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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.
When I was fresh out of high school and in college, I had a data entry job in a silicon valley high tech company. Each day I received Excel reports from multiple sources ranging from dozens to a hundred attachments. My job was to organize them and enter into a database. Now I wasn't a programmer at all. In fact I only learned Visual Basic macro on my own and instead of formatting those reports into the format I want and merging before data entry, I used the VB macro to record my actions which turned directly into code. I fixed that code up a little bit so that it could read the entire directory (where I dropped the attachments) and processed an entire day of work in under a minute. Sure enough, I lost my job only a week after that because someone found out that I automated the job. Now if I was to set the macro to run one record every 10secs, I would have been able to keep my job for a while LOL.
more than once.
These were people taking 60+ hours to do the same work I was doing in less than 20 hours a week. Automation of some of my work made it worse.
Management just tossed more work on my plate, and got rid of the slow people, with no financial inducement for me. I never said anything, and found plenty of time to surf /. and reddit while things ran batch jobs on another screen, or computer(s)
If you're serious about automating your job, make sure your apps do a directory check to make sure you're still employed before it does it's job.... /s?
I've ended up being that one guy that gets job offers because somebody I've encountered just wants me at the company because of this. Some of my employers have sat me at a desk for years knowing I had nothing to do because I solved all their problems in 6 months. They keep me around because I occasionally fix something else, or something breaks and I can fix it faster than anyone else, or they want to do something new and they stick it in front of me and ask how to engineer a better solution.
It makes for a good story, but I really don't like being the guy who has the answer to everything. The business keeps me around because I'm tangentially-useful and they occasionally get 10x my salary out of something I do. This often results in me being the only person with responsibility over a certain type or set of systems, so there's no back-up--I've protested this and they simply decide it's too expensive to hire two of me.
I've at times been the guy who wanders the building talking to people, then sits down and makes their work go away.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
... when I first hired on at a law firm.
My first day, I was on the job at 7:30 am and learned that the incumbent, who would be schooling me, would not show up until 10:00 am.
So, I looked around his office and spied an old abandoned notebook that had the line: "backup password is steelers."
I logged in (Novell 3.1) and inquired about the user "backup." It had god privilege.
I made myself an admin and started touring and documenting stuff, finding shit like a backdoor into the system via a dialup modem that the firm new nothing about.
When my mentor showed up, he said, "Well, the first thing is to make you admin."
I said, "No need. I already did that and, BTW, you're no longer admin on my site."
We worked until 11:00 pm each and every night. goddam
A week later he was gone and I ordered a dry erase and listed all the fucking reasons I was working until 11:00 pm.
I tackled each line item and cleaned up the mess, automating as much as I could (I threw the modem in the trash).
A month later, management said they noticed that I didn't work overtime anymore. I told them, that's true, and you don't pay me to so so.
By 3 months I had fully automated mundane tasks and sat in the rocking chair except for when new tech came along.
In my opinion, keeping things out of the ditches is a valuable talent.
No guilt here.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I worked a job for 11 years. The entire time my team and I are were automating everything we could. We were very good at it and our manager(s) encouraged us. Why? So we could automate something else and move to something else, etc. The value in the employee is the constant improvement, and it appears my team was lucky to have management which saw the value.
If you get rid of someone who automates their job, who will maintain it? Improve it? Update it? Very short sighted on the management to just fire them. In 6 months when a password changes, some data being used in the process moves, or a person who doesn't think this is automated job is doing anything and deletes it, what will you do then? Make someone else try and reverse engineer it and figure it out, if they didn't get rid of all the workers who could do this.
... about the mechanic, who upon request, produces an itemized receipt applies here.
-Tapping with hammer - $1
-Knowing where to tap - $399
OK, so you automated your own tasks, and they want to fire you as a result.
But wait a minute. With you gone, who understands the automation? Who can fix it when it breaks? Who can update it to handle new types of input, or when the environment changes around it?
Maybe it still makes sense to let you go, and hire a contractor now and then to adjust the automation. But maybe not.