The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (theatlantic.com) 415
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.
Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is after you automate the task, you are no longer the one producing the results. The computer is.
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.
The guy automated a task, he got paid for his work to automate that task. But being he wasn't doing anything after that, his contributions had ended.
I have my code and my effort in place all around the world, helping other make a lot more money then Ill ever make. But they paid me for my effort, and I moved on.
I am not the one generating millions of dollars, it is the computer running the code that took me a few minutes-few months to create, is actually doing the work. I got paid for my work.
No for me to survive. I work on other projects. Because my net worth should be less then the total of my contribution.
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's a victory that you get to brag about, not a punishment. You beat the game and get to advance to the next whatever.
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The guy automated a task, he got paid for his work to automate that task.
So did they hire him to get the work done or to automate the task of getting the work done?
It sounds like they wanted him to do the work. He looked at the job, looked at the previously available tools to do the job, and made better ones. The agreement is still in place for them to give him money while he's giving them the end product they asked for.
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Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Bad results means your output is profiting the company less then what they pay you.
If you can automate a job, you did a good thing to the company... However you will not and shouldn't expected to be rewarded all the time for your past success.
A company doesn't need the person toiling for them, they are good with efficiencies. However if you don't need to do that job, then you should move to the next one.
WORK ISN'T MISORY. But to work and keep a job. You need to work for your job. Work and doing your fair s
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Why shouldn't you expect to be rewarded all the time from automation? The company pays you to do X. If you weren't able to automate X, you would still be doing X. It is your work doing the work (lol), you should receive the benefits of the results. Fairness is a concept used to exploit the naive.
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The thing is after you automate the task, you are no longer the one producing the results. The computer is.
Software is horribly under-valued, that doesn't negate the value of it. Realistically all automation, whether done at a personal or b2b level, should be SaaS (and for that matter, taxed at 50% of whatever the job it automated was paid adjusted for inflation over time to pay out a UBI so we don't all fuck ourselves sideways with automation.)
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The task may be automated, but one still needs to monitor the automation. There's no completely unmonitored automatic system out t
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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.
<snip>
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....
I think your premise is wrong. If you take too long to perform a task (for most jobs) your employer doesn't demand you give money back. If your task takes you an hour you're paid for an hour. If that same task takes you two hours, you're paid for two hours. That's considered a cost of doing business.
There's an agreement, generally implicit, between you and your employer: you put in effort, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional, for a time and you get paid for it, and in return you get paid for yo
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Supervisors overload, employees featherbed. This is the way of the world.
Sorry, no, employers 'get what they manage for'. If all they want is the job done for a _salary_, then all they get is the job done.
That's a defect in management. Should recognize good employees autonomy and use better metrics.
A technically clueless manager is both a problem and an opportunity For every task you can automate and sleepwalk through, there will be problem caused by the moron. The trick with a clueless manager is ge
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This is not the case if you are a normal W2 employee, which is salary. You are NOT paid by the hour...you are expected to be at their disposal doing their work for 40 hours a week.
So, you are not getting paid
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?)
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No they'll get you to document it first, so others can 'run' it, then fire you once you're no longer needed to run the process, probably under the guise of not telling them earlier, or your position is now 'redundant' *suprise!*
Don't tell them, you're under no obligation to (yet) and you need to check your contract. If you have to do it how they say, then you can't automate (and shouldn't be doing it, as it could be grounds for dismissal!). If the contract is stupid enough not to say anything about or reg
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Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Employment literally assumes a certain amount of time worked per week; by not working even a small fraction of that time, a person is clearly violating good faith.
And here you are posting on Slashdot during working hours. Bad, worker bee, bad!
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Well, this really doesn't apply at all to regular W2 work.
If you are working 1099...depends on the contract, is if fixed price, etc?
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not doing nothing. I have my system on autopilot and spend my time doing something I'd rather do instead. I agree, doing nothing is really the worst way to spend your time.
Second worst, though, is doing some mindless work.
Better is of course doing what you want to do.
And best is doing what you want to do and getting paid for the time you spend doing it.
I leave it to the reader to determine what the merit of automating away a mindless job is, and what the potential benefit is if you don't report it.
Re:Why would you want to do nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Doing nothing is not nothing! (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Doing nothing is not nothing! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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All software is automating someone else's job.
Incorrect. Real-time software creates new functions that no person could perform. One could say the same about web hosting and content delivery. As well as AI.
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All software is automating someone else's job.
Grand Theft Auto?
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Jobs are 'owned' by the people paying, not the people doing.
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The big mistake was not taking that time to keep current with tech and letting his skills deteriorate. I can't think of a place where you couldn't sit and look at the environment and see where things could be improved, but this guy just basically coasted those years. He automated hos own job.. ok.. how about helping automate someone else's also? Use this as a jumping point into toolchain automation or architecture positions.
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I can't think of a place where you couldn't sit and look at the environment and see where things could be improved
That's all well and good when you have the ability to do something about them. The problem usually is that you don't have unlimited rights/authority to just fix random stuff. It also supposes you know enough about the (tech, business process, etc) to do something constructive about them.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw some obviously broken technology/process and said "shit, just do it this way" and then once I dove in realized there was way more going on and that the broken way was some kind of
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I think this is a backwards way of looking at it.
If I create a tool, on my own time, then they are paying for the use of that tool. When I leave the company, so does the tool. The company should be aware that's what they are paying for. No different than hiring a general labourer with a shovel vs hiring one with a backhoe. Each has their function, and if the business is not the one providing the tools, then they have no claim to them or the performance gains they provide.
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"Ultimately, doing nothing is crushing to the human spirit. Why would you want to do that?"
The summary mentions he was "working" from home so he probably wasn't "doing nothing". He was probably doing whatever else he wanted to do with his life.
I'm undecided on the morality of this but having most of every single day to do what you want sounds like a dream to me although i did get to enjoy it for a 5 month unemployed period that I could afford
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No, they don't care, and if they can inflict that upon someone else to boost their own wealth by an amount that barely impacts their
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Well, being able to automate your job usually means your job wasn't that hard and you could easily get better pay in a different job. So the choice may be doing nothing with lower pay or doing something slightly more interesting with more pay. Also remember that the job doing nothing won't last forever. Eventualy you get laid off or the job otherwise goes away; then in the next interview you will be asked "so what have you been doing recently?"
I did have one job where for a period I had very few activiti
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Mordac, "Preventer of Information Services" is posting on /.
Tables turned (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's actually an argument that resonates very well with me.
So far I thought "Well, yeah the employer does get what they want but you doing nothing for the money was not the intention behind the contract."
However, you put it very well. Which brings me to another thought: B2B works similar as well. The customer doesn't get to ask for his money back just because the other business provided the service or product with less effort than the customer had previously assumed necessary. In fact, every MBA will cong
Re:Tables turned (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither entity is owed anything. If I code myself out of a job, I don't have a job? Most 'auto-automation' still needs occasional tweaks eg when the process changes. So you're sitting there as an assurance/insurance that you can still do the job manually if necessary.
It's like saying: "police and firemen spend 80% of their time in the station, in a car or in coffee shops, let's fire 80% of them" which is a legitimate argument to make but it's also a bad argument to make when you need to hire police and firemen on the spot.
As an employer, I would rather have someone on hand that knows how to automate their own job than someone that simply goes through the motions of a factory worker every day. I know that the first can handle things if something changes as for the latter they'd have a huge productivity problem when it does.
If your employer doesn't KNOW that things can be automated, then that is a management problem, hire the guy that did the automation as a manager - but if you have an entire layer of middle-management to feed, THEY don't want to be out of a job either and most likely THEY are the ones that are holding back your company.
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If I code myself out of a job, I don't have a job?
If you automate your job to the point that what you had been hired for is no longer needed, then your job no longer exists. There may be a different job of tending to the automation, but that one has different job requirements and is not the one you were hired for.
As an employer, I would rather have someone on hand that knows how to automate their own job than someone that simply goes through the motions of a factory worker every day.
So would I, but that's not what this thread is about. It is about someone automating her job then doing nothing. As an employer, I'd want to find that employee another job where she can be productive (maybe automate another job) and not just si
Re:Tables turned (Score:5, Insightful)
You understand that most managers would just dump on more work and leave pay the same, perhaps with some vague promises they will never keep.
Employees, seeing that, will than act in their own self interest. Why would I work to increase a managers bonus when there is _nothing_but_more_work_ in it for me?
It's not unlike a manager that fires someone, no notice, no pay in lieu. They should expect to never get notice from employees, unless it's convenient for the employee.
This all comes down to: 'If you want more money, the best way is to change jobs.' I didn't set that up, just observed it. 'They' can't blame anyone for working the system 'they' setup.
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Victim?
Managers get what they manage for.
If a manager just wants results and that's what they get, they are no more victims than a manager that rewards high LOC/day programmers.
It's usually much harder to make an automated process truly bulletproof, vs having to monitor. So I'd assume a daily exception check at least.
In that situation, I'd be studying for a better job with 100% of my spare time. But that's because the situation described implies intolerably clueless management, not because I'd feel
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The problem with that logic is that when the process changes and the automation breaks, now you're not going to have the employee around to quickly update the automation. Someone else is going to have to figure out how the automation works, or they'll have to go back to the manual process. Either way, you probably lost more in productivity gains than it would have taken to pay that person's salary.
When you get someone who's smart enough to automate themselves out of a job, firing them is the wrong move. Ins
Is the work getting done? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the work's getting done then you're doing the job you were hired for.
The mechanism doesn't matter.
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If the employer receives that value that you're being paid to provide then he should have no complaints.
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Y E S
Y E S
Y...hey look, I can just press Y. I tripled my productivity!
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Somebody's gotta push the button.
Yes, but that somebody does not need to be a high paid programmer.
I did this to myself a long time ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I did this to myself a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I did this to myself a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Him being fired for not telling management about automating the process sounds like not telling management was the smarter of the options. It is clear he worked for PHB of Dilbert Fame. He was fired after a week of automating the process, which means he wasn't really hiding it either.
Proper management would have called him in, said their peace, and offered to let him automate as much as he could, and to keep management informed. You don't fire people for not telling someone. You fire them for gross misconduct.
If you're in management, your job is to maximize the efficiencies of your workplace. If I were management, I would have looked at that as the gift horse it was. Find good people, and make their work meaningful and reward them for a job well done. This kind of Ticky-Tack bullshit is why most management is set up for failure.
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Re:I did this to myself a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
That assumes companies are rational. There's a saying: "Dilbert is a documentary, not a cartoon." Many managers treat their group as a fiefdom and want it to grow in importance and staff. If automation makes their group look trivial, they may invent reasons to fire or move the "perpetrator". You have to view it from the manager's position in the organization, not from overall balance sheets. The overall balance sheet may have little impact on a manager's standing in the org.
That being said, I've seen multiple organizations where their reporting and searching/querying systems are a combinatorial mess. With better built query-by-example forms, refactoring, and export to Excel (CSV) options; one can often simplify many of those and reduce the number of screens and reports to roughly 30% of the original count. (You do have to know the org fairly well to do it properly.)
Such combinatorial redundancy is a mistake programmers keep making for some reason. I don't know if it's an intentional job-security game, or they don't know any better because they never have seen it done right.
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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.
Of course the flip side is that there's no guarantee that things will stay automated.
As the environment changes around the tasks, changes will be needed to the automation. Who knows how to do that? Oops, they had let you go.
I've done it but made sure it was known (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah, but that means you have to work ..
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Job security? They should add in a speed-up loop! (Score:2)
An oldie, but a goodie.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop [thedailywtf.com]
Automation is a force multiplier (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Take them to the cleaners (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Yes, this behavior is unethical. (Score:5, Funny)
works until it doesn't (Score:2)
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 definitely get it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
fired wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Expand your responsibilities (Score:3)
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.)
Efficiency Gains are a Double-Edged Sword (Score:2)
Re:Efficiency Gains are a Double-Edged Sword (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I have been told to slow down by my cow orkers (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
More work for the same money is definitely a risk of not pacing yourself. People need to make sure they are getting at least some long term benefit for this from their company or it's not worth it. Getting sentenced to surf /. and reddit though -- that's just cruel.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Adding a dead-man's switch in your code is a good way to get yourself sued. It has happened before, and you're just looking for a world of hurt if you do it.
Now, being sloppy and using your home directory as a temporary extract location as part of a deep and complicated routine, because you needed a quick way to debug it? And your well-commented debug script looks there for data? There's a reason they let you go, and it was quite possibly stuff like that.
Re: (Score:2)
A day's work for a day's pay. (Score:3)
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.
Obligatory... (Score:2, Funny)
Simpsons quote [imgur.com].
I did that ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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.
Automate as you will (Score:3)
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.
I automated a bunch of stuff (Score:3)
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)
Meh (Score:3)
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.
Continuous Automation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The old joke ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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.
next time license the code (Score:2)
Why do nothing? (Score:2)
commentsubject (Score:2)
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
I have little sympathy for him (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Oh yeah, sure. Let's learn 10 new languages, 20 frameworks and 30 productivity-enhancing techniques every year and become an expert in every single one of them.
Experience tells you that 99% of the crap being released are only fads and to stop wasting time trying to be "pro-active". If you're lucky you'll pick the right one before the others, otherwise you just wait and see before wasting your time and memory on useless crap.
If it was me (Score:2)
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
New face to an old issue (Score:2)
Mosquito (Score:2)
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.
This was my experience. (Score:3)
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.
Lack of drive (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
But now we can have it again with Russian trolls. lol
No Job is Static (Score:2)
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?
Re: Fight Club (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Fight Club (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I automated away running around putting out fires (Score:3)
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 str
Re: (Score:2)
The questions are: If the job can be automated, why did nobody else know that, why do his managers not understand that, could *anyone* have done that (not everyone writes code), is that code part of the business or not (I know not all employers have IP-assignment, and usually not if you're not hired as a techy/coding/ideas person) - because otherwise you would have to compensate for that tool, no?
But my question as an employer would be: Fabulous! Thanks! How much can I pay you to licence that tool?