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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#171

Post by derefr »

bradknowles wrote: post #170
derefr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! ;)

Ah, but you didn't automate the job away. Like I said, you did the automation on your own time, with your own resources. It wasn't work-for-hire; they don't own the rights to it. And there's no instance of it already set up for them to use. As of the moment that you offer them the opportunity to subscribe to your SaaS service (and note that you don't have to mention that it's your SaaS service), they're still in the position of having no automated process, just you sitting there able to do the process manually.

So they have two decisions to make: whether to buy the SaaS service (in order to receive the benefit of the automation); and whether to keep paying you.

They can choose to say "no" to both... but now, not only do they not have an automated process, and just as little idea of how to automate it as they did when they started; they also don't have you there to do the process for them, and they lose your hard-won expertise on the process that would be crucial for building any sort of in-house automation.

(I'm assuming here, note, that the company isn't one that tends to automate processes—if they did, they'd probably have already found the low-hanging automation fruit that your job consisted of. As such, they likely don't have any in-house automation expertise, nor do any in-house expertise for evaluating the competence of automation consultancies.)

ETA: my original point was that everything I'm saying here (and more) is what some person with sufficient motivation to think through all the details would be saying to their boss to convince them. "Convincing your boss" includes "thinking through all your boss's objections and having rehearsed, polished counters for them." Have I done that? No. But I'm not someone with an automatable job.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#172

Post by rllin »

this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently

- usury

- patents

- copyrights

- land

- software as a service

the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.)

the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended consequences (cf. prop 13)

the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition of pithy features.

i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a more (post) modern marxist.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#173

Post by bradknowles »

6nf wrote: post #165
bradknowles wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If companies were run in a logical manner, then your thought process would be reasonable.

Sadly, while there may be some logical people in a company, many companies (most?) wind up not being run in a logical manner due to a wide variety of internal politics and societal issues.

What you hope (and pray for) is that the logical people in a company are not also sociopaths, in which case you are really well and truly screwed.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#174

Post by nerdponx »

And no mention of Marx or Socialism? If there's ever an appropriate time to bring up worker-owned means of production, it's this right here. As I've heard it (I have not read the Communist Manifesto myself), Marx viewed automation as one of the ways in which workers can liberate themselves.

The merit of welfare economics is predicated on the "winners" being able to compensate the "losers", and thereby obtain a Pareto-optimal wealth distribution. The fact that this compensation does not happen is the reason that aggregate consumer welfare has grown tremendously, but people still have to work 40 hours a week for their food, housing, and healthcare.

It's tempting to say that employees ought to be compensated proportional to the value they generate. Let's say every employee is allowed to license their work output in such a way that, if they automate a process, they are entitled to royalties stemming from the automation of that process. Should that license be perpetual? How do you decide how big the royalty should be? How do you determine the actual value generated by a given automation?

Edit: wew, instant downvote. Care to clarify?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#175

Post by funkymike »

darawk wrote: post #44
pathseeker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

True, though presumably if you have an automatable job, you're not actually employed as a programmer and as such may not have a clause like that in your employment agreement.

That's a grey area. It may still be considered to be a work made for hire and so the employer would own the copyright.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#176

Post by analog31 »

peteforde wrote: post #127
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…

One thing that I find maddening about this topic is the assumption that people who automate their jobs won't take the new time they get back and put it to better use. For some, that could be learning skills or working on a startup, and others might just want to spend time with their kids. That said, it seems incredibly wrong to judge someone for being clever enough to relax and get paid for it. And if someone enjoys…

I wonder if it's possible to turn things around for some people: Sitting around relaxing, and then doing their work in bursts of cleverness, may be a coping mechanism for someone who has a hard time staying continuously busy all day long. Or maybe there's a sliding scale between those extremes.

I fall somewhere towards the side that you might guess, since I'm defending it here. ;-)

I don't necessarily automate my job, but I depend on things like math and theory, to solve problems that the other engineers tend to solve laboriously through brute force and trial-and-error. I suppose a math equation is a sort of automation. And of course programming is how one does math these days.

Maybe I avoid resentment, because I'm doing work in a way that most people hate even more than doing hard work. It's also hard for them to pin down how much I work because they don't know how to estimate it.

Hypothetically, if someone wanted to debate with me about the value of work, I'd ask them how work is measured: What are the units of measure? Joules? Hours? Indulgences? How about... dollars?

The only time that we don't measure work in dollars is in a social setting, including within the workplace. For instance, we don't give motivational speeches and other kinds of attention such as meetings in proportion to your wages, but tend to treat all workers relatively equally in those things.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#177

Post by toomuchtodo »

bradknowles wrote: post #154
ambicapter wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "operations" engineers can be moved to making sure Ops are running well at home (you apparently have an API) or into Technical Sales if they'd rather stay in the field. Informing the customer of all the configuration that is available to them, for example. Just because there's a nice graphical configuration tool, doesn't mean any clients are actually going to look at it when they have an issue. They'd much rath…

Nope. Operations is a pure cost center. Cost centers only exist for the express purpose of being compressed twice as much this month as they were last month, so that you can make them half as expensive. Developers are valuable. They create value. When all the good Operations staff has left because they're tired of being treated like mushrooms, all the Operations stuff gets thrown over the wall and then the Developers…

Truth. Left ops for infosec and wouldn’t ever look back.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#178

Post by 6nf »

bradknowles wrote: post #173
6nf wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If companies were run in a logical manner, then your thought process would be reasonable. Sadly, while there may be some logical people in a company, many companies (most?) wind up not being run in a logical manner due to a wide variety of internal politics and societal issues. What you hope (and pray for) is that the logical people in a company are not also sociopaths, in which case you are really well and truly scr…

That's crazy, I don't understand how people are so negative about this. Sociopaths will NOT fire that person, they'd put that person to work automating other jobs. This is just how you run a business.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#179

Post by zer00eyz »

bradknowles wrote: post #150
josephjrobison wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-developer, how can I hire someone (or a team) like OP that focuses on automating menial stuff and focuses on the most important? Does a development agency that focuses on this model exist? Of course they should be paid more per hour (or other unit) than your average, less optimized agency, but the sum total should be less than hiring inefficient agencies. (P.S. I understand the best developers probably don't…

Body shops don't work like this. Their purpose is to put butts in seats, regardless of whether or not that butt is attached to anything else that is functional. Functioning in this manner would actually be counter-productive for them, because it would reduce the number of butts that they have to put into seats, and would reduce the number of seats into which they could put butts. If you know of a development agency,…

But actual consultants exist, some of them are working as well (unlike a body shop).

This sort of thing is how I now pay the bills.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#180

Post by romwell »

6nf wrote: post #163
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 differen…

>Why didn't this employee share this system with the others?

Because the consequences of him doing that are unclear. And since one potential (if not likely) consequence is management would simply retain 1/4 of staff doing this work and fire the rest, why would he share that?

Was there a huge sign at his workplace outlining the consequences of automating anything? An explicit policy that would alleviate such (reasonable - read the article!) fears? I don't think so either.

What was clear, presumably, is that as long as he processed X catalogs a day, he was getting his salary paid. That was what he was hired to do. And so that was exactly what he was doing.

>Why did he think it was OK to slack off for 6 hours a day instead of doing 4 times as many catalogs?

Because this is how work works. You pay someone to do something, and the expectations on the amount and kind of work - and the amount and kind of compensation - are discussed in advance.

>If this employee worked for me, I'd be putting him to work finding other things to automate!

Yes, and that's exactly the problem.

What if there aren't any? What if there are, but he doesn't find them? What if he finds them, but doesn't know how to automate the task? He was hired to go trough books and compare specs, automating his employer's business was literally not his job.

You see, your "reward" is not paying the employee 4X salary for being 4X efficient (you left that little part out!). Your reward is making the employee perform a more difficult job that they didn't sign up to do, presumably for the same salary (since you didn't mention paying them more).

Do you still wonder why they kept their silence?

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