Coders Automating Their Own Job
theatlantic.com
Coders Automating Their Own Job
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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#2I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought.
We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements.
This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspects of our current job. Build systems, pipelines, workflows, etc.
It's nice to kid ourselves and think of it as work intended to improve productivity but from a company's point of view the value is decreasing overhead and cost which comes in the form needing 1 person to do the work instead of 10.
Cross your fingers that you're the 1 and not one of the 9 :).
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#3Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain.
Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#4If you're coding for a non-technical business, i.e. one in which they're not directly selling your productive output, then it's not hard at all to get to a point where your daily tasks don't take more than a few minutes a day. After all, it's other people that are actually driving the revenue. You can ask for more duties, but their capacity to define tasks for you is never going to outpace your ability to deliver.
My advice is to not fight this state of affairs. Figure out your own way to stay productive. Divide up your spare time between coming up with ideas for your employer and doing side projects. Take long lunches with your coworkers and leave at 4.
You can find happy professional nirvana but you have to believe in it first.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#5As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into nothing...
In practise, achieving some sort of "steady state" or status-quo doesn't work for a few reasons:
1. Inherent system complexity ensures something always breaks. Human attention is always needed.
2. Markets evolve rapidly due to technology changes, regulatory changes and the very nature of markets: Strategies and ideas that worked in the past cease to work in the future.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#6The employer is paying you for the product, not the effort. I see no moral quandary here, nor any compulsion to notify the employer. They're getting what they want, that should be the end of it.
EDIT: And I would add, for anyone that has automated their job in this way...what you should really be doing is scaling it up, and finding other companies who are probably paying employees to do the same thing. Then start your own company that does whatever this task is as a service.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#7I've automated large chunks of my job away, but I've never felt that I ended up not having things left to do as a result. There are always more tasks to automate and more problems to solve.
I get the impression from these stories that the dishonest part of what the self-automaters are doing is that they could do other tasks and use automation to increase their productivity, but instead chose to keep their productivity the same and relax with the extra downtime.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#8It should be noted that programmers are not automating themselves out of programming jobs. They're automating themselves out of data entry, or testing, or any number of other mindless tasks easily done by computers.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#9Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain. Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#10The employer is paying you for the product, not the effort. I see no moral quandary here, nor any compulsion to notify the employer. They're getting what they want, that should be the end of it. EDIT: And I would add, for anyone that has automated their job in this way...what you should really be doing is scaling it up, and finding other companies who are probably paying employees to do the same thing. Then start you…
Maybe we both have loose morals but I don't see it as cheating the employer anymore than one "cheats" an employer by driving to work instead of walking.