Many years ago, one of the secretaries was on holiday and the big boss asked me to write a program that, unbeknownst to me at the time, completely automated her job away. When she came back she came to me in tears, couldn't believe I had stabbed her in the back like that. Well this story has a happy ending, the boss did it so he could promote her, he just thought it would be a nice surprise! But ever since then I have been very conscious of the power we have and I try to work on new things, not merely automating away old ones. I make the exception obviously for using automation to bring work back in-house that had previously been outsourced or offshored. Those jobs are already destroyed, and automation always improves the quality and turnaround.
Coders Automating Their Own Job
61–70 of 499 posts
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#62How do I find a job I can automate away?
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#63I'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 productivit…
Come to SRE. We are seriously expected to fully automate our job away twice a decade and still manage to just keep growing.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#64It 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.
Exactly. I wonder how their bosses don't realise that these tasks can be automated.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, what's in your automation toolbox?
I usually write scripts in Python or Bash, depending on the task. I've had a fair amount of success using a cron for scheduling, but I've come to really enjoy using Jenkins for automated tasks. A lot of tasks make sense to trigger off of events other than the time and Jenkins is quite flexible in that regard.
Some kinds of automation only create more work. Looking at you, Chef.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#66It 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.
Development jobs are shifting as more and more towards "plugging APIs together" and much less end to end development. Modern web dev is fantastically more productive and efficient than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Most/many SAAS apps are substitutes for aspects of what previously would have been part of a developers job to put into place.
Some. Some development jobs. We sometimes forget that the world of development isn't just the WWW.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#67> Wary self-automators, he speculates, “don’t trust our workplaces. The boss is going to say thank you, good work, now do it again.” Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things. There are an INFINITE number of useful things we need to do as a society, so we shouldn't be upset if we automate one of them away. Move on to the next. Of course, programmers should make sure they negot…
> Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things.
It is not necessarily an easy path, it takes time, and there's going to be trial and error involved and although the discussion is about automating 100% of a job away, there's many other possible outcomes such as effort-multiplication, getting rid of the grunt work and gaining more time to focus on deeper problems.
This is effectively "out-of-band" work that is a great experience for the individual but which _many_ organizations do not condone. A LOT of workplaces don't tolerate workers doing stuff that they're not being "told" to do.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#68How do I find a job I can automate away?
look for excel heavy data entry jobs
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#69It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#70"There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first."
This was a pretty good article until the conclusion. It's like he's totally unaware that all the information is already shared. I guess it could be a weird plea for some sort of blockchain union or something. Homie should just google "task automation github".