Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 499 posts

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#311

Post by galfarragem »

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…

My experience also. Every mainstream religion, afaik, defends honesty, sense of community, solidarity between people. More real faith - normally - means more attendance and the reason why attendance is such a good predictor of low crime.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#312

Post by blueblimp »

analog31 wrote: post #176
peteforde wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

What sort of work do you do?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#313

Post by xorcist »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #303
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 wouldn't surprise me if you found out that some work is useless in the first place. Many people lack the bigger picture of what the purpose of operations really are.

That's what easy to miss when thinking in terms of "automation". Automating existing work doesn't move us forward very much. Making the work unnecessary is.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#314

Post by shoo »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #244
kaitai wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. […

It's cultural and more pragmatic. Those who work hard, a positive outlook, maintain themselves and their families, are resourceful ... will likely be healthy and abundant. The farmer who idles away doing not much will have a bad crop. The farmer who is responsible and diligent, mends his fences, ploughs well, keeps his equipment clean and proper and minds the livestock ... will likely do well. Except in case of disas…

> 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.

> Except in case of disaster of course, and then maybe some kind of metaphysical excuses might come into play!

there's a particularly distressing variation of this kind of belief that, upon hearing news that a terrible disaster has stricken a distant country, killing tens of thousands, concludes that those victims must necessarily have deserved such a fate -- by not living life according to the well-understood principles, or not worshipping the correct god.

that conclusion is perhaps a reasonable and logical one given belief in enough axioms like "there is an omnipotent god", "if we live a certain way god will reward us", "the universe is generally fair".

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#315

Post by blub »

6nf wrote: post #201
romwell wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 w…

Well people don't usually like or want to work for little dictators which fire people on a whim for minor things.

So your employees (assuming you have any and this is not some hypothetical scenario) won't straight out say those things, they will just quietly do them :)

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#316

Post by m00n »

A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer.

Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree on a fixed price of 10000$.

Two scenarios of what happens next: 1) He shows up the next day with a gardening robot you never knew existed and he never told you he would use. The work is done in 30 minutes. He goes home to spend time with his kids. (Or maybe contract more "2 week projects"?)

2) Two gardening people show up every morning to greet you when you drive to work. They leave when you come back and make steady progress every day. On the last day you come home early and witness that actually the daily work is done by a gardening robot in 5 minutes and the two people actually drive home during the day to spend time with their kids.

Would you contract this guy again?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#318

Post by jamespacileo »

m00n wrote: post #316

A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer. Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree on a fixed price of 10000$. Two scenarios of…

- Commissioning a script to automate something is expensive, plus you need to find the talent who can automate it and do a reasonable good job of it. It's sometimes a risky investment.

- If ready-made robots (and scripts) were available on the market, the employer would definitely use that instead

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#319

Post by 6nf »

blub wrote: post #315
6nf wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Well people don't usually like or want to work for little dictators which fire people on a whim for minor things. So your employees (assuming you have any and this is not some hypothetical scenario) won't straight out say those things, they will just quietly do them :)

Just to be clear, I've certainly never fired someone on a whim and in fact I can't even remember the last time I actually had to fire someone. Probably at least 5 years.

But we do try really hard to hire people that fit in our culture, and we make sure new employees understand how we work. If someone's just sitting there doing their assigned job as they were trained, they'd be fine but they would probably not get promoted or earn a pay raise every year.

And of course if someone DID need to go because we lost some clients or whatever, those are the ones we'd want to let go first.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#320

Post by caoilte »

m00n wrote: post #316

A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer. Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree on a fixed price of 10000$. Two scenarios of…

I would be sad that it seems they didn't feel they could trust me, but if they did the job well and for a good price why wouldn't I hire them again?

Also, they're not my employee. I contracted them for a one time job. Totally different working relationship.

Post reply on HN