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Coders Automating Their Own Job

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#161

Post by lwhi »

peteforde wrote: post #119

You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you didn't write it? This does a better job than I could have of tieing together a dozen threads of conversation that I've had with various friends for years. I actually believe that there's a culture war implied in this debate; the question of who deserves to reap the gains of automation is more than just philosophy or ethics. The question "is t…

When most people or organisations are purchasing a service, they're usually mainly concerned about the value that service will bring them.

The amount of effort required to produce that value, helps to dictate market conditions and the amount of competition; aside from this, ultimately I don't think effort matters so much when you consider it in terms of B2B transactions.

Eventually, if a service is easy to supply—competition will drive down the price—and the economic system will readjust accordingly.

--

Strangely, it's only when you consider an individual in permanent employment that automation seems to present itself as a dilemma.

There's definitely a lot being said about automation. We're regularly told via news outlets that a large percentage of the populations' jobs will be replaced by robots.

But aside from the idea of universal basic income; I believe there's a more general trend towards working independently, i.e. in a freelance capacity.

Maybe automation becomes far less of a dilemma when this is this case?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#162

Post by bradknowles »

derefr wrote: post #144

One perspective I haven't seen here yet: these employers are willing to pay an entire person-salary to get this task done. Therefore, if there was a SaaS service that did the same task, the company should be willing to pay a person-salary worth of money for that SaaS product. So why not build the automation in your free time, knock out a little website with a Stripe subscription form to sell it, convince your boss to…

No business would be willing to pay that.

Once you've shown them that the job can be done easier/faster/cheaper, they will insist on that as the new standard.

Rinse and repeat until you are penniless and they have all the money.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#163

Post by 6nf »

cortesoft wrote: post #30

> 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 told this story a few times and I always get surprisingly diverse reactions to it, especially on Reddit.

Back in the late 90s I worked at a place that sold all kinds of automotive parts. Everything from nuts and spark plugs to turbochargers and large assemblies. The secret sauce of this company was a small team of people who worked through thick supplier (paper) catalogs and figured out which parts from different suppliers are in fact interchangable by comparing their specifications. This all went into the database for the sales team's use.

Well one younger guy in this team worked out a way to largely automate his job using OCR and spreadsheets. Instead of taking 8 hours to work through his day's load, he would do it all in an hour or two. Then he'd slack off for the rest of the day.

Soon the manager found out but the manager was not upset, instead the manager was disappointed. Why didn't this employee share this system with the others? Why did he think it was OK to slack off for 6 hours a day instead of doing 4 times as many catalogs? If this employee worked for me, I'd be putting him to work finding other things to automate!

In the past I've had many comments from people saying 'oh he should have kept it a secret' or 'he is getting paid to do X and if he is more efficient then why cant he slack off' or even 'oh no this is a disaster now most of that team will be laid off'

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#164

Post by derefr »

bradknowles wrote: post #162
derefr wrote: post #144

One perspective I haven't seen here yet: these employers are willing to pay an entire person-salary to get this task done. Therefore, if there was a SaaS service that did the same task, the company should be willing to pay a person-salary worth of money for that SaaS product. So why not build the automation in your free time, knock out a little website with a Stripe subscription form to sell it, convince your boss to…

No business would be willing to pay that. Once you've shown them that the job can be done easier/faster/cheaper, they will insist on that as the new standard. Rinse and repeat until you are penniless and they have all the money.

But they were just paying that, in the form of paying you. If they don't think the task is worth paying that much to get done, they would have just been not-doing-the-task.

Also, note that I never suggested mentioning that the SaaS service you create should make any mention of its service being automated.

Consider an entry in the "cloud bookkeeping SaaS" genre: they sell you on having real accountants looking at your books, with automation to ensure the reliability of those accountants' work. They never mention that they'll also be using automation to make your workload easier to handle, such that each of their accountants is handling the books of 1000 clients. That's an implementation detail.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#165

Post by 6nf »

bradknowles wrote: post #156
m000 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you automated your job on your own free time?

Then they get to pay you less because you work fewer hours to do the same job. Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

> Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

This is the kind of ridiculous thinking I'm talking about in my other comment. You just made your job into a cheap, automated process. That's the most valuable thing you could do in a company! If you did that in my company, you'd get a promotion and you'd be put to work finding other things to automate. You're the kind of person every company wants! Why would we fire you? If we're dumb enough to fire someone like you, you're better off at another company anyway.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#166

Post by dragonwriter »

testvox wrote: post #151
kbenson wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there exists a large contingent of people who believe with all of their heart that God wanted them to find it, that the person who lost it should have been more careful, that they are just having a lucky day. A large part of how America sees work, poverty and wealth was historically influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic, and I think that lingers quite a bit today. I think it's why a lot of people view the poor as…

It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any. > The so-called Protestant Ethic then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born "with a silver spoon in hi…

> It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any.

In theory, but in practice that just means that those with inherited wealth expend some of it on building a personal myth of being self-made independent of their family legacy. It's often paper thin, but as long as they make the gesture to ritually acknowledge the norm, it seems to suffice in practice.

Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#167

Post by ohopton »

DennisP wrote: post #132
ohopton wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluntly put, smarter programmers than you are automating you out of a programming job. Not pretending for a second I'm safe.

That's been happening ever since the first computers. The first programmers hand-entered machine code, then someone automated that with an assembler. Then the first compiler automated much of the work in writing assembly code. Since then we've gotten ever more powerful languages, libraries, and all sorts of tools. None of this has reduced the demand for programmers.

Couldn't agree more, that doesn't mean it's always going to be the same. A lot of programming jobs these days are putting information from a database on a screen, then updating it in the database after it's been edited. Doesn't feel like that should be an impossible thing to automate in a fairly sophisticated way. Though that's been true for a long time and we don't seem to have made much progress.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#168

Post by bradknowles »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #113
gaius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some kinds of automation only create more work. Looking at you, Chef.

Heh. I’m an intern on the ops team at a small-medium company (just under 150 employees, at least 50 or so engineers, ~$20 mil rev), and we use Chef for configuration management. I’ve observed that some members of the ops team are actually afraid to converge servers. I also find the precedence rules, node variable (?) rules etc to be horrifically confusing. I haven’t worked with Ansible before, but it sounds more simi…

Chef got to where it is today because people used it to build systems at a scale that was simply not feasible before. And as it grew more capable, people built more tooling in and then leveraged that to build even larger systems.

So, if you're not building systems at the Netflix or Amazon scale, then Chef might have features and tooling that you don't need -- today. But as you grow and you find you do need those tools, they will be there.

I can tell you that Chef was a key part of the system for taking the Raytheon GPS OCX system and letting us build out an entire virtual datacenter in a matter of hours instead of months. Once everything is racked and stacked and cabled together, just press the "Go" button and everything builds itself and installs itself in a fully automated way.

If you're not familiar with GPS OCX, that's the next-generation ground control systems for GPS satellites -- both the current generation of satellites that is currently aloft and the next-generation fleet that is being developed.

With regards to Ansible, there are many lessons that the Puppet and Chef communities learned years (or decades) ago that are being re-learned yet once again -- like ssh isn't a very scalable communications mechanism when you start talking about handling thousands of servers.

The concept of "just let me run my custom scripts everywhere" is a nice one, so long as you're talking about a dozen or so machines, each of which is a unique snowflake "pet". But when you want to start building a cattle farm, that method stops being so useful.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#169

Post by tabtab »

buboard wrote: post #160
tabtab wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Modern web dev is fantastically more productive and efficient than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I have to disagree. The esthetical expectations of the user/customer are higher now. If it's not "in style" they think you are sticking them with old tech. And you have the desktop/mobile split that frameworks only get half right and require days of black-box fiddling to get working right on all devices. And JavaScript g…

> If it's not "in style" they think you are sticking them with old tech Is that even true? Is there any survey showing that users consider those bad or old tech? Because with things like the reddit, ebay, paypal, gmail redesign, the common thing i ve noticed is that nobody asked for those.

That's just my experience. If a customer pays for a new gizmo, they want the "latest and greatest". If it doesn't look latest and greatest to them, they feel slighted. I'm not saying it's necessarily rational, only that it's the way customers on average react. They don't always say it directly, but word gets around. I've seen it many times. Humans judge books by covers.

As far as old-looking sites like Ebay, if an Ebay competitor appeared with equivalent services and product choices, yet LOOKED fancier/stylish, Ebay would start to lose customers. Lucky for Ebay, no such site exists. (If they appeared, Ebay would probably spend on a visual revamp.)

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#170

Post by bradknowles »

derefr wrote: post #164
bradknowles wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No business would be willing to pay that. Once you've shown them that the job can be done easier/faster/cheaper, they will insist on that as the new standard. Rinse and repeat until you are penniless and they have all the money.

But they were just paying that, in the form of paying you. If they don't think the task is worth paying that much to get done, they would have just been not-doing-the-task. Also, note that I never suggested mentioning that the SaaS service you create should make any mention of its service being automated. Consider an entry in the "cloud bookkeeping SaaS" genre: they sell you on having real accountants looking at your…

They were paying you that, sure. But then you showed them that they didn't need to pay you that anymore, because you automated that job away. So now they won't pay you nearly so much.

You're welcome. Now, get back to work, you slave! ;)

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