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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#201

Post by 6nf »

romwell wrote: post #180
6nf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (reasonab…

If someone with this attitude worked for me, I'd get rid of them ASAP. We don't want people sitting around saying 'thats not my job' or 'I'm not going to look for ways to do things in a better way' or 'I wasnt hired for that'

Our company culture is the complete opposite of that. We want people to help each other. We want people to challenge how things are done. We want to change things all the time, experiment, see what works.

I have NEVER hired someone and said 'heres exactly what you need to do for 8 hours, have at it'. Not even close. All businesses must move forward, lest they die in the dust. The old cushy 9-5 job where you just do the same thing over and over your whole career is dying out quickly.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#202

Post by Zarath »

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…

"is there inherent nobility in work itself?"

Nietzsche would hate this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

Working is the opposite of noble in the traditional sense of the word.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#204

Post by auxym »

eksemplar wrote: post #158
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…

With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sq…

What is RPA?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#205

Post by gitgud »

onemoresoop wrote: post #75
eindiran wrote: post #7

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…

Does "increase their productivity" equate to increase their pay? In most cases that's a no unfortunately. It's up to the "automator" what they make of their time imho. If they're wasting time playing games it's their loss since these opportunities don't come by too often. If they use it to grow their knowledge and skills that's great and well earned since the company only expected them to do their workload, the hard…

I agree it's a privilege to have the ability to automate your job.

The programmer who has extra time from automating his jobs has a choice on how to spend that time.

- Waste it playing games

- Learn other skills

- Work on other side projects

Only the first option is negative to the employer.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#206

Post by toomuchtodo »

sankumsek wrote: post #198
toomuchtodo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not trying to diminish it's role or value, but wouldn't security be kinda looked as a cost center as well?

That’s a really good point as it relates to costs between security and ops. My hunch would be downtime is your own business, but data and financial loss is everyone’s (either through liability, legislation, or insurance costs).

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#207

Post by czl_my »

auxym wrote: post #204
eksemplar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sq…

What is RPA?

Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#208

Post by gitgud »

jmathai wrote: post #2

I 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 aspe…

Replacing yourself with something you built is what engineers should strive for.

Engineering problems just move higher up in the stack. Few people are coding assembly code now days, and in the future few people would be writing in other low level languages.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#209

Post by ddingus »

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…

I once returned a wallet, cash, everything intact.

Called the guy when I found it. He totally panicked. Was odd.

When I handed it to him, that face! Worth it.

Amazingly, he proceeded to try and give me the cash. Was an effort to decline.

At the time, I really needed a warm fuzzy. The lost wallet was a great opportunity, and I got a good one.

But, our conversation basically centered on, "who does that?"

Indeed. The stories of Japan make me want to visit just to soak a little of that in.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#210

Post by the_watcher »

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 I find fascinating about the article is that it's assumed the cleverness was the code written to automate. This is incorrect; the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial.

I thought about this too. Pretty much everything I've automated turned out to be way easier than I assumed and I ended up feeling dumb for not realizing I could have saved myself time by doing it sooner.

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