current role for 80% of what you're
currently paying me."

?

Not only does that release you from the unnecessary expense of going to work,
it frees the company some space and employment expenses too. They save money
on getting the task completed, so that can be labelled as a management win "we
outsourced and saved with no drop in quality".

In addition you are free to do the same for other businesses. Or indeed to
sell extra seats of your solution and put your former colleagues out of work.

~~~
paulriddle
It is a smart decision, but still it's better to build something solid before
you start consulting: an online presence, a blog, a podcast, network of people
who know you, etc. So that your former employer is not your only source on
consulting gigs.

But even then, most companies would refuse, because it means they have to
contact their legal department to draft a contract, and change their workflow
to accomodate for you, an external entity. I've seen people transition from
employees to consultants for one company, it was very smooth though. It's just
that some companies would have a kneejerk reaction of "errr, dude, listen,
whatever, man, just if you're leaving, then you're leaving, if not, then not,
this consulting stuff, I don't think anybody would approve of, so no, either
you stay as you are, or leave, sorry." Because they don't think it's
important, they don't value you, and don't really care, so by becoming a
consultant you're presenting a problem and additional work for them, they
would rather avoid it, especially if avoiding it is the easiest thing to do -
nothing. HR will find somebody to replace you.

Or it may work out how you described, especially if you sell it to them with
charisma and good vibes.

------
Hysterisis
A few years ago I was working for a QA department and trying to apply my
programming skills wherever I could. There was a weekly report that someone in
upper management produced to send to their peers, which was basically two
filtered and cross referenced CSV dumps. I briefly took over that task while
the manager was away, and was able to automate it pretty easily. I even
produced a small GUI that made it easy for the manager to use later.
Ultimately the manager chose to keep doing it by hand for 40 hours per week. I
left that organisation a few months later.

------
Itaxpica
This can be good when companies and incentive structures are set up to reward
it. The entire concept at the core of SRE is "if you have skilled engineers do
your ops work, they'll automate as much as possible, freeing up their time to
work on bigger and more interesting problems". At Google, automating a huge
swath of your own job is one of the fastest ways for an SRE to get promoted.

------
jefe_
These days I'm much more inclined to automate my own job than someone else's.
It seems many of the times I've taken extra steps to more fully automate other
people's tasks, it's had the adverse effect of alerting them that even further
automation is possible and they inevitably ask, "why can't you just automate
the whole thing?" I then proceed to spend about 7 minutes frustrated and
determined to automate their entire job away before cooling down and simply
adding them to my list of "non-client people who think I should work hard so
they can be lazy."

------
orbitingpluto
This is a common situation that I've been in several times before, even up to
the point of automating the automating.

I had one particularly nasty supervisor who gave me a project, then asked me
how long it would take to program, then without fail tell me that was
unacceptably slow, then tell me that my predecessor could have done it in half
the time, and finally question my competence.

So one day he brings me a short programming project that previously took
anywhere from say 2-3 hours, asks me how long it will take to program, and I
respond with, "30 seconds". He then replies, "That's too long. So and so could
have done it in 15... wait, what did you say?"

I've mostly or completely automated several of my own jobs, and when done with
that, proceeded to reduce my co-workers' work load. Usually it does not end
well. Either someone higher up in the organization will perceive the
automation as wasting time (still can't wrap my head around that), think of
you as now redundant, or see little reason to offer additional compensation
while moving you into a new position that does nothing but automate. After
all, if you were willing to automate in the previous position at the previous
level of compensation, why should they have to pay you more now?

~~~
turtles
“30 seconds”. You should have told him 6 hours. If he needs it done quicker
hire someone else. Enjoy your day.

~~~
orbitingpluto
He wasn't able to successfully pull this stunt ever again. It actually
completely changed our work dynamic and almost completely eliminated job
stress. It was also the catalyst to deciding that I wanted to move on and I
gave a 4 month notice shortly thereafter. Ultimate jerk move, he actually hid
a bonus check intended for me in his desk for weeks because he didn't realize
I was being so nice with the amount of notice. He thought he could prevent me
from getting it entirely. That did not go over well with the president of the
company.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
So, theft and fraud eh? Sounds like a lot more than a "jerk".

Hopefully, the president canned him and referee his conduct to the police?
Seriously, the less poisonous people like that, the better.

------
eindiran
I've automated large chunks of my job away, but I've never felt that I ended
up not having things left to do as a result. There are always more tasks to
automate and more problems to solve.

I get the impression from these stories that the dishonest part of what the
self-automaters are doing is that they could do other tasks and use automation
to increase their productivity, but instead chose to keep their productivity
the same and relax with the extra downtime.

~~~
lrem
Come to SRE. We are seriously expected to fully automate our job away twice a
decade and still manage to just keep growing.

~~~
eindiran
How did you get into SRE? Did you start off as a software engineer and
transition over?

~~~
lrem
Straight out of PhD. The interviews went smoothly in part due to earlier
experience in an ISP, but these days Google takes in SREs with 4 x coding and
1 NALSD interview. It's the stuff talked about in
[https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-site-
reliability/97...](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-site-
reliability/9781492029496/ch12.html) and there's quite a few Google-organized
workshops on this.

------
jmathai
I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and
my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought.

We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age
where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements.

This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and
write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspects of
our current job. Build systems, pipelines, workflows, etc.

It's nice to kid ourselves and think of it as work intended to improve
productivity but from a company's point of view the value is decreasing
overhead and cost which comes in the form needing 1 person to do the work
instead of 10.

Cross your fingers that you're the 1 and not one of the 9 :).

~~~
pathseeker
> I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself
> and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought.

You've just described the purpose of the entire software industry. Did it
really not occur to you that writing systems to automate tasks would displace
anyone doing those tasks manually?

~~~
jmathai
It did occur to me....at my last job.

------
tialaramex
I've always seen this as the _point_ of what I do. The promise is there in
work by Church, Gödel and Turing, but Grace Hopper is the one who made it
tangible. She called the thing she's responsible for a "compiler" but today
we'd understand it as a linker.

Grace understood in engineering terms what Turing et al. grasped only as a
mathematical principle. We can get the machine itself to take the tedious
parts of programming the machine and automate them, so that we're left only
with some higher level task, and then, we can just automate that too, this
recursion continues forever.

~~~
ketzo
just came back from the Grace Hopper Celebration, I love this as a summary of
her work! really cool person who I hadn’t known much about before

------
bpchaps
One thought that keeps me awake at night is that my past automation work has
cost others their jobs. I understand that that's "how the world works", but it
still deeply affects me that people have lost their livelihoods because of my
actions.

~~~
munk-a
I understand this guilt but it doesn't belong to you. We're rapidly entering a
post-scarcity economy and most of the western world are employed in service
industries anyways. I think the lack of more societal guarantees to survival
is a critical issue especially in the US, it'd be nice to see UBI or
alternatives explored more and rolled out so that losing one of these tedium
jobs isn't devastating on the former employee.

~~~
bpchaps
Yeah, probably. My career started in a job that could have easily been
automated, but never was (intentionally). So in a lot of ways, I feel indebted
to it and the idea of entry level tech jobs, because it allowed me to build a
career without a degree. From that experience, it feels kind of sad that
_certain_ automation can displace potential careers.

------
dbg31415
Back in the 90s I had a high school summer job where I had to run some scripts
against a production database. I was told, "You have to watch it in case there
are errors." Boring work. Essentially, I sat for 2-3 hours a day watching a
status bar move.

I would run a backup script on a production database, then copy the backup
over to a local storage drive, then run a sanitation script to clean up
customer data, then copy the database again to a public folder where the devs
could access it.

I would use the time to try and dissect the script and read up on SQL. A few
months in, I added a few lines to the script that emailed me if there were
errors (and of course this list of errors evolved over time...), and set it to
automatically do the download and sanitation work.

Then I corrected a few parts of the sanitation script to block out a few more
bits of customer data that whomever wrote the original script had missed, and
then set it up on a schedule to pull a copy every hour... the devs loved that
the data was coming down more frequently.

I was so proud of my little automation project, and I showed my boss. I was a
little worried he'd be upset that I was running this script on production. He
wasn't. He loved it. Then he told me to delete it.

"You cost me $8 / hour, but when you go back to school I'd have to hire
someone who costs a lot more to maintain this. The budget is already approved
for the year, I can't change it. This is great... and I know what I'm asking
you to do is stupid... glad you're learning here... but really I just want you
to sit and watch the status bar move."

------
buboard
This is a non-issue. They should be talking instead about what an antiquated
concept the 8 hour office work day is, especially for knowledge workers.

------
jt2190
We need a HOWTO for Job Automators that addresses things like:

    
    
        * when to automate versus when to quit and 
          start a company
        * who owns the code, and how to find out
        * when/if/how to reveal the automation 
          to your employer
        * etc.
    

(edit: Mentioned in the article was this book: Automate the Boring Stuff with
Python, by Al Sweigart:
[https://nostarch.com/automatestuff#content](https://nostarch.com/automatestuff#content))

------
pgreenwood
>The gains from automation have generally been enjoyed not by those who
operate the machines, but those who own them. According to the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development, the share of income going to wages
in OECD nations has been decreasing since the 1970s, while the share being
funneled into capital—into things like cash reserves and machinery—has been
increasing.

In Australia these benefits have largely gone to land owners, as opposed to
capital. See this chart:

[http://www.prosper.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2009/01/unearne...](http://www.prosper.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2009/01/unearned.jpg)

Even a scheme such as universal basic income would not help much as the
benefits would end up being captured by land owners, via inflation of rents
and land prices; unless this was addressed another way, for example with a
land value tax.

------
iamleppert
And what happens when this job eventually ends (as they all do) and the only
thing you've had to show for your time spent in industry is your league of
legends score? Meanwhile your peers would have likely moved on, gained skills
and progressed in their careers in someway. Sounds like a sure-fire way to
deadend your career and limit your future prospects.

~~~
peteforde
One thing that I find maddening about this topic is the assumption that people
who automate their jobs won't take the new time they get back and put it to
better use. For some, that could be learning skills or working on a startup,
and others might just want to spend time with their kids.

That said, it seems incredibly wrong to judge someone for being clever enough
to relax and get paid for it. And if someone enjoys relaxing as much as I
enjoy coding, who am I to say that I'm righteous and they are a loser?

~~~
iamleppert
I was addressing the exact situation in the article where the guy used the
time to play league of legends. But you’re right it’s not for me to judge how
others spend their time.

------
Iv
I'll weight in from a slightly different angle: I consider my job as a coder
to be 90% bullshit. I call it plumbing. Inject that data stream into these
input, buffer this, convert that, cache that shit. Launch a thread to do that
in parallel, manage a thread pool, poll that stuff, convert that data format
into that other, I could go on for pages.

My real job is in the 10% remaining: understanding the problem, producing an
algorithm or an architecture, optimizing things in a way that require a deep
understanding of the data, designing the UI the users really need.

I'd gladly automate the plumbing in order to do 80% of interesting stuff
instead of 20%.

------
JoblessWonder
One of the only discussions I've "Favorited" on Hacker News was related to
this: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job? "

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945)

------
logfromblammo
I don't believe that a salaried employee is duty-bound to work any more hours
in a week than is required to accomplish their given assignments. Nor do I
believe that the tools they create themselves to do that job more effectively
should automatically become the property of the employer.

The reason people do not disclose the automation of their own jobs is because
they do not believe they can monetize their cleverness more effectively than
by keeping secret their shortcuts. They sincerely believe the company will
fire them and pay nothing for their automation tools.

It is ultimately a "truth to power" phenomenon. If you have the power to
plunge me into a lifestyle of deprivation and poverty, I will avoid giving you
any reason for doing so. If you have the power to take some of my profits for
yourself, I will seek to avoid informing you that is possible.

The philosophy of "Office Space" applies. It's a question of motivation. If I
bust my ass so the boss makes more money, I don't see another dime, so I just
do the minimum amount to not get fired. And we also have to know that the
minimum amount of flair is not the actual minimum amount we can wear.

I'm sure many of us have seen extra effort go completely unrewarded, or even
get punished. That experience takes a toll. Not one of us can trust our
employer to do the right thing all the time--even for those of us that are
founders! So we preemptively choose for them, and sometimes do the thing that
is right only for us. If more companies were capable of more accurately
assessing the value of software automation, we wouldn't have to think twice--
we'd take the bonus equivalent to several years salary, and start automating
something else.

------
projectileboy
One thing I find fascinating about our culture is how much we elevate
corporations above people. If a corporation found a way to automate production
in such a way as to keep their product prices flat but increase their profit
margin, most everyone would applaud. This is _the exact same thing_ , but a
decent portion of society finds it to be unacceptable behavior.

~~~
mrcogmor
They wouldn't applaud unless the reduced cost for the business lead to a
reduction in the purchase price for consumers.

~~~
projectileboy
At a minimum, investors would.

------
m00n
A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time
savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer.

Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell
your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work
for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree
on a fixed price of 10000$.

Two scenarios of what happens next: 1) He shows up the next day with a
gardening robot you never knew existed and he never told you he would use. The
work is done in 30 minutes. He goes home to spend time with his kids. (Or
maybe contract more "2 week projects"?)

2) Two gardening people show up every morning to greet you when you drive to
work. They leave when you come back and make steady progress every day. On the
last day you come home early and witness that actually the daily work is done
by a gardening robot in 5 minutes and the two people actually drive home
during the day to spend time with their kids.

Would you contract this guy again?

~~~
iaml
One important distinction that you omit is the robot gardener costs exactly
the same as other people doing the work manually. If I had to choose between
two options that cost the same, but one is ultra fast and has consistently
high quality, it's a no-brainer for me.

~~~
m00n
Why would the robot cost the same? If it costs the same, then there is no
incentive to introduce robots in the first place. I think the wide-spread
automation is a testament to the much lower price of robots compared to human
labour, no?

~~~
iaml
I mean the guy using robot gardener takes the same pay for the services, not
the robot, sorry for confusion.

------
dredmorbius
_In the first fire-engines[1], a boy was constantly employed to open and shut
alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according
as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to
play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of
the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the
valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to
divert himself with his playfellows. One of the greatest improvements that has
been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner
the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour._

\-- Adam Smith, _Wealth of Nations_

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_1)

1\. The modern term for these devices is the perhaps more familiar "steam
engine'.

------
meritt
I look forward to the blog post in a few years with someone detailing how
they're earning $1M/yr because they have 20 data-entry jobs they've fully
automated.

------
gaahrdner
Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.

------
matiu
It depends if your employer is nice or not. In one job the boss was thankful
and made my job more enjoyable (no extra money though). In another I saved the
company a million and got demoted (due to politics). It doesn't give any
incentive to share next time.

------
coj337
I used to intern for a large Australian bank and we had a fairly complex
access management workflow.

A month into the job after I'd figured out how it all works, I spent a week
automating it and was promptly told I was allowed to run my scripts do it if
it was kept secret from the higher-ups (to avoid the red tape and the intern
they don't trust much).

This automated a backlog of work that had a team of 5-10 people scheduled on
for a good year along with any future requests, a month or two after my
internship I bumped into my boss again they told me they had gone back to
doing it the slow way because the bosses wouldn't approve it, despite showing
a 0 failure rate compared to a pretty big one from the bored employees.

~~~
gaius
_the bosses wouldn 't approve it, despite showing a 0 failure rate compared to
a pretty big one from the bored employees._

A boss’s prestige is in how many people they manage, not how many scripts they
run. That’s the key to understanding these kinds of decisions.

------
User23
This is why equity is the best compensation and it’s going to be even more
important to negotiate for it as our profession evolves. You can never be
automated out of your equity.

If you create something that generates continuous value for your employer, you
should share in that.

------
stuntkite
"There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-
automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle-
and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually
enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the
advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of
automation that puts people first."

This was a pretty good article until the conclusion. It's like he's totally
unaware that all the information is already shared. I guess it could be a
weird plea for some sort of blockchain union or something. Homie should just
google "task automation github".

------
vmarshall23
Isn't that _precisely_ the job?

I had to automate my job when working full time in grad school, otherwise I
never would have passed a class.

Since I entered the work force, most jobs have been some version of "automate
some task for other people (customers) to exchange for pieces of paper
representing effort($)" or "automate some internal task so company spends less
$ paying meatware to do _things_ saving effort($)". Rinse, and repeat until
either:

a) company makes $$$$! b) company runs out of $

If you manage to automate all-the-things and haven't hit state a) or b) then
you start flame wars on internal mailing lists about how the free company
snacks suck or whatever. :-)

------
imh
If you wanted to only work 2 hours per week, do you think there's a place in
the industry for you? Maybe for a freelancer or consultant or anything else
where you are outside the company, but there's no place for this internally
anywhere, no matter how efficient you are with those two hours. As long as
that's the case, people will be incentivized to hide how efficient they can
be.

The article suggests at the end that these people have a strong position to
negotiate, and I wish it were true, but I just don't see it ever happening :(

------
flukus
I think a lot more would be automated by now had the right incentive
structures been in place, there are still tonnes of low hanging fruit in areas
that are to small or too diverse to productize.

One example I remember is a company I worked for that had a lot of people
doing data entry, basically reading faxes from a variety of sources that could
have been 90% automated by OCR and some trivial AI. It was too specialized for
any off the shelf system but too expensive for the company to invest in
automating. I probably could have built an automated system but it would take
a huge time investment to get to a point where they'd be willing to buy it and
they would likely not pay enough to support me full time.

Now imagine if I could retain some rights to my automation to my automation
efforts? I could take one of these data entry positions and with a bit of my
own time invested I could probably automate 20% of the work fairly quickly,
freeing up enough time to further automate things without sacrificing my own
time. Sooner or later enough would be automated that I could start doing
multiple jobs if the company were willing to license it. Eventually I could
take on another entry level role and start the process over.

I would come out in front, the company would come out in front and the world
would be more efficient, but the incentives just aren't there.

------
peterwwillis
The article is a red herring. They're asking the question "Is it immoral to
fire someone for automating their job?", when the question should be "Why
aren't more companies encouraging their employees to automate their job?"

Yes, a person can automate their job until they're not doing anything, and
yes, a company can punish an employee for sitting idle. But the latter is
inherently stupid. Automation both achieves the goals originally set out for
an employee, and frees them up to do more work, without any additional cost.

The business's goals should include adding value and productivity and reducing
cost. If an employee automates their job, they've improved on their job
productivity, which adds value to the company at no extra cost. In the
article, the company has a choice:

A) fire the employee and hire a new one to keep doing the job manually.

B) fire the employee and keep the automation.

C) keep the automation, keep the employee, train the employee for a new manual
job.

D) keep the automation, keep the employee, train them for a new manual job,
and have them automate that.

If the company chooses A), they're just stupid. If they choose B), they're at
least eliminating an unnecessary position. If they choose C), they do the same
as B), except they _also_ retain a person that is already trained and
accustomed to the company, which saves time and money. If they choose D), it's
the same as C), plus they can continue to lower costs and add value.

~~~
gehwartzen
Now look at it from the employees perspective; None of these cases result in
the person who did the automation from gaining additional compensation and
half of them result in them loosing their job.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Incorrect.

The first 2, they lose the job.

The last 2, they lose the time-freedom.

In all instances, is there no good reason to tell of automation.

------
carapace
I once landed a job by telling the CEO something like, "If you're doing it
right, programming is _all about_ replacing yourself with automation."

In Cybernetics there is a formal measure called _Variety_ which is something
like a limit or measure of complexity of a system. Programming can be
considered the art of extracting the low-variety parts of a process into
automation, leaving the high-variety parts to the (high-variety) humans. _This
process itself is low-variety._ Therefore, from first principles, programming
is automatable. Our programming environments will eventually look like
automatic systems that we instruct with our intentions, and then they consult
us as _oracles_ to determine the high-variety parts of the necessary process,
having automatically computed the low-variety parts.

In fact, this is already happening _as fast as people can accept it_. The
limiting factor is not in the machines (they are already superbly fast) but in
the psychology of the people involved. Most of the research and much of the
technology already exists and is in many cases decades old. (Cf. "The Mother
of All Demos" and Prolog.)

As time goes on, given the exponential nature of the meta-process, it will
feel like a step function for many of us: one day relevant and employable,
then the next day replaced by a machine and unemployable, and unable to learn
the next thing fast enough to beat the masses of your peers competing against
you in the same boat.

I realized all this years ago, and have been asking peers and coworkers, "If
you could write a program that could replace yourself, would you?" However, to
date, no one has taken the question seriously.

I find this article, appearing in a non-geek publication, to very heart-
warming. Maybe people are finally catching on?

Anyhow, this is why e.g. Universal Basic Income is important: _You 're going
to need it sooner rather than later._

Unless there is some essential economic activity that humans can perform that
machines can't we are all on the "discard pile" of history.

I actually think we'll just mellow out and enter a Golden Age, but again,
_only as fast as we can accept it._ Certainly the Universe is willing for us
to live in peace and harmony, it's up to us to choose to, or not.

~~~
Kim_Bruning
> "If you could write a program that could replace yourself, would you?"

I've done it a bunch of times, sometimes by accident.

In one case I was going to be assigned to do testing every evening. But I
wanted to go home at 6 every day, so I automated the tests on my first day,
then came back in the morning and started 'working on my next task'; never
realizing that previously the testing job had been a full time position.

I ended up doing about 5 people's worth of work there that summer.

Of course, it's probably because the project wasn't particularly organized,
and our team was explicitly given a free hand to find inefficiencies and fix
them. Still, it's a nice story to tell people ;-)

~~~
munk-a
It's great to do that, in the puzzles we're all trying to sort out in our
daily jobs actually managing to entirely automate yourself out of a job is
basically solving the equation.

Granted the value created by such tasks usually isn't fairly compensated so
there are a lot of societal issues.

------
ry4n413
I work in Finance/Investment Industry and was "let go" from one of the
companies I worked at because I automated a large portion of my job (among
other things). I even wrote an instruction manual for the entire process (not
knowing that I could/would be let go). They ended up replacing me with a guy
who didn't know how to program, but had 20 years of experience. Live and
learn.

~~~
krupan
That should look really good on your resume, or probably could be the basis
for a consulting business.

~~~
ry4n413
Yep, I started a consulting venture ~2 years ago. Funny enough, the guy who
"let me go" also said I should start a consulting business.

[https://www.gotemstl.com/](https://www.gotemstl.com/)

------
eslaught
The funny thing about coding is that every time we automate something away, we
just go on to take on ever more ambitious projects. We've been automating away
our own jobs for decades, and... the jobs haven't gone anywhere. If anything,
there is more demand now than ever. Short of strong AI, I don't see this
changing.

This is actually one of my biggest reasons why I don't think we'll ever
develop a true engineering discipline of software. In other engineering
disciplines, there's a notion of a routine set of tasks that require skill and
displine to perform. In software, whenever we discover routine anything, we
automate it away. Therefore there is a relentless force moving against the
routinization of our work, that is precisely what has made it so lucrative to
be in software.

Who knows, maybe some day that trend will end. But at least for a good while,
I suspect the more likely possibility is that we'll keep expanding the scope
of our work as the tools keep taking on more of the work.

------
knurdle
At the first internship I had in the late 90's, part of my job was taking
these text files full of data and creating these huge excel reports with them.
It was something that would take a few hours to do because of how much data
there was. I taught myself VBA and wrote up this little program where you just
upload the file and it spit out the report in about a minute. I luckily had a
boss who saw the potential in that and while I wasn't promoted, I was just an
intern after all, at the end of the summer, I was the only intern the company
kept. And they moved me all around the company to different departments and I
learned a ton and it was a great experience. I did automate a few departments
to the point where people who were doing full time work had their work cut
down to couple of hours a day at most. I finally left when my friends who
started doing internships at these "internet" companies were getting paid more
than I was and I had asked for a raise and didn't get it.

------
megamindbrian2
I use a calendar pretty heavily to stay on task. I automatically accepted
meeting invites because my job was so boring going to meetings was probably
the only good part. My managers found out I accepted them automatically and
told me to turn it off. Instead of turning it off I put a 5 minute delay on
the invite receipt. I was laid off for "attitude problems".

~~~
pensatoio
I don’t get it. What’s wrong (morally or otherwise) with automatically
accepting meeting invites.

~~~
megamindbrian2
They said I didn't look at a meeting so they were mad when I'd show up a
minute or two late. Of course no one cares when other managers showed up a
minute or two late. This was at Charles Schwab. I'd never work or invest
there.

------
siliconc0w
Businesses are mostly just complicated cybernetic programs that try to turn
money into more money. But it's like shitty spaghetti code where you have to
understand years of debt to understand why A needs to talk to B, C, D and
process the results into some new form E. Maybe they do this manually with a
spreadsheet and arcane business rules passed down from generation to
generation or maybe those rules are encoded in some awful program written
twenty years ago that is terrible by any modern measure but is bespoke tailed
to their shop/industry/regulatory environment.

You could probably automate this process but it requires a holistic
understanding of the whole system which no one may even have, much less
someone with the technical skills to automate. Plus it's like refactoring
spaghetti code with little to no documentation, no specification except the
current output, no tests, and likely involves a some combination of multiple
technologies and manual human-powered processing.

------
mikestew
What's disappointing is the opening story of the QA guy who automated his job
and then proceeded to spend time playing video games. To each their own how to
use new-found efficiency, but if this person had truly automated their job in
50 hours, I'll bet _someone_ within the company could find him something more
interesting to do, for a lot more money.

~~~
auxym
I read r/financialindependence from time and time, and it's not uncommon for
me to read about people _who have nothing to do at their job_. From their
account, they ask for more work, but nothing comes, and they spend their days
redditing and watching youtube. Thus, they want to retire ASAP as they find
this mind-numbing.

This is completely bewildering for me. All managers I've had were always eager
to pile on more work on my desk when I was starting to look like I was
finishing something, sometimes to a fault.

Is it a US thing? Have you guys experienced something like that? What is it,
something like having to keep people around to justify budgets?

------
outworlder
I am currently trying to automate my job. This will allow me to focus on more
important issues.

In other words, I am automating away the job I don't want to do, to focus on
the job that I want to to, and that will bring more value for the company. I
don't expect the workload to ever decrease, just that our team will be able to
tackle bigger issues.

------
derefr
One perspective I haven't seen here yet: these employers are willing to pay an
entire person-salary to get this task done. Therefore, if there was a SaaS
service that did the same task, the company should be willing to pay a person-
salary worth of money for that SaaS product.

So why not build the automation in your free time, knock out a little website
with a Stripe subscription form to sell it, convince your boss to pay for this
SaaS service _instead of_ paying you to do it, and _then_ ask if they have any
other work for you to do?

If they do, great: now you're making 100% of your salary from the SaaS (and
you can grow it from there if you like), and then 100% of your salary again
because they've retained you to do a new thing.

If not, great: now you can quit and do what you like and continue to receive
100% of your previous salary in passive SaaS-business income.

~~~
bradknowles
No business would be willing to pay that.

Once you've shown them that the job can be done easier/faster/cheaper, they
will insist on that as the new standard.

Rinse and repeat until you are penniless and they have all the money.

~~~
derefr
But they _were_ just paying that, in the form of paying you. If they don't
think the task is worth paying that much to get done, they would have just
been not-doing-the-task.

Also, note that I never suggested mentioning that the SaaS service you create
should make any mention of its service being automated.

Consider an entry in the "cloud bookkeeping SaaS" genre: they sell you on
having real accountants looking at your books, _with_ automation to ensure the
_reliability_ of those accountants' work. They never mention that they'll also
be using automation to make your workload easier to handle, such that each of
their accountants is handling the books of 1000 clients. That's an
implementation detail.

~~~
bradknowles
They were paying you that, sure. But then you showed them that they didn't
need to pay you that anymore, because you automated that job away. So now they
won't pay you nearly so much.

You're welcome. Now, get back to work, you slave! ;)

~~~
derefr
Ah, but you didn't automate the job away. Like I said, you did the automation
on your own time, with your own resources. It wasn't work-for-hire; they don't
own the rights to it. And there's no instance of it already set up for them to
use. As of the moment that you offer them the _opportunity_ to subscribe to
your SaaS service (and note that you don't have to mention that it's _your_
SaaS service), they're still in the position of having no automated process,
just you sitting there able to do the process manually.

So they have two decisions to make: whether to buy the SaaS service (in order
to receive the benefit of the automation); and whether to keep paying you.

They can choose to say "no" to both... but now, not only do they not have an
automated process, and just as little idea of how to automate it as they did
when they started; they also don't have you there to do the process for them,
and they lose your hard-won expertise on the process that would be crucial for
building any sort of in-house automation.

(I'm assuming here, note, that the company isn't one that _tends to_ automate
processes—if they did, they'd probably have already found the low-hanging
automation fruit that your job consisted of. As such, they likely don't have
any in-house automation expertise, nor do any in-house expertise for
evaluating the competence of automation consultancies.)

ETA: my original point was that everything I'm saying here (and more) is what
some person with sufficient motivation to think through all the details would
be saying to their boss to convince them. "Convincing your boss" includes
"thinking through all your boss's objections and having rehearsed, polished
counters for them." Have I done that? No. But I'm not someone with an
automatable job.

------
mmsimanga
I used to train clients on the BI product the company I worked sold and
supported. This was mostly taking users through the demos. The users would
follow what I was doing on their training PCs. The problem was that in one
class it was possible to have users who might have been exposed to the
software before or were just fast learners. Sometimes the software would have
issues on the training PCs and I would have to trouble shoot what the error
was. In a nutshell it was tough running demos and attending to slow users and
issues with PCs.

So I automated the demos part by creating screencasts of the demos. I would
play the demo whilst I was helping out my students. The first class loved the
demos. They asked for copies which I gladly gave them. Management didn't like
the idea and I was told not to use my screen casts.

------
sharadov
I see this possible in only 2 kinds of organizations 1\. Very large - where
you are a practically a number and work in a department buried deep. 2\. Small
- where there is a reasonable amount of technology but no desire or budget to
upgrade. It's working, so don't touch it.

------
yason
If your work really is so simple that all of it can be automated then it
initially sounds like a golden deal: the employer is getting what they're
paying for and the employee has a lot of... free time.

But the trouble is that most decent programmers just couldn't stand that. They
absolutely need to feel they're doing useful work. So they'll either expand
their duties in the company (likely with no similar expansion in their pay) or
leave for another company (that pays them to do the both challenging and
useful work).

Another case are companies where you absolutely need to automate lots of stuff
to get to do real work. If you fight the system you'll run out of energy
sooner than the system ever would, but if you automate the fight you can stay
operative yourself.

------
recon517
Easy to understand if you are cheating by automating your job and spending now
freed time for leisure: if your contract says that you are paid by an hour or
for fixed number of hours a week/month then you are cheating. Of course, not
paying you for overtime can also be considered cheating from your employer.

The only way to not be cheating by automating your job is to spend now extra
available free time for other duties mentioned in your contract, perfecting
your professional abilities, or moving to a contract which is goal based, not
work-hour based.

It is a pity that somebody can be clever enough to automate his/her job but
don't see implications regarding the contract signed with the employer.

------
jv22222
When I built my SaaS app Pluggio (a social media dashboard), I'll never forget
a conversation I had with a customer, who gleefully explained how much they
loved the product!

Apparently, before Pluggio they had someone working full time on social media.
But now, they were able to fire them and do that same work in 1 hour a week
for only the $25/month cost of the app.

After further digging, I realized that a lot of my customers had fired people
because of the leverage that the app gave them.

To this day I don't quite know how to feel about creating products that mean
people loose their job.

Anyway, it's one (amongst a few other) reasons I decided sell the business and
move on.

------
meuk
It always bothers me how things could be automated better if people just put
in a little more thought.

For example, where I work, we use both entity framework and raw SQL scripts. A
common chore is to delete all migrations, delete the database, run "add-
migration SetupDB", "update-database -script", and save the script (with some
added boilerplate) in a specific folder

However, the "update-database -script" command does not pipe the script to
output, but instead opens a new window in VS with the script. This is part of
the reason why I am not a fan of Microsoft/Windows: relying on a GUI makes
automation so much harder.

~~~
yurishimo
Aren't there ways to automate this though? Even if it's not 100%, maybe you
could get the first parts, and then get everything setup so you only need to
click a window and then "select all, copy, tab, paste" to finish.

I'm sure with some clever thought, you might even be able to use a GUI
scripting program to work with the VS window. I'm thinking of a series of
keyboard shortcuts to reliably set the state of the VS window to where you can
script a mouse click in the appropriate spot and then more keyboard shortcuts
to copy and save the output.

------
gravy
How do I find a job I can automate away?

~~~
abledon
look for excel heavy data entry jobs

~~~
morenoh149
any other tips? what if you have plenty of experience programming, wouldn't it
be too obvious?

~~~
abledon
\- I see your background is heavy in tech... we dont see these types of
resumes normally

\- yeah, i used to work on aproject for 4 years, it never saw the light of day
because the people and business processes werent in place. I'm interested in
exploring the non-programming side of business , the people relationships,
(insert whatever aspects of position your applying for here)

------
godelski
It seems to me that we are coming on a different paradigm of work. It makes
sense in the industrial revolution to have assembly line like working. Where
workers are "cogs in a wheel". But now we have tons of tools to do those
strict tasks. After all, every programmer says you should program repetitive
tasks.

So what do we shift to? A wider job duty and more creativity? Creativity is
the thing that machines still fail at the most and (as far as I know)
currently impossible to automate.

------
wallstquant
How is a programmers value add usually measured?

I am a researcher/trader and I spend a large portion of my time programming,
but I am ultimately paid off the change in profitability of the strategies
I've worked on and not on the code I've written. It's a means to an end.

When someone is working on a purely technical project, how can they
successfully argue for the value of their work? How do you measure the value
of a purely technical project? Are there other metrics that matter?

------
jillesvangurp
If you are getting money for not working because you automated your job away,
good for you. But you should be aware that your company will likely not
survive very long because it is being mismanaged. Chances are that it has
smarter competitors already. Usually it is just a matter of time before the
shit hits the fan.

So, you might want to consider using your time preparing for that eventuality.
E.g. spend some time learning new stuff or jump ship to a better company.

~~~
aplummer
I think you underestimate how defensible some businesses are. For example, a
supermarket or bank in Australia. “A matter of time” could be your entire
career.

~~~
dbmk
Yes. I worked for a company that has such a moat surrounding its line of
products, it will a couple of decades to erode. 70% of the people there were
doing very little on a day-to-day.

------
astannard
I automated my job at a company. I did not tell management for a week after
but was then bored. It took another few months of me nagging them for more
work before the believed me and gave me another project.

It was a business critical application I inherited that was highly unreliable,
my job was to keep it running. I just reworked the code so that it ran
reliably and was resistant to outages etc. I also added in a few scheduled
tasks etc to keep it ticking over

------
IronWolve
Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script

------
cyberferret
This could be a koan: If you write a program that works so well that it makes
your job of programming easier - are you a good programmer or a bad
programmer?

------
lucas_membrane
The opposite also happens. Almost fifty years ago at a large insurance
operation in downtown Los Angeles, there was a programmer who programmed and
maintained a suite of reporting programs. But his programming skills were
limited, so he was actually just keypunching the needed reports into his
programs as hard-coded data. If you get what you pay for, why care?

------
vorg
Many programmers who automate portions of their workload will use the extra
time they gain to place bugs in the systems. When those systems fail, they
quickly fix them and look like a savior. If they are on after-hours standby,
they make extra money from the callouts. They thus reduce the stress in their
own jobs, but increase the stress in other peoples jobs.

~~~
korantu
This is borderline criminal, and should be caught with processes / code
review.

Did you really see a lot of such cases??

~~~
vorg
When I worked in IT, both in mainframe programming and before that in ops, I
saw many cases of this. "borderline" is just another word for "plausibly
deniable". Programmers doing it can claim to have made a mistake. Managers
turn a blind eye to it because it's easier than getting pay rises for staff
they don't want to leave.

------
honkycat
I've never understood the profound lack of drive and ethics it takes to
automate your own job and then conceal it from your employer.

The worst jobs I have ever had have ALWAYS been the ones where I'm not
contributing to my company in an obvious way, or at consulting firms where we
consistently kick ass and finish our sprints early, and then goof off for days
on end.

~~~
derefr
> profound lack of drive

That assumes you want to be doing the thing you're doing, rather than some
other thing (which potentially doesn't generate money.)

Professionally, I'm a programmer. I write code for money.

But _vocationally_ , I'm an author. You know what the best job in the world
would be, for me? One where I'm paid a living wage to do nothing at all. Then
I would have the free time, the energy, and the resources to write books.

"Why not just become a professional author?" Well, because being a
professional author is only a little bit about writing books. A lot of being a
professional author is about _selling_ books. Going on tour to signings,
appearing on morning talk-shows, and just generally running the business of
extracting royalties from your book.

But I am not, vocationally, a businessman who happens to be good at writing
books, and so sees that as an appealing strategy toward an end-goal of "making
money." No, I'm an author. I love writing, not money. I love seeing people's
smiles when I reach them with my writing. Money is a means to that end—a way
to keep me alive so I can keep doing the thing that makes me happy. If I could
be kept alive and functioning and able-to-write without any income, I'd gladly
have none.

I would say that I have plenty of drive. Just... not for doing the thing that
I do for money.

~~~
honkycat
Honestly, your comment annoys me because it puts words in my mouth, as if I'm
doing what I want to be doing. As if I DREAMED of being a back-end developer
my whole life. As if I'm some artless drone that can't understand the mind of
an artist.

> That assumes you want to be doing the thing you're doing, rather than some
> other thing (which potentially doesn't generate money.)

No, it doesn't at all. It means I would rather be doing something more useful
than browsing facebook all day for a job I'm being paid to do. It means I
don't dump all of my work onto the people around me and be a complete
parasite. It means I want stability and praise instead of constant fear of
being discovered and fired and ruining my own life.

Most of us do not want to work, that is why we are paid for it. The vast
majority of people do their job to get by.

> But vocationally, I'm an author. You know what the best job in the world
> would be, for me? One where I'm paid a living wage to do nothing at all.
> Then I would have the free time, the energy, and the resources to write
> books.

Yes, I would love to hang out at home and read books all day, constantly
learning new things.

If I could drop everything and not have to care about having a roof over my
head, I would be a video game developer or an artist.

BUT, I don't have rich parents or anybody to support me. I don't have the
privilege of not working, most people do not.

So instead I'm a slacker programmer who doesn't work overtime, gets by, and
lives his life the best he can in his down time.

> I would say that I have plenty of drive. Just... not for doing the thing
> that I do for money.

To be clear: I'm specifically talking in the context of people who are so
dysfunctional that they automate their jobs and do literally nothing for
years. If I was in their position I would find something more interesting to
spend my time on.

What do you do after that? Who is going to hire you after being fired for
defrauding the company? Also: I believe doing things like this CAN open you up
to liability. Also often a company owns everything you do with their computer,
or that you do during work hours.

------
monkeydust
I am currently building and selling software that automates fx and fixed
income otc traders out of a job.... Or rather....allows them to spend more
time on higher value tasks (so goes the theory!)

It's fairly addictive automation, I'm finding all sort of functions and jobs
that could / should be automated to the growing frustration of my colleagues
:-)

------
bryanrasmussen
In A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (different one, but still something of a
jerk), the rich daughter of a Newspaper magnate who has needed glasses since
she was a child gets an eye exam and is declared to have perfect vision and
not in need of glasses. Her father says to bill him for one pair of perfect
glasses that will never break.

------
ovrkil
I'm employed at a company that engineers financial institution software. I
have no qualms admitting when I moved to QA I quickly wrote a program to do my
testing. Now each release I just update the relevant variables compile load
and run. I see no problem with using my grey matter to it's full potential.

------
0xfeeddeadbeef
I've read on HN (don't remember exactly) a story about a military service
person, who automated his data entry job and told his commanding officer, who
scolded him and told him to do what he was supposed to do and "not to be
clever". Maybe someone recalls the article I'm talking about?

------
_zachs
There's a big difference between a Software Engineer and a Data Entry worker.
While I (Software Engineer) can definitely automate certain parts of my job, I
cannot automate taking an issue from the board, figuring out how to solve it,
writing code to solve it, and getting it reviewed in a PR.

------
ovrkil
I work for a financial software company in QA and I have no qualms admitting
right after arriving I wrote a program to test the new release code for me.
Each release all I have to do is change some variables load and run. I see
nothing wrong with using my grey matter to its fullest potential.

------
amarant
The real story is that management didn't hire someone to automate these tasks
in the first place!

That's what we have software for, do boring stuff so we don't have to! By
automating these people proved themselves to be developers, and not just
software-in-a-meatbag, or SIAM, if you will.

------
omneity
Shameless plug, I wrote a tool that allows coders to leverage automation a lot
more:

[https://medium.com/p/meta-executable-processes-for-
software-...](https://medium.com/p/meta-executable-processes-for-software-
development-eea55103e4b0)

------
jeandejean
Well it seems that if your work can be so easily automated, we shouldn't call
you coder in the first place.

That's an interesting debate, but basing the article on 2 anonymous reddit
posts whose authors couldn't be reached to get the full story is not what I
expect from journalists.

------
jsprenne
Automating data entry work or similar is one thing, there are many companies
out there automating a high-value-added work like IT project management. Most
of the work project managers do today will be automated in the coming years.
Mark my words!

~~~
snarkyturtle
One thing that PM's do that I don't ever see a computer doing is managing
clients/workers. It's the classic idiom: technology is easy, it's people
that's the hard problem.

~~~
jsprenne
You're right about people being the problem but, as you said, technology is
easy and in my work, I see how automation manages clients and workers.

------
FrozenVoid
The people automating their jobs are automating themself out of the job,but
freelancers are just simplifying their job. The difference is freelancers
aren't obligated to reveal the magic of their work. They just "do it".

------
raintrees
It would seem automated coding would be right up "Ditching Hourly" Jonathan
Stark's alley... It would instead require a shift in attitude about value and
time. It follows in the lazy (automate it) ethic.

------
jtcond13
Inter Alia, this article is another piece of evidence that a lot of pretty
smart people are stuck in jobs that aren’t very complex. The accumulated cost
of this to the rest of us is quite high...

------
Walkman
We automate everything we can, but I never felt for a single moment that I
will have no job tomorrow if I do this, there is always so much problems to
solve, so much to do.

------
matchagaucho
Moore's Law seems so ingrained in Silicon Valley, that _not_ questioning
automation opportunities every 18 months is a guaranteed predictor for
obsolescence.

------
caoilte
The real crime is that these very smart data-entry clerks don't quit for
programming jobs that pay double.

------
amelius
Interesting. Now I want to read about doctors and lawyers automating their own
jobs.

------
EugeneOZ
If you can automate your job, you are not a programmer. Maybe nasty "coders"
means exactly this.

------
goombastic
Not sure why so many people here are surprised that benefits of efficiency
accrue to the owners of capital. That's the basic premise of capitalism in a
way.

Profits float upwards, hard negotiation pushes downwards on actual workers and
managements try as much as possible to reduce what's owed to actual "doers" of
work.

------
nerdponx
And no mention of Marx or Socialism? If there's ever an appropriate time to
bring up worker-owned means of production, it's this right here. As I've heard
it (I have not read the Communist Manifesto myself), Marx viewed automation as
one of the ways in which workers can liberate themselves.

The merit of welfare economics is predicated on the "winners" being able to
compensate the "losers", and thereby obtain a Pareto-optimal wealth
distribution. The fact that this compensation does not happen is the reason
that aggregate consumer welfare has grown tremendously, but people still have
to work 40 hours a week for their food, housing, and healthcare.

It's tempting to say that employees ought to be compensated proportional to
the value they generate. Let's say every employee is allowed to _license_
their work output in such a way that, if they automate a process, they are
entitled to royalties stemming from the automation of that process. Should
that license be perpetual? How do you decide how big the royalty should be?
How do you determine the actual value generated by a given automation?

Edit: wew, instant downvote. Care to clarify?

------
rllin
this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently

\- usury

\- patents

\- copyrights

\- land

\- software as a service

the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of
profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also
frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.)

the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended
consequences (cf. prop 13)

the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end
date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need
for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition
of pithy features.

i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful
because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a
more (post) modern marxist.

------
hardwaresofton
I never see anyone suggesting that maybe we should be rethinking the contracts
we sign as developers and rethinking how our compensation is determined.
Despite how well you think you're being paid, you're being underpaid (this is
almost necessarily true economically) -- in addition to that, companies have
literally colluded in order to suppress your wages, despite making profits fit
for history books.

The idea that an employer owns everything (in particular IP, basically the
products of your mind) that you generate on their time or yours while you work
for them is bullshit -- it's a complex problem but business has chosen to
resolve it 100% in their favor and workers just laid down and taken it. Non-
competes and strict laws against selling secrets are one thing, but laying
defacto claim to everything you generate is ridiculous, yet is the norm.

\-- rant incoming --

Software Engineers/Developers/programmers are just the bottom rung of this
century's gold rush. Half the time the mines they're working in are canary-
less coal mines. Some drink the kool-aid and think the "startup" they work for
is anything more than an aspiring too-big-to-fail company, after a few years
they wise up and by that time they're too bogged down with life to care/change
course. I remember reading a post earlier in the week on C-level compensation
and noting that CTOs were the least paid of all the C levels, despite being
maybe the second most directly tied to the economic value of any tech company
(sales might be #1).

Despite how smart we think we are, software engineers are fucking stupid. This
article is stupid, but only because the premise is stupid (outside of taking
~20 paragraphs to go through random internet musings/anecdata to get to it's
point:

> Self-automators show that coders are actually in a unique position to
> negotiate with employers over which automation-derived gains—like shorter
> workweeks and greater flexibility to pursue work that interests them—should
> be kept by workers. There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but
> theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation
> techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an
> industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare
> opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set
> the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first.

People who deliver out-sized value for a company but aren't naive enough to
think they'll be anywhere near properly compensated will not share their
secrets. The ethics question isn't even on the right side, companies should be
paying employees for the value they create properly, this situation exists
because that doesn't happen. Companies are "people", yet aren't beholden to
ethics and are largely run by people divorced from the realities they impose.
Where you land on this issue is basically how your employment contract was
written and how you interpreted it, against the backdrop of the culture it's
in -- the only difference is that people at the just about always cheat/bend
rules or find luck to get to where they are, but preach that they "put in the
time" and honestly just worked hard for forever to get where they are.

There is nothing inherently noble about doing work -- that's vassal brain
fodder. If working was the only way to build discipline and dedication then we
should all be working graveyard shifts at 3 jobs, and _not_ wanting to get
rich.

------
pdimitar
> _“They took what I had developed, replaced me with an idiot that they showed
> how to work it, and promptly fired me for ‘insubordination.’ I had taken a
> business asset that was making them $30 grand a year profit and turned it
> into a million dollar a year program for the company, and they fired me for
> it to save ~30 grand a year on my salary. Job creators my ass.”_

There's an inherent conflict of interest and power struggles in many
organizations. The business people rarely do create value by themselves; they
create the opportunities where value can be created -- and not all
businessmen. So when they see something that changes the game, they utilize
the convenient clauses in the contract and seize that new power which they can
utilize and try and gain the upper hand on others like them. Cynical I know,
but it's what I observed first-hand and what many others have told me.

> _Ideally, automation decisions would happen collectively, with colleagues’
> and peers’ input, so, the gains could be evenly distributed._

Cute, but I don't see this happening anytime soon. Let's face it: most of us
fight for scraps from the tables of others, much more rich, people, for most
of our lives. Look at a lot of politicians.They start off so idealistic and
some of them even strongly believe everything that got them elected. What
happens next? We don't know _what_ happens but the end result is that they get
more and more disconnected from the problems of the people who elected them.
Why do you think that is?

I believe it's because they got their hands on money and connections.
Additionally, they worked a _LOT_ to get where they ended up eventually. Tell
me, would you like to start over in a brand new area and not get your hands on
poorly documented money and just work for a meager official salary? All of
that when you are 50+? We the people burn out and we need our efforts to lead
to a better future where we work less. IMO it's inevitable.

What I am saying is that I don't feel the need to share a piece of $500,000 a
year consultancy with fellow programmers if I do NOT have several beach houses
and apartments in downtown areas of several capitals. And have a healthy
reserve of money to last me a economical crysis akin to the 2008.

...Basically, I don't see myself being very generous up until I hit 8 figures
of income. I am greedy and I am real about it. I don't feel many others are
very benevolent and will STAY benevolent when faced with the choice to live
peacefully and leisurely with all the financial security they desire vs.
taking risks to finance people who might just be looking for a secure paycheck
and don't care about the cause you want to invest your wealth into. This is a
very real risk and is the reason for the failure of a lot of startups.

But if you have different view I am interested to hear it.

> _“The system shouldn 't be more important than the individuals who helped
> make that system relevant.”_

That is unequivocally true. And IMO it will never change anyway. :(

The people who collect and get to redistribute wealth are greedy and aren't
that stupid that they will invite competition out of a good heart.

------
gaius
Many years ago, one of the secretaries was on holiday and the big boss asked
me to write a program that, unbeknownst to me at the time, completely
automated her job away. When she came back she came to me in tears, couldn't
believe I had stabbed her in the back like that. Well this story has a happy
ending, the boss did it so he could promote her, he just thought it would be a
nice surprise! But ever since then I have been very conscious of the power we
have and I try to work on new things, not merely automating away old ones. I
make the exception obviously for using automation to bring work back in-house
that had previously been outsourced or offshored. Those jobs are already
destroyed, and automation always improves the quality and turnaround.

~~~
onemoresoop
I wonder why you got downvoted as I am always wary of what that kind of
(sneaky) direct job automation can cause to the people who are discarded.

------
browsercoin
when I did this at my last job they were like cool, can you automate this and
this....

I learned that I was taken advantage of.

~~~
vajrabum
Hopefully you put that experience on your resume and got a higher wage at your
next job putting your automation skills to good use.

------
JakeWesorick
Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you
are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee
of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme
inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain.

Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they
can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.

~~~
kyleblarson
[https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/spanish-
public-...](https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/spanish-public-
servant-skipped-work-for-a-decade/news-story/e7623219ac39c696812b368269b5ef59)

~~~
jlarocco
Not justifying what he did, but that's not possible without a major management
failure.

