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Coders Automating Their Own Job

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#231

Post by CamTin »

DennisP wrote: post #185
ohopton wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I spent a lot of my career doing that. There was usually a fairly large gap between what made sense in relational database design, and what was convenient and sensible for users.

More importantly, "what is convenient for users" will frequently change and be expressed only vaguely by those users in natural language bug reports or feature requests. Converting that natural language into something machine-readable is programming, whether it involves typing cryptic strings into emacs or hooking together components graphically a la LabVIEW.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#232

Post by i_made_a_booboo »

peteforde wrote: post #223
godelski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the quote "The harder I work the luckier I get." applies here. Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities. I think this is a case where people confuse correlation and causation. Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success.

I propose an alternative lens: What if "luck" was actually just an individual's ability to perceive an opportunity... intersected with their own feeling that they have permission to act upon it?

What if you were born in Puntland, Somalia and you were shit out "luck".

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#233

Post by taneq »

godelski wrote: post #189
imgabe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this doesn't quite get it. Will "hard work" lead to success? No, not exactly. I don't think anyone believes that. A prisoner in a work camp works hard. Hard work combined with personal agency leads to success. Are you responsible for yourself? That is, are you taking responsibility for yourself? If so, you will find a way to make yourself successful. If you are looking for someone else to take responsibility…

I think the quote "The harder I work the luckier I get." applies here. Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities. I think this is a case where people confuse correlation and causation. Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success.

"Trust your luck, Taran Wanderer," Llonio called after Taran as he left for the Free Commots. "But don't forget to put out your nets!"

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#234

Post by zhte415 »

maire wrote: post #226
zhte415 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial. > Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat. Absolutely. A minor observation I have, living in Operations/Finance. Don't me…

It all depends on who is rewarded for the automation. Salaried employees who automate are generally recognized for the productivity that automation provides. Low level data entry people are not rewarded. Your story reminds me of my son who graduated with a liberal arts degree right after the financial crash. He completely automated his first job (using excel and VBA) and was not rewarded. Long story short, he went ba…

Good for your son. Sadly check-box HR ticks are too often required for being recognised, that's something I have to fight against where operations staff are 3x underpaid compered to developers yet arguably far more agile.

Good he found a better employer.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#235

Post by projectileboy »

One thing I find fascinating about our culture is how much we elevate corporations above people. If a corporation found a way to automate production in such a way as to keep their product prices flat but increase their profit margin, most everyone would applaud. This is the exact same thing, but a decent portion of society finds it to be unacceptable behavior.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#236

Post by kaitai »

kbenson wrote: post #131
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…

> 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…

Looking at the history of religious thought in the US, it's not the Protestant work ethic per se, but in large part the "prosperity gospel" or prosperity theology [1] -- this belief that God will reward the right kind of Christians with material wealth. There are strong currents in Protestantism that posit that rewards are for the afterlife and that one may have to endure poverty in this earthly life and that's ok.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#237

Post by godelski »

peteforde wrote: post #223
godelski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the quote "The harder I work the luckier I get." applies here. Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities. I think this is a case where people confuse correlation and causation. Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success.

I propose an alternative lens: What if "luck" was actually just an individual's ability to perceive an opportunity... intersected with their own feeling that they have permission to act upon it?

> What if "luck" was actually just an individual's ability to perceive an opportunity.

>>Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities.

That's what is meant by "being able to take advantage of more opportunities. You are better able to see that they exist. You are also primed to look for them. You also believe that you can succeed at that opportunity. BUT a key thing is that they actually have to exist. There are situations where you can work really hard and there be no opportunities to be successful (financially. Because we can redefine what successful means but that doesn't consider context). As illustrated above you can work really hard in jail and that can result in no gained success.

But we're talking about sayings. Sayings are never exact but rather hold a generalization in a nice and easy to remember package. Sayings always include a lot of implicit information. We could quibble about finer details but whether you should or shouldn't depends on the context of the conversation and whether the context the saying is provided in contextualizes that implicit information.

What this saying packages is:

Though work highly correlated with success it does not necessitate it. There are opportunities for success frequently around us and frequently unseen. Hard work will not result in seeing or being able to take advantage of said opportunities, but rather it correlates with the ability to. Furthermore, hard work often correlates with improvements in skill, which grant access to new opportunities that previously were not obtainable. While there are a lot of things that lead to success that correlate with hard work and while success itself in turn correlates with hard work, success itself is not granted to all those that work hard.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#238

Post by jwally »

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?

Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks.

The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#239

Post by sonnyblarney »

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…

"God wanted them to find it"

I think you'll find that most people who 'keep the wallet' are probably not religious and don't think about it the morality of it all that much, whereas those who are regular temple/church/mosque attenders would be among the least likely to 'keep it'.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#240

Post by kbenson »

baddox wrote: post #212
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…

Okay, I’ll bite. I don’t think this large contingency of people exists. I’m sure a lot of people would keep lost money rather than turn it in, but I’m very skeptical that there is a widespread view that this is an acceptable or justifiable action.

I'm not sure I disagree with you in this specific case, but I think it's fairly easy to tweak some of the details (is there identification in the wallet? Is it obvious it's been missing for an extended period? What if it's not money, but some possession?) and vastly change the percentage of people that would respond one way or another, even when there might not really be much ethical difference.

That said, I was mostly pointing towards what I see as an explanation for the difference in attitudes regarding wealth and poverty and how it intersects with peoples opinions of personal responsibility, which I think does have a place in that scenario, even if it's not always the primary driver.

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