71–80 of 499 posts
If you create something that generates continuous value for your employer, you should share in that.
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Hopping or starting a company to sell your work are becoming the fastest ways to get "promoted."
I was going to suggest this from my experience. I hate to burst GP's bubble, but the attitude and environment at his next job probably won't be any better in regard to "best practices." It's extremely difficult to gauge how your attitude toward development compares with a prospective team's after an hour of chatting. I became a manager last year and quickly discovered that changing others' behavior and habits is next…
> 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…
I'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…
And it is only not fair to the peers whose work cannot be automated, and as someone here said, it's a temporary privilege to be working in programming, we're in a different world, higher pay, more learning opportunities, more leverage than other jobs. But, nothing lasts forever. We're going to be automated away eventually.
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Which by definition is impossible... Once two different traders discover how to 'perfectly' trade, the game changes and as they say 'here we go again'
I disagree, the solution to remove stock market traders is to figure out a way to examine financial data and projections to such a fine degree that stock trading is no longer a sensible thing. Imagine a currency trader focused on USD & CAD, what would happen to their job if Canada decided to permanently pin their currency on the USD with a guaranteed exchange of .5 USD for 1 CAD, the markets surrounding arbitraging t…
- currency is very different from equities - while one could argue that a central bank deciding to peg it's currency to $ is a realistic scenario, it simply doesn't make sense for equities (an equity is basically a right for present and future earnings of a company - good luck 'perfectly' predicting that !)
- as you note, there would still be speculators, since there is always uncertainty. There are numerous examples of countries pegging their currencies and then when unexpected happens...
- traders / sales would still compete for order flow of the clients (and get the cut), so there would still be a game to be played albeit for smaller margins
It 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.
If you think about it, the existence of programming languages and compilers is due to programmers automating their jobs away. They no longer had to tediously translate higher level algorithms to machine code. And really, the existence of computers is the result of automating the job of human computers away. The entire history of computer science is this. The difference is that these guys hit a local maxima, and just…
CS encompasses way more than automation. Graph theory, ADTs, complexity analysis (just by way of example) are all very relevant, even if the computation is done manually, by hand.
A lot of computer science presumes a very abstract computer; a human and a modern machine apply equally well.
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>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. Careful, if it gets out that you wrote the code to automate your job as a coder while actually at your job, your company most likely owns that IP.
I am still in academics so I have a question about this. If your company owns this is, what shouldn't they be rewarding you generously for making it? They are making money out of your extra effort/work. I get that employees who want their own ip should have the right but if the company is paying you extra and giving other rewards and removing the headache of managing your own company, is that not good?
Yes, in theory. In practice, an employee's power to negotiate wages is limited. At some point, the employee just needs to work to eat/pay rent/etc.
Now, in most areas (of the US), software developers already are paid generously. Even in lower paying secondary markets, software dev are usually paid significantly above local averages.
And, anecdotally, that pay is often for a much "easier" job, where "easier" means less stress and fewer hours than professions that generate similar salaries (engineering, accounting come to mind).
> 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…
Yeah, but that person still has to feed and house their family. And in some areas there are "plenty of companies", but not in all.
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 hav…