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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#301

Post by peteforde »

antidesitter wrote: post #285
peteforde wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice thought, but do you have any evidence to back this up? The notion that religious people are less likely to do bad things is highly problematic, objectively and logically - and it carries the unfortunate assumption that non-religious people are more likely to do bad things. People should not need to subscribe to a paranormal belief system to understand that theft, rape and murder are bad.

> That's a nice thought, but do you have any evidence to back this up? Do you have any evidence to back up your claim in the OP? > The notion that religious people are less likely to do bad things is highly problematic, objectively and logically. What exactly do you mean by “highly problematic, objectively and logically”? > People should not need to subscribe to a paranormal belief system to understand that theft, ra…

Evidence, no. I haven't done that particular research.

However, I do spend a lot of time in conversation with my best friend - who is a late-convert Christian - about the distressingly common phenomena of people who call themselves Christians because it flatters them, but don't actually participate or behave in the way they are supposed to.

You know, like the POTUS.

I do happen to believe that religious people shouldn't assume that they act better than non-religious people. We all have to draw personal lines somewhere.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#302

Post by bryanrasmussen »

In A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (different one, but still something of a jerk), the rich daughter of a Newspaper magnate who has needed glasses since she was a child gets an eye exam and is declared to have perfect vision and not in need of glasses. Her father says to bill him for one pair of perfect glasses that will never break.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#303

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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 have told my work more than once that if they wanted to get the most out of me they should put me on the "front line" for a month or two, and let me decide what needs to be automated. It has always been laughed off as me being cute.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#304

Post by gaius »

bradknowles wrote: post #168
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tool…

there are many lessons that the Puppet and Chef communities learned years (or decades) ago

It’s funny because I would say that Chef has yet to fully re-learn what the CFEngine community knew.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#305

Post by yuppp »

iopuy wrote: post #279
anonytrary wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the salary for each person was X, I asked for a salary bump of 3X [and they didn't]. ... And from that point on, I stopped treating my job as an extension of my identity or fulfillment of purpose. Indeed, the best work is done when you do it for yourself. People basically sign their brains away when they go to work for Facebook and Google. Those companies will be likely to get B players no matter how many seemin…

Liked the reply but MIT, my alma matter, grades on a 5.0 scale

I didn't go to MIT, but it's alma mater

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#306

Post by EliRivers »

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?

I bought a lottery ticket, and I have permission to win, yet I didn't.

I suspect luck is, in fact, simply the event of uncertainities crystallising favourably (or unfavourably if the luck is "bad"). Like it says in the dictionary.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#307

Post by luch »

forinti wrote: post #69

It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.

in French "travail" is the word describing a paid work, and it has the same Latin root as "torture".

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#308

Post by badminton1 »

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…

> Typically, the code itself is trivial.

There are tremendous financial opportunities waiting behind automation of expensive tasks usually performed by developers.

For many of those tasks, the moment is right now, and the code itself is not trivial.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#309

Post by dgcoffman »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #19
wvenable wrote: post #8

It should be noted that programmers are not automating themselves out of programming jobs . They're automating themselves out of data entry, or testing, or any number of other mindless tasks easily done by computers.

We may not (yet) be able to automate ourselves out of programming jobs, but we can certainly leverage smart development practices into making the job a lot less labor-intensive. I'm experiencing a shift in that thinking right now. I write reusable, modular, tested code. My co-workers don't. I use a project management system (Phabricator, on my own personal server, which I maintain); the company doesn't. For most of t…

> leverage smart development practices into making the job a lot less labor-intensive.

I think we instead do the same amount of labor, but accomplish more.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#310

Post by petepete »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #271
Strongerpass wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you base that on?

I base that on 40 years of life experience and travel and living in a variety of communities. But there's overwhelming evidence of it, an BTW I'm not saying 'religious' per say, but 'church attendance' which is a much stronger overlap with conscientious behaviours. [1] [2] [3] People who doubt that regular church attenders are more likely to 'return wallets' I think have little exposure to classical religious communi…

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