Coders Automating Their Own Job

I think where this analogy breaks down and becomes gray area in modern society is when the group unit that benefits gets too large to ascertain where the gains are accruing.

We're biologically wired to optimally deal with groups of ~150 or fewer people.

OK, so you are explicitly making this a part of the job description. Which, arguably, was not the case for that particular employee at that particular job.

>If someone with this attitude worked for me, I'd get rid of them ASAP.

When people are "got rid of ASAP" for their attitude and not due to their performance, that's more than reason enough to keep silent about, well, everything.

Because who knows what kind of attitude the boss might have on that day, or seek from their employees.

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Now on the me-note: in my current job, I do my best to automate and document processes to save my and my co-workers' time. But, unlike in the case above, that's my job as a software engineer. And I know that when I make things better, I am rewarded - either with a thank-you, a bonus, or joy from improving my own work flow. I don't have to fear being reprimanded or fired for that.

In my previous job, which was a Teaching Assistantship, I went over and beyond trying to improve things (I rewrote the lab assignments that everyone hated, and turned them into something useful and enjoyable) - and got hit with a plain, literal, "it's not your job" from the administration when trying to push these changes. Initiative was unwelcome there.

The moral? I've seen both sides. If you are the manager, it's on you. You create the environment where people will be either eager to be improving things, or will be scared to try (and will keep mum if they do).

>All businesses must move forward, lest they die in the dust.

And so do the employees.

>The old cushy 9-5 job where you just do the same thing over and over your whole career is dying out quickly.

Indeed, and that's why people move on to other jobs. I think the puzzle will solve itself once you put yourself in the shoes of the person your story was about.

>We don't want people sitting around saying ... 'I wasnt hired for that'

But surely you hire people for something? I hope you don't expect your software engineers to, say, clean toilets - and vice versa. And if you do, I hope you pay your cleaning staff as much as you pay your engineers.

Which, again, was not the case in the story you posted (the person doing the automation was neither expected to do it, nor was paid at the level that people whose job it is are).

The idea that an employer owns everything (in particular IP, basically the products of your mind) that you generate on their time or yours while you work for them is bullshit -- it's a complex problem but business has chosen to resolve it 100% in their favor and workers just laid down and taken it. Non-competes and strict laws against selling secrets are one thing, but laying defacto claim to everything you generate is ridiculous, yet is the norm.

-- rant incoming --

Software Engineers/Developers/programmers are just the bottom rung of this century's gold rush. Half the time the mines they're working in are canary-less coal mines. Some drink the kool-aid and think the "startup" they work for is anything more than an aspiring too-big-to-fail company, after a few years they wise up and by that time they're too bogged down with life to care/change course. I remember reading a post earlier in the week on C-level compensation and noting that CTOs were the least paid of all the C levels, despite being maybe the second most directly tied to the economic value of any tech company (sales might be #1).

Despite how smart we think we are, software engineers are fucking stupid. This article is stupid, but only because the premise is stupid (outside of taking ~20 paragraphs to go through random internet musings/anecdata to get to it's point:

> Self-automators show that coders are actually in a unique position to negotiate with employers over which automation-derived gains—like shorter workweeks and greater flexibility to pursue work that interests them—should be kept by workers. There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first.

People who deliver out-sized value for a company but aren't naive enough to think they'll be anywhere near properly compensated will not share their secrets. The ethics question isn't even on the right side, companies should be paying employees for the value they create properly, this situation exists because that doesn't happen. Companies are "people", yet aren't beholden to ethics and are largely run by people divorced from the realities they impose. Where you land on this issue is basically how your employment contract was written and how you interpreted it, against the backdrop of the culture it's in -- the only difference is that people at the just about always cheat/bend rules or find luck to get to where they are, but preach that they "put in the time" and honestly just worked hard for forever to get where they are.

There is nothing inherently noble about doing work -- that's vassal brain fodder. If working was the only way to build discipline and dedication then we should all be working graveyard shifts at 3 jobs, and not wanting to get rich.

Most of us work because we have to. I'd like to reach the point where I work 100% because I want to, not because I want to avoid the issues created by lack of money.