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

431–440 of 499 posts

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#431

Post by sonnyblarney »

shoo wrote: post #314
sonnyblarney wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" 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 "

This happens, but it's barely a thing.

I've never seen or heard of such a thing in real life, it's something you only hear about on CNN.

Services in mainline Churches don't really ever go into this kind of thing, the congregation would find it as wacky as you or I would.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#433

Post by valesco »

luch wrote: post #307
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".

I read an interesting book (somewhere in my library if you're interested) that took a different view on work ; one of the preliminary discussions was about the famed ethymology of the word "travail". The author made it go back to the immobilization of a horse in a cage when changing its horseshoes, or the immobilization of a woman in her "travail" of giving birth. It's the fact that we are taken by a task, preventing us to do anything else on a whim. In that much more neutral sense, you can view work as anything you choose to be busy with.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#434

Post by GFischer »

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.

Some companies do try, they end up building higher level languages / code generation tools that still require programmers.

One such tool is very popular here in South America:

https://www.genexus.com/en/global/products/genexus

GeneXus™ streamlines application development by automatically generating everything from databases to code, frontend to backend, and server-side to client-side services. It’s not magic — just a smarter way to create smart technology.

It ends up being a kind of DSL.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#435

Post by malhotra_chetan »

ekzy wrote: post #385
Immortalin wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless Plug: https://KloudTrader.com/Narwhal Doesn't make the decisions for you but manages the other 80% of the complexity involved in deploying a trading strategy.

Is it your product? The "get started" buttons don't work. As well as none of the links under "What does Narwhal Offer?"

Hi! I am a co-founder @ KloudTrader. The get started buttons don't work because we haven't launched yet. And the list under "What does Narwhal offer" are not links, they are just a list of features. Anyway we are launching this week, we would love if you could signup for our early access list(https://www.kloudtrader.com/#getnotified). We will notify you as we launch. Cheers!

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#436

Post by kingdomcome50 »

visarga wrote: post #254
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 think this is a case where people confuse correlation and causation. Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success. Not true, hard work is a cause of success, just not the only cause. Luck (opportunity) is a factor, but a much more unreliable one at that. Genetics is also a factor (intelligence, passion, curiosity, playfulness). I like to see this problem from the point of view of Reinforcement…

"Hard work" makes no sense as a cause of success. "Hard work" doesn't cause anything, rather, it is a means to an end.

We could contrive an example whereby "working hard" allowed you to "create more widgets in less time than anyone else" and so you receive a promotion (success). But even then we know that your success isn't from just "working hard", but is instead from the result of doing so. Given the context of this thread, I think we can agree that "creating the most widgets in the least time" can be done without "working hard".

I would argue pointing to "hard work" as a cause of success is confusing how a causal factor was reached with the factor itself.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#437

Post by crankylinuxuser »

ardy42 wrote: post #268
nstart wrote: post #251

This article really highlights how odd our methods of valuing output are. Ultimately if someone is idling for 6 years because they've written a program to do their job for them, who cares? They are delivering the same output which hopefully the company deemed was valued at X amount BECAUSE it delivers Y amount of profit/returns. This article is actually touching on a deeper level of dysfunction in how we do things li…

> This article really highlights how odd our methods of valuing output are. Ultimately if someone is idling for 6 years because they've written a program to do their job for them, who cares? They are delivering the same output which hopefully the company deemed was valued at X amount BECAUSE it delivers Y amount of profit/returns. Their boss cares. This is capitalism, and capitalist ethics say you should be fired if…

> This is capitalism, and capitalist ethics say...

Wrong. Capitalism has no ethics. The only 'ethic' it may have is "Make money and resources". Humans are secondary. Ethics are secondary. The environment/public commons is secondary. Even the laws are secondary, given the fine is less than the gain.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#438

Post by crankylinuxuser »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #402
turtles wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“30 seconds”. You should have told him 6 hours. If he needs it done quicker hire someone else. Enjoy your day.

He wasn't able to successfully pull this stunt ever again. It actually completely changed our work dynamic and almost completely eliminated job stress. It was also the catalyst to deciding that I wanted to move on and I gave a 4 month notice shortly thereafter. Ultimate jerk move, he actually hid a bonus check intended for me in his desk for weeks because he didn't realize I was being so nice with the amount of notic…

So, theft and fraud eh? Sounds like a lot more than a "jerk".

Hopefully, the president canned him and referee his conduct to the police? Seriously, the less poisonous people like that, the better.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#439

Post by siliconc0w »

Businesses are mostly just complicated cybernetic programs that try to turn money into more money. But it's like shitty spaghetti code where you have to understand years of debt to understand why A needs to talk to B, C, D and process the results into some new form E. Maybe they do this manually with a spreadsheet and arcane business rules passed down from generation to generation or maybe those rules are encoded in some awful program written twenty years ago that is terrible by any modern measure but is bespoke tailed to their shop/industry/regulatory environment.

You could probably automate this process but it requires a holistic understanding of the whole system which no one may even have, much less someone with the technical skills to automate. Plus it's like refactoring spaghetti code with little to no documentation, no specification except the current output, no tests, and likely involves a some combination of multiple technologies and manual human-powered processing.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#440

Post by kelvin0 »

peteforde wrote: post #300
sonnyblarney wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comments below for links to articles. There is overwhelming evidence that religious people, particularly those who attend services are less likely to be involved in criminal activity. Your assertion that the religious or church attenders are mostly about 'belief in paranormal activity' is really quite missing the ball, to the point that it's almost offensive - though it's a common misunderstanding. Most classi…

I actually am the OP, and I just wanted to say that while I suspect we disagree on some fundamentals... I am extremely impressed by the quality, tone and effort to link to research evidenced in your two replies. As you deduced, I missed your initial reply because we both posted at the same time. For what it's worth, I'm also in Canada and my best friend is a Christian. She was not born into it and has always been rea…

What constitutes a 'Criminal Act' in generally accepted terms? We can probably agree that there are some cases which generally considered 'bad': Stealing, Killing and others. But even some instances of these 'bad' acts are also up to debate (stealing to feed your kids, killing in war or self defense...).

But it's also worth noting that what constitutes a criminal act is largely dependent on the laws that are enacted by a majority (this is also a broad generalization). Taking into account that a majority votes these laws, these laws will also reflect that same majoritie's Religious (or lack thereof) beliefs.

This 'hypothetical' religious majority will probably never vote for laws which 'criminalizes' their beliefs and actions! Thus it's quite easy to see that Religious folks from this majority will never be deemed criminal.

As a thought experiment: imagine that attempting to obstruct or make it more difficult for someone to have an abortion was illegal. How many more religious people would become 'criminals'?

In conclusion, one person's definition of criminal is another's person definition of a 'hero'. Claiming that religious people are less likely to be criminals is based on shaky assumptions in my opinion.

Post reply on HN