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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...
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.
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()
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.