Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
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.
An oldie, but a goodie.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
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
Since the work you're assigned is being completed significantly faster and with less errors than before, it is wrong to not ask for a raise.
Had a job with a small defense contractor, doing corp IT. Mostly my job was making sure the system the payroll system(running Oracle)kept running and that the SAN/file shares kept running.
As you can imagine, pretty much once all of this stuff was setup, there was really nearly nothing to do. I showed up for around 4 hours three days a week(to keep up apperances mostly). I stuck around the place for years because...why the hell wouldn't I? I got paid well to be a slacker. Only reason why I'm not at that job anymore? Upper management fucked up their main contractor and the company went tits up.
I'm sure that works until something goes wrong with the automation and there's nobody left who understands how it works. I've automated plenty of my daily job, but when anything doesn't happen that should...nobody else will even attempt to figure it out, even though I do have these processes documented. Because I wrote the processes, i can usually figure out where to look and what the problem may be fairly fast, where someone else would have to figure it out.
I'm doing the same with my job. The nice thing is that I'm part of a fairly large organization with a lot of need, and as I free up my time, I'm in a position to help address other areas.
But yeah, I do less work now than I did two years ago. Gone are the days where this position manually does a lot of things. Some massive data QA that used to take weeks now runs in about a half day. That's generally a prelim run, some fixes, and a few more runs to make sure everything is good to go. If nothing was wrong, it would be under an hour.
If companies aren't pushing their technologically minded folks to automate things, they're throwing money away. Automate to free up time, use that free time to document the automation, rinse, repeat. The only downside is that this position is now going to require someone with more technical skill than it has historically had, and that costs a bit more money. The upside is that the quality of work being done is far higher, and the downstream effects are much more efficient, accurate, and productive processes and workers.
I've worked with people handling data and managing processes upstream and downstream of me to create a much more robust and unified system. I'm now working with them to do the same on the other side, and that's starting to create a web of pretty high quality work throughout the organization. Not what I was really hired to do, but management loves it. There are definitely some sticks in the mud who can't adapt to change, so for the moment, we're working around them. You insist on manually editing spreadsheets and leaving errors in them for someone else to correct? We'll write a script to identify the most common ones, and to create summaries which are likely to highlight the issues. That next person's job just got 90% automated.
I doubt I'll ever get to 100% not working, but I might hit 35% of my time monitoring and tweaking automation by the time I'm done.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
My recommendation is to be upfront, tell them right away, and request more responsibilities be assigned to your role (ie: take on more work.)
I'm speaking from personal experience, as I've been in this situation in several previous jobs. Among the job responsibilities would be one which was a manual task that could benefit from full or partial automation. In some cases it was easy, like the data entry described in the summary. Other times it was error-prone work, where partial automation didn't reduce the time so much as reducing the errors.
In all cases, I first confirmed with my employer that I could spend work time to do the automation (about 60% said yes). If they said no, I asked if I could use company resources (ie: my computer, the impacted server, etc) during non-work hours (eg: lunch hour) to do it. In only one case was the answer still no, and for that case there's nothing you can do - either do it manually or quit.
Once the task is automated, laud it as an accomplishment and ask for more work. I have yet to find a single employer who was unwilling to assign more work to a resource with a proven track record of getting things done. If it's a tech shop try to talk it into getting moved from QA or DevOps to dev (assuming you want to), or promoted from junior to intermediate. If it's a non-tech shop, you'll likely be asked what else you can automate. My only recommendation there is to talk to the people currently doing the tasks before you suggest you can automate them. The panicked look on the face of a lifer whose job I had proposed automating is one of my biggest regrets (it turned out OK in the end, they retrained him to manage warehouse staff.)
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
But now we can have it again with Russian trolls. lol
I've come up with more efficient ways to generate reports or to do work, but find while it helps improve your work to not be doing mundane tasks, your employer may find you don't have enough to do and fold your role into someone else. Most employers I've worked for though are good about recognizing your improvements and hand you more problems to tackle.
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.
Are you confusing paid employment with a hobby?
It sounds like you have this weird notion that work should be "fun" and that the more of it you do, the more fun you have. And that doing work is in itself sufficient motivation for doing more.
If I could free up my day by fulfilling my duties (more or less, I can't send a script to a meeting) then that permits me to engage in other, possibly more fulfilling things. Maybe even ones that my employer benefits from. But provided they are satisfied with the work-product they are paying me for, it is of little concern to them how it is produced.
While I have heard about people sub-contracting their tedious, repetitive, jobs to low-paid countries, that sort of activity contravenes most employers confidentiality conditions.
A further, more relevant question would be whether it is moral to automate someone else's job? If I was able to automate my work, then there is a good chance that the same automation could be applied to others in my team. Do I owe it to them to NOT do this. Should I be loyal to my colleagues or to my company?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The lazy programmer automates their job and does nothing. The indispensable programmer realizes that tasks are not the job, and finds ways to take on or manage multiple tasks that the employer may not even understand they need done until it's presented to them.
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?
If someone has found a better and more efficient way to do their job, they deserve a promotion, added responsibilities, better perks, and certainly a raise in pay.
I see two problems: First, some companies see their employees as cogs in a machine rather than capital contributors to the community. Second, some people see themselves as cogs in a machine rather than contributors to the common good.
If I found an employee leeching off the company, I'd give them a month to document what they did. I'd pay them double for that month, and sue them if they didn't do it. Either way, they would be looking for a new job.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I'm having a hard time with this, "automated my job" assertion, especially in QA.
If a product is being updated and improved, then the automation of the previous version is useless. A QA professional is needed to update the test suite and then do detailed manual tests and do some digging to identify a root causes for new issues..
If a product is NOT being updated and improved, then why have an automated QA process for it?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Simpsons quote.
... 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.
Just don't tell anyone or brag about it to your coworkers / management lest you run the same risk of being let go.
Sure they can keep you on so you can keep automating things, you just have to be ok with being the reason folks are getting laid off.
( Tip: They're definitely not paying you anywhere near the amount you're saving them )
I write small stuff for public use to help make the job more efficient. Those that can be utilized to replace people completely, I keep under wraps.
And I got promoted. And I got to automate more stuff. But being a project lead and pseudo-manager was boring so I quit. (pseudo-manager: I had 2 reports, but I split their review process with my boss)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I can see it both ways.
Companies don't automatically charge me less when they find cheaper ways to do things. If I'm selling a set of regular task completions to my employer for a salary, and I figure out how to complete those tasks faster, the employer is still getting what they bargained for.
...a couple of jobs ago.
I took a bunch of manually entered commands (mkdir, cp x y, etc.) and scripted the process. What would take 10-15 minutes manually (10-15 times per day) now took about 2 seconds. There weren't any negative repercussions and the tech lead had zero problems with what I did.
Of course, there were other tasks to be done so I didn't automate my entire job, but I was able to significantly reduce manual tasks and move onto other more important stuff.
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.
the way to do it would be to sell a license for application doing that task.
Automate your job and then work on other projects for yourself and the company, and learn new skills!
Well, it's smart of him to automate his job, but stupid of hit to rest on his laurels. I am manager I used to have said something along the lines of: "if you want a promotion, make your existing job seem effortless." He was in legal, but the point remains.
If I hired a guy who automated himself out of his job, great! Let's pay you more, and put you somewhere that costs us a bunch since we don't do it efficiently.
Now, maybe they fired him out of ethical concerns for pretending to work. That could be grounds for dismissal in my book, but I'd have to weigh the workplace politics he was facing vs. the benefit of having a good coder automate more of my business.
My buddy did this. He built a deadman switch. The company decided, without notice, to offshore the department. They gave him a pink slip and he walked away.
The automation code he made, on his own time, with his own resources, went away too.
The offshoring didn't work.
Consider that this happens without an ounce of guilt at the corporate level.
Consultants, vendors, big contractors. $500 military wrenches. Being invoiced a billable hour because someone left a voicemail.
We also do it to shuffle salaries around. If you're among our more powerful elite (politics, but also industrial, telecom, even entertainment/fashion) you're damn right your little brother has some kind of consulting job title and supposedly inhabits office#701B, in a building that only goes up to 6.
EG: "And the office on our left is where Ajit Pai currently works, for his six-figure salary." "Oh, does he live here in New York?" "Mr. Pai has never been to New York."
It's not something that's supposed occur in the tiny range of a pleb's influence, of course.
That said, it's also a personal issue, as in having an inwards perspective to consider, unaffected by the relative measuring sticks in the world around you. It will likely affect Who You Are, and not just in philosophical navel-gazing zen yoga ways. Filling a portion of your time doing something meaningful for society so that you feel like a human being. It could be as simple as wandering a golf course, collecting balls and giving them to people. Playing music in a park, painting shit on an orphanage wall - there isn't really a standardized measuring stick because, again, it's an internal condition, very susceptible to the nature-nuture build you ended up with.
Some people - and I expect this view to be particularly common amongst the overly-logical coder types and slashdotters - is that the company is paying for a job to be done. If the job is done is a week or an hour, it makes no difference to the customer (in this case, a company).
Others consider it to be a relationship. The company does its best for the employee, and the employee does its best for the customer. Morally, then, if the company doesn't need you to do that job any more, you should tell them. Likewise, the company has a moral obligation to ensure you have a new job. Companies like this do exist, I believe.
There's also a view that a job as a sort of sacrifice. You sacrifice certain hours. The company rewards you. A lot of managers in large companies see it this was as well, since there is little tangible relationship between effort and company success. This seems to be how most people see it on some level. Earning money for not doing anything feels like cheating.
That last view is what is tripping people up. We're wired to think this way. People will think this is cheating even if, logically, they can't really argue it is.
Software developers have been trying to automate themselves out of a job for decades, and the good ones fail every time. If he knew that his job was fully automated, then he could have looked towards the future, kept up to date on his skillsets, learned emerging practices in the industry, and made himself available to help continually improve other aspects of the business through further automation.
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.
I would immediately tell the boss what I had done as soon as it was working
Then, I would ask for another problem to solve, preferably a harder one
I would go bonkers if I was forced to sit at my desk all day, doing nothing
This isn't that odd of a concept when viewed through old school division of capital and labor, though with a new twist based on the technologies involved. The software that automates your work is effectively capital in and of itself, and the coder used their labor to create that capital. However, the company paid the labor wage without expecting the creation of that capital but instead just the laborer performing the job themselves. But the management is acting on the behalf of the company owners, the traditional capital holders, and thus want the control of the capital themselves as opposed to the supposed laborer keeping it to themselves. Many companies would expect the worker to remain in the position of a laborer with a wage rather than buying the end service from another effective tiny capital holder with their own little automated fiefdom.
I'm not going to go out and say how this all "should" work, but it does demonstrate that the barriers between labor and capital are much lower when you introduce automating software into the mix relative to traditional forms of capital like heavy industrial machinery or real estate.
To me, working for someone is also an unwritten, social contract. If there's something work-related that they'd like to know, I think it's obligatory to report it.
I am not a fire inspector at my job, but if I see something dangerous in the building, I'll report it, just as no one directly asked me to shoo a mosquito off his shoulder.
At my last job, my predecessor spent most of his time on menial work and running around like crazy putting out fires. I automated tbe menial stuff and put processes in place to PREVENT fires. That left me with lots of time on my hands to be much more productive than the last guy.
My bosses saw that I was productive, without too much supervision from them. That meant I could tell them how long a task would take do do - and do it right, without starting any fires. I continued to be productive without being stressed.
Automate the rubbish, and ask for specific work you actually find interesting to fill out your day. I don't mind putting in an honest 8 hours, but I do mind spending it on repetitive make work, and polishing documents up that will never be read by anyone ever again.
I wrote a script about Four score and seven years ago that posts on SLaShd0t in my place so I don't have to dissipate my time with you nobel prize imbecile hAx0Rz.
Nobody suspected a The Thing until today, proving grounds that my scripture is absolutely prefect.
#DeleteFacebook
"not light-emitting diode by executives"
You're not making any sense, man.
#DeleteFacebook
Anyone who has done sysadmin knows the drill on working at a new place:
1. Set up logging on all functions
2. Write log filters for normal operation and automatic responses
3. Respond to things that get through the filters
Sysadmins initially work like dogs until they get a first pass at steps 1 and 2 running - after that, it's routine maintenance and spurts of work for new functions.
System administration IS automating yourself out of work. Sysadmins don't get fired for doing it, often because management doesn't understand what they do.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I was once hired to replace a guy making $100K+ a year who quit because they were increasing his workload and he felt it was too much. Overwork happens in IT but when I was analyzing what he actually did, I don't see how he got away with it. He spent half the day receving previous day's orders from the database in one format, putting it into Excel, then converting into another format that the order system could handle. The rest of the day, he did nothing. Yet he complained about "more" work. For the first month when I did it manually it might take 2 hours tops with checking to make sure the orders were right.
The second month, I automated all of it with a stored procedure. It ran every morning and took five minutes. My bosses at first thought I was some sort of genius for automating a task until I showed them what I did. My coworkers (and his former coworkers) were more shocked that he worked so long at the company and did so little.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wally: What's this? (Holds up a piece of paper)
PHB: It's the new non-compete agreement everyone has to sign. By signing it, you agree not to do any work for a competitor for a year.
Wally: (signs it) Here you go.
Wally: (as he leaves PHB's office). I haven't done any work for this company in the last 5 years.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you're paid for your time, it's unethical.
if you're a 'contactor' you're paid to get the task completed.
This doesnâ(TM)t ring any ethical alarm bells for me. If someoneâ(TM)s paid to do a job, and their automation can do the job, then the employer is getting what theyâ(TM)ve paid for.
Hopefully, more *interesting* work.
I've done this several times. When the first bit of work is done I tell my boss. We verify the results, need to keep their interest in my skills up. Then I let them know the plan and ask for more that might benefit from my skills.
Did this as a software consultant (in QA support) as well. Lead spent two weeks trying to solve the issue, hired me, found my office, 45m later I entered his office and asked for the next task. "WHAT!" was essentially his reply. But I stayed around automating the hell out of the place.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
It's software, so it needs to be supported (we aren't talking about things like the notepad program on your home computer). Who better to support it than the person that wrote it? A rational employer would prefer you sit there and twiddle your thumbs until you are needed, rather than quit. Likewise, most managers would quickly get annoyed with you for bugging them constantly for more work to fill the days in between supporting what you have put in place, and creating more of it as the need arises (needs do change and new ones arise). I've flat out told people bringing me new things that I am not willing to take them on unless they can be automated. We aren't staffed for an ever expanding workload. For example, I don't get paid what I get paid so I can manually FTP data files everyday at 10 AM, or spend hours manually scrolling through log files for irregularities. And what would happen when I am out of office? Consuming my days with busy work just to ensure I don't have any downtime would be stupid and a disservice to my employer, especially when something comes up (and something always comes up eventually) that requires my full attention. If you have some free time, go train yourself on blockchain, or C#, or AWS, or Azure, or whatever else might make you a better guru when the need rises (if you are really bored, go document your code). It's not like IT requires only a purely static body of knowledge where things don't change.
they give me another task to take on. I'm surprised the same thing wouldn't happen at other places, especially software companies.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
There was an omission in the original article that I see continued here: why can't the "boss" tell that it has been automated, that the employee is not busy? I put "boss" in quotes because it's clear these people do not HAVE any boss at all, if there's nobody tracking their day closely enough to spot complete inactivity for months on end.
This actually raises a question of a second person not doing their own job: the boss clearly is not. A real boss understands the jobs below her well enough to take them over, if slowly and with documentation at hand. At the very least, they see their staff every day or nearly, ask them about specific issues at least once a week, sit down for a half-to-one-hour chat every month. If this is a professional enough staff position to be programming their work, they are not sweeping floors, they are doing complex "symbolic analysis" (i.e. screen work) that should require constant adjustment and correction to the corporate mission.
A good boss would have detected declining time spent on the original tasks, and slipstreamed in more work gradually, the drop to zero-hours would never have happened. NB: This increased work is the more usual phenomenon, resulting in the tragicomical loading of huge amounts of work onto a single position that is never given increased pay. They just eventually leave and get to forever tell the story of how it took 3 people to replace them. THAT'S a common story!
So the story should not have been about the undersupervised employees who have no responsibility to do their boss's job for them. The headline should be "Supervisors so clueless they don't know their employees have automated everything."
It's really interesting to me that the article writer and much of slashdot are not jumping on the "boss" thing - it suggests that supervision of IT staff is routinely this detached and clueless. Much depends on employees being willing, out of pride or whatever, to do more work for the same money, voluntarily. Which usually happens.
I'd say there are three types of work in today's modern society.
1. I'm paid x dollars to physically sit at desk y for z hours of the day, and take care of whatever is handed to me. As long as I'm physically there and do what's handed to me, mission accomplished. Some days are crazy full, and others are really quiet. On the quiet days, nothing is required of me except my presence. Nothing more necessary.
2. I'm paid x dollars to do y work. Call it piecemeal work, or the gig economy, or whatever. If I find a way to automate the task so that it takes me 5 seconds to run a script that does the work for me, my job is done. I just did it quickly. Nothing more necessary.
3. I'm paid a salary plus benefits, retirement, vacation and sick days. I'm expected to put in a full work week for the benefit of the company. There are expectations of professionalism. If I accomplish a task quickly and have spare time, it's not my own. I'm expected to ask for more until my plate is full.
I wasn't able to figure out all the details, but it seems like this guy was probably in category 3, but he behaved like he was in category 2. This disconnect is why he was fired. He did the job fine. Better then fine. Professionalism then demanded that he ask for (or just take on) more to help the company. He probably could have gotten away with splitting the difference. If he had programmed his way to 38 free hours per week, maybe he could have played Fortnite for 19 hours and spent the other 19 on other projects beneficial to the company. He'd probably still have his job if he'd done that.
Nobody gives raises or promotions. What do YOU get from telling them? They thank you and give you more work (if you don't milk them for months.) Do you get a promotion? A pay raise? No. They would give you more work; eventually you would automate and replace multiple jobs until you were busy or writing TPS reports all day for the people under you.
I just gave myself more work needing to be done they couldn't believe the amount of work I was getting done and then it became a political problem as I expanded my job outside what they wanted... and into the territory of other people. If you do this, you make enemies from everybody who fears you will automate or at least change the way they have done their job for years. Doesn't help that I got a shirt saying something along the lines "don't anger me or I'll replace you with a shell script" but it was the elephant in the room.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The only thing I can think of is that these people had a lack of drive. If you know that you can automate your job, and if other people share a similar job, then leave and become a contractor. As a contractor you can negotiate be paid based on results, then if you can take on the work of ten people, you can make up to ten times as much.
I am trying to build a General AI so I can download and automate myself out of work and life...
If it's boring and you hate it. automate. If it's boring and you hate it. automate. If it's boring and you hate it and you'd rather masturbate it. If it's boring and you hate it. automate.
... for programmers. Seriously. Automating repetitive tasks is what programming is all about. In fact, of I'm your lead and I catch you doing a task manually for the 5th or 10th time without having any sort of automation in place, you'll hear from me.
I'm doing full-stack web and my main job is to maintain a degraded flaky WordPress setup with 40+ plugins that is mission critical and mustn't go offline. Yeah, that sort of thing. It involves keeping track of plugin update states in an Excel sheet. This task is two weeks away from being fully automated with a set of scripts and the PHP-Office classes. No way am I doing this manually for longer than three weeks it takes to automate it.
The time I gain from automating I will of course use to dive deeper into new useful technology that may help us move the mess away from the setup and maybe get rid of half the plugins and replace them with well built templates, better configuration or something.
Bottom line: if you're a programmer and your not automating you're not doing your job.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Doing Nothing
Office Space ^^^
This has been one of the more enlightening articles with respect to the comments.. Most of them have been well thought out and detailed... albeit everyone is disagreeing with everyone else on what basically boils down to two points of view:
On one hand you have the folks who have a moral issue with a person figuring out a way to do their job without actually having to do their job. We'll call this... obscured productivity.
On the other hand you have the people who are okay with a person using their brain to do their job quicker and with more perfect results, but who are not forthcoming with their employer on how they are arriving at these results.
To the people who have an issue with automation it mostly seems that they have a problem with the fact that there is no "sweat equity". i.e. the person being paid for the work isn't actively burning calories to get the job done.
To me it appears that these people would be more "ok" with the programmer NOT automating his job, even though he has the skills to do so. i.e. he's under no obligation to make an invention. As long as he is plodding along doing his job manually it's more "honest". Somehow this is more moral for lack of a better term.
The automation way, according to the story, is more exact and produces far better results that are nearly error free.. i.e. it produces a much better result. The old manual way was more error prone and produced inferior results. But, it burns calories..
This is a tough one. On one hand, under the law in most places, the employer owns all the rights to that automated process since it was invented on the job. Thus, by automating the job the employee is potentially placing his own job at risk. The employer would have every legal right to terminate the employees employment as the job no longer exists.. it's been automated, after all. Even the most liberal states do not require employers to invent new jobs for surplus employees.
So, you have two situations... Do your job the manual and inferior way, even though you have the skill to deliver a better product but no legal obligation to do so, and you have some modicum of job security.. OR deliver the best possible product you can and potentially sabotage your own employment....
It's a pickle...
I've worked in many jobs over the years, and I've got to say, I've never ever had an employer tell me that inventing a new process, to vaporize my own position, was a job requirement.. All were simply happy when good results were produced.. But, one would be delusional if they even implied that the employer would not be in a better position, financially, if they were able to eliminate unnecessary costs. Redundant jobs, of course, being an unnecessary cost.
You're paid for results and for your thinking, and if you can make a program work for you then you can sell it as a software solution, sell a license or the product and aell support for it on the way, for fixing improving and customizing it for common needs.
No.. No you cannot. (caveat, speaking to US Law here). If you invent a process, while on the job, your employer owns that process. You cannot patent it, you cannot sell it, you cannot license it. Not legally. It is the intellectual property of your employer, unless you have a contract that specifies otherwise. The default is ownership belongs to them.
Before anyone even bothers... yes, in some cases the law requires that the invention be related to the job you are being paid for (inventing a water powered engine while being employed as a software programmer would probably keep your invention in your hands). Automating your job, certainly, would fall well within the scope of "related to".
I'm not commenting on the moral position of that situation.. Just the legal position.
In the strictest sense, when we are being paid a wage to do a job, the most moral position would be do do your job as quickly and efficiently as possible, without breaking any laws, safety regulations, or putting yourself in danger. i.e. doing it "efficiently". I'm not saying you have to kill yourself with stress.. You just don't.... fuck off... while on the clock.
But, we all do it.. You go to the water cooler, and while there you talk to "Jim" for a minute.. You're not there for hours... Just a minute or two.. Technically.. you're fucking off on the job. We understand these short breaks.. They help with stress, they keep us sane.. But.. there's a line.. What is it? I honestly don't know. The law mandates two 15 minute breaks and one half hour break per 8 hour shift (I think this is federal, but I'm not positive. It's the case here in California at least). The other breaks tend to be informal and sprinkled here and there.. But what's the line? At what point does those minor breaks become unethical? 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 6 hours?
I have no opinion on it that I can formally define.. As an occasional employer, it's kinda like obscenity. I can't define what fucking-off is, precisely... But I know it when I see it.
Just food for thought.
Labor doesn't owe Management anything.
Really? You don't think you owe them an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, at the very least?
Would the reverse be true? Would your statement have symmetry?
Does Management owe Labor anything?
I am actually interested in your reply, if you'd care to.
I'm of the opinion that if Management owes Labor wages for work performed, then Labor owes Management work for wages paid. It's a symbiotic relationship, to a certain degree.
People are talking about data entry. Data entry is not coding.
This is non existent problem
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I worked in a group managing well over 1000 Unix (mostly Sun) workstations and a couple of dozen large servers. our days consisted primarily of user "whack-a-mole" operations, fixing stupid user errors, shutting down rogue users and managing break-fix. We (all 4 of us) were constantly exhausted working 60 hour weeks and management refused to hire any additional headcount. We got together and decided to automate the management of all the systems. We locked down all the workstations and made them rootless, booting over NFS. We then added scripts automating the build and rebuild of individual and groups of systems. When done, we'd reduced out workload by 50%. The result of all this hard work was our management trumpeting that we had just been lazy before and we actually needed fewer, not more headcount. I left, leaving the other 3 to fend for themselves. When last seen, there was a single guy working 60+ hours a week. Some things never change.
Organization? You must be joking..
I worked as a developer for a large Wall St brokerage firm. Production support was required and rotated among a small staff of about 3 people. That meant showing up before 7am with a beeper and having to manually fix issues with several hundred unix machines that were used by stock traders and their staff.
A typical morning would generate between 30-70 beeper alerts. (With non-reliable delivery with no notification of failure.) I rewrote the production scripts (written in csh -- OMG no functions how could they be so stupid) in Bourne shell (sh using a function to parse a user's .cshrc file to get the important variables). Within one week and some small changes to cron start times and retry methods, The alerts dropped to 10-20 each morning.
During the next month, more scripts were replaced with sh, beeper alerts were logged to a production support log (so alerts sent while one was in a subway were available to staff upon their sitting at a desk at work -- instead of waiting calls from mad traders saying their system didn't work...) And the number of alerts dropped to less than 8 each morning.
I told my manager that I could continue the automation but he said NO. Well, I figured out the causes of the system that triggered the alerts; then communicated that to the same manager. He said no to any changes. So, I wrote a parser of the alert log that created a "fix.sh" file that was not executed. When I showed up a 7:00 am with a large coffee and 2 newspapers (NYT and WSJ) -- I would copy the scripts content and paste into my terminal's command line (thereby satisfying the requirement to not automate the well-documented gaps in production code and scripts). Verify, the results and then sip and read until my upidstay anagermay said it was OK to get to my real job of being a developer.
Well, time goes on and I improve code quality while implementing new required functionality. While working on a testing a new release in \to production on a Saturday afternoon, I was told that the sick day that I took to have an elective in-office surgery (to remove a ganglionic cyst) woul not be allowed since I wasn't actually sick. I stopped typing, turned to him and said something akin to "are you serious? I am giving you my Saturday, this isn't the first time. And you're telling me that you won't give me the time to have a medical procedure done? Really?"
My sick day was not covered. I was fired for unspecified reasons. ("At Will" contracts say that a person can be terminated for any or no reason.)
Turned out that my next job was with intelligent ethical people that launched my career to the next level or two.
It's part of every job. If the employee is covering it up and pretending to be doing it by hand, he or she is dishonest and deserves to be fired. On the other hand, the managers that go years without noticing probably also deserve to be fired.
For the record, automation is cool and deserves advancement, if it is done with full disclosure.
People put rocks on sale for $500 and other people buy them. If you can convince somebody to pay you a monthly salary to write a single script for them, go for it, buyer beware.
I think is smart automate, but you always can do new things. To be lazy in our job is the worst for you and your enviroment.
it's my job to automate my job.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
that looked and acted just like me, I sent it to me job and go on permanent vacation instead. Would that be ok?
I.e., who shall reap the benefits of automation? The population at large or the owners of companies?
I think soon, automation and our current economic and political system won't fit together anymore.
I automate parts of my job all the time.
The key is not to lie about it, but advertise it. There is ALWAYS more work. Besides, typically the work you are automating isn't the kind of stuff you really want to be doing anyway (hence the automation). Besides, even if you automate the work, they'll still need you there to occasionally be able to update or adjust it due to business need or fix it should it ever break.
Like the example I recently did this to a chunk of work that got dumped on me due to reorg/transition. The last guy would take several solid weeks to do it manually, and he's done it for years and knew what he was doing. I took one look at it and was like no way am I doing that. It would have taken me a couple months. While it took a considerable amount of work (a heck of a lot more than I had originally though when I first started of course), I can now do the same thing in about 2 minutes of processing time. In addition while testing I found all sorts of previous errors due to the manual process, as no matter how knowledgeable and careful the other guy was, it is gonna happen. For me I did it because I didn't really have the time to do it manually along with the rest of my duties, nor did I really have the inclination to do that sort of manual drudgery. However I was up front with my manager in saying that it is going to take me longer to do this because I intend on automating the whole thing so I can do it in minutes rather than weeks after I am done.
Part of it involved reverse engineering some export data from another system no one really understands, which I will now be able to leverage that code I did for a couple other future projects for other systems which would also like to consume that data in a more automated fashion. (When I started this whole mess, my first bit of advice to management was to alter the existing system to make it do what the business wants, however it's from the 70's, no one knows how it does what it does anymore, it simply works, so no one wants to touch it with a 10ft pole for fear of having to replace it)
That said, this wasn't a systems project for me. This was me creating a tool for myself to make my life easier. So while I am somewhat proud of some of the elegant ways I put it together, it also has a number of embarrassing kludges that just work. I wouldn't call it a house of cards, but if it ever does break or need to be altered, there is no documentation, I would be the only one that understands how it works, so I'd have to be the one to fix it should it ever need it. I didn't do that on purpose, its as I said this wasn't my job to create a system, this was a tool I made for myself to address a need. So should someone else ever have to deal with it, they can either try and figure out wtf I did, or they can build their own and I wouldn't feel too bad about that.
It's simple- I get hired to do X or produce Y, and as long as those things happen, everyone is satisfied.
If I automate some or all of the process, so what? Those things (doing X or producing Y) are still getting done. My employer is happy, I'm happy, my bank account is happy.
Someone please point out the "problem" here, because I really can't see it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...