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The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com)
Brian Merchant, writing for The Atlantic (condensed for space): In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: "From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work." As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality assurance job, he had fully automated his entire workload. When his bosses realized that he'd worked less in half a decade than most Silicon Valley programmers do in a week, they fired him. [...]
About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?" The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry" -- and, six months ago, writing scripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, their employee simply did flawless work.
The post proved unusually divisive, and comments flooded in. Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. [...] Call it self-automation, or auto-automation. At a moment when the specter of mass automation haunts workers, rogue programmers demonstrate how the threat can become a godsend when taken into coders' hands, with or without their employers' knowledge. Since both FiletOFish1066 and Etherable posted anonymously and promptly disappeared, neither were able to be reached for comment. But their stories show that workplace automation can come in many forms and be led by people other than executives.
About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?" The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry" -- and, six months ago, writing scripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, their employee simply did flawless work.
The post proved unusually divisive, and comments flooded in. Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. [...] Call it self-automation, or auto-automation. At a moment when the specter of mass automation haunts workers, rogue programmers demonstrate how the threat can become a godsend when taken into coders' hands, with or without their employers' knowledge. Since both FiletOFish1066 and Etherable posted anonymously and promptly disappeared, neither were able to be reached for comment. But their stories show that workplace automation can come in many forms and be led by people other than executives.
No one owes you a job. If you've automated one job, simply ask for another. If your employer won't go along with that, go work for someone else with a more intelligent approach. Ultimately, doing nothing is crushing to the human spirit. Why would you want to do that? Time is irreplaceable.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I mean, the employers would not consider the employee's needs when implementing automation, so ethically the inverse should be true. the employers are paying for work to be done, the employee is doing the work. "how" he does the work does not matter.
If the work's getting done then you're doing the job you were hired for.
The mechanism doesn't matter.
No sig today...
I often try to program myself out of a job, but then I make sure everyone knows what I did and look for more work. The company gets two employees of work out of me for the price of one. I get recognition, job security, bigger raises, promotions. It works out better if you're honest.
I'n not a coder but I do a lot of general IT work. Automating tasks is a big part of my responsibilities and it has never once put me out of a job. Instead, it made me more effective and productive, able to pass along the more mundane tasks and take on (and help to streamline or completely automate) additional tasks.
Automation, if done correctly, is simply a force multiplier. As noted, it allows you to get the mundane, repeatable tasks out of the way in order to address and tackle higher-level functions. This is, ideally, how you would advance in any organization. If you've automated yourself out of a job, you're probably doing it unethically and not stepping up to lead additional projects.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
It is my job, as the manager of my team, to identify and automate every job that can be automated. If the manager is dumb it is his/her fault. If the company hires dumb managers, the company deserves to lose money. Unless the company comes up with a formula and says, "this job costs the company 120K a year indefinitely. At our capital cost, it is worth 4 million (or 6 million or whatever) to eliminate it. You give me a script to do that, I pay you 50 to 80% of the capital saved" the employee should keep quiet.
The Criminal Executive Officer shows vague calculations of capital saved and takes 80% of the alleged savings as his bonus. Why shouldn't the employee play catch me if you can?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If it were my employee that automated their job, I would fire the ones that were still doing everything by hand and keep the obvious intelligent one.
I don't know the exact nature of the job, but if I were them, I would have hired you to see what else you could automate. Perhaps the reason they fired you is that you didn't tell anyone about it, so perhaps the real lesson here is that you should keep management informed. It's pretty unlikely that they'll be so foolish as to remove someone who just saved them a lot of money when the potential of more savings are possible.
Him being fired for not telling management about automating the process sounds like not telling management was the smarter of the options. It is clear he worked for PHB of Dilbert Fame. He was fired after a week of automating the process, which means he wasn't really hiding it either.
Proper management would have called him in, said their peace, and offered to let him automate as much as he could, and to keep management informed. You don't fire people for not telling someone. You fire them for gross misconduct.
If you're in management, your job is to maximize the efficiencies of your workplace. If I were management, I would have looked at that as the gift horse it was. Find good people, and make their work meaningful and reward them for a job well done. This kind of Ticky-Tack bullshit is why most management is set up for failure.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A further, more relevant question would be whether it is moral to automate someone else's job?
All software is automating someone else's job.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
That assumes companies are rational. There's a saying: "Dilbert is a documentary, not a cartoon." Many managers treat their group as a fiefdom and want it to grow in importance and staff. If automation makes their group look trivial, they may invent reasons to fire or move the "perpetrator". You have to view it from the manager's position in the organization, not from overall balance sheets. The overall balance sheet may have little impact on a manager's standing in the org.
That being said, I've seen multiple organizations where their reporting and searching/querying systems are a combinatorial mess. With better built query-by-example forms, refactoring, and export to Excel (CSV) options; one can often simplify many of those and reduce the number of screens and reports to roughly 30% of the original count. (You do have to know the org fairly well to do it properly.)
Such combinatorial redundancy is a mistake programmers keep making for some reason. I don't know if it's an intentional job-security game, or they don't know any better because they never have seen it done right.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, it's smart of him to automate his job, but stupid of hit to rest on his laurels.
In my first office job, I found a way to automate a complex data entry task that used to take 2 weeks each year, so that it only took me about an hour (and was free of all typos, which if you glance at my post history, you know is a big improvement). I hesitantly raised the topic with my boss, and was smacked down - don't waste my time with that nonsense, just get typing.
Well, I had made the effort to tell him and been rebuffed. I felt free to use that two weeks each year to automate other parts of my job that my boss clearly had no interest in hearing about. Snowballed pretty well - after 5 years the job was pretty darn easy.
I took a good lesson from that place: my job as an engineer is to highlight problems that I see, but run with management decisions (this isn't life-safety stuff we're talking about). It's not my job to get fired for shit that's ultimately unimportant, or try more than once to correct a mistake in my favor.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.