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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.
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.
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
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.
Well, the employer is paying you to get a job done.
You are fulfilling doing that job, they didn't say you had to sweat over it or spend grueling hours doing it...they just want the results.
I'm guessing this is a W2 gig, so they are paying you salary for doing a job and producing the results.
Now...you are doing that.
There's nothing wrong with doing 'nothing', or maybe doing other activities you are interested in (assuming you are working from home)...or, if you are so inclined, maybe do some extra work during the day, and earn some extra money.
But you are not cheating...you are giving them the return other money, and if you can do that and still have "YOU" time to do relaxing things, fun things, or even make more money on the side, there's nothing wrong with that.
Your automation has given you your time back to do with as you see fit....while still meeting your obligations.
Better than sweating your ass off outside in the summer digging a ditch....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
There's an opposite end to the spectrum. For every driven, highly motivated type, that wants to work 60+ hours a week and is always looking for new things to busy themselves with once they get existing ones under control, there's someone who really just wants to do nothing, or as close to it as possible. Maybe there are some who fall into that soul-crushing pit and just become accustomed to it, but I think there are a few people who are just wired that way to begin with.
Like anything, most people fall into the middle. I can't really understand anyone at either extreme. I mean that I've done some 60+ hour weeks, and there have been weeks where I've done practically nothing as well, but they're not the norm and I can't understand how anyone would want either of those to be the norm, but I suspect that they'd just look at me in turn and wonder how the hell anyone can want things they way I like them.
Problem is that is a massive disincentive to make your job more efficient. If the result of automating your job is to be punished with redundancy, you are better off not automating.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nope.
The employer pays you X amount of money to receive Y amount of value in return.
If you're providing Y amount of value then you're doing the job correctly, it's nothing to do with "time" or "results" or how you achieve it.
(...and what are they going to do, fire you for automating the job and keep all the people who are still doing it manually?)
No sig today...
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.
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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!
... 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.
I think that is the very essense of the controversy. I am hired for my time. Some people are hired for results. I look around my office and .. there really are both kinds of people here. The results people are goofing off a lot more than me a lot of the time, but they're also the people who sometimes have to work late when I get to go home. We'd have to be having some kind of emergency for me to work late, and it's very rare. It's been many years since I put in a week with over 40 hours.
It really does depend. But there is one glaring, easy clue staring everyone in the face. I'm paid hourly. The results people are paid salary. Maybe that really is all it comes down to.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Companies don't pay you for results, they pay you because your effort is worth more to them then what they are paying you for.
Bwahaha. So nobody ever gets fired for bad results?
This just sounds like the company wanting it both ways, wanting the results *and* the employee to somehow be toiling for them, as if his labor misery was a product unto itself.
As a thought experiment, imagine a company hires an employee to fill a job. By some kind of magic, the employee can do their job without any actual effort exerted -- the mere presence of the employee causes the work to get done even though the employee seems to perform no actual labor, they just need to be present. Does the company fire the employee because they don't "work"?
I can't escape the idea that SO MANY respondents in this thread have some weird, Calvinistic idea about jobs needing to require some labor misery associated with them in order for the employee's "work" status to be justified.
If some super genius takes a job and can do the job they are assigned with far less effort than the typical employee for that job, why punish them? I mean, maybe promote them or try to give them a bigger job to gain more benefit from their genius, anything else just seems to be punishing them for not being as slow and ineffective as the average employee.
The contract is for your time, not results.
Pretty much the definition of "professional" is the opposite. More practically, if they're paying me for my time, then obviously I'm paid hourly. I'm I'm not paid hourly, then obviously they're paying me for results, not my time. What could be more clear?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Because automating your job means that the job no longer exists? I have had many bosses. The best of them would do as you say (I hope), the rest would have just "let me go." I can't eat praise.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math