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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#471

Post by someguydave »

buzzdenver wrote: post #261
someguydave wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is related to Taleb's observation that employment is a kind of "slavery". What he means by this is that you effectively have sold your option to own those to outsized returns in exchange for a regular paycheck.

That sounds more like an option pair for an equity. Both your upside and downside are limited and you get a steady income stream. Slavery is very different.

Except, is your downside really limited? It's true the company must make payroll while you are still employed. However, the employer has the option of firing you. While this might not put in you in debt to the employer's creditors, it does reduce the value of your employment contract to zero AND reduces your attractiveness to future employers.

If you only have had one employer for a long period, this is a large blow. Taleb makes the point that the taxi driver is in an enviable position compared to the salaryman for this reason.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#472

Post by someguydave »

hawkice wrote: post #257
someguydave wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is related to Taleb's observation that employment is a kind of "slavery". What he means by this is that you effectively have sold your option to own those to outsized returns in exchange for a regular paycheck.

That's... not what slavery is. That analogy is extremely poor compared to using securities derivatives, which is a field Taleb is familiar with. Edit: also, is this feature of salaried employment so misunderstood as to require an analogy? You get paid a fixed amount, or with specified bonus structure. It's literally the number one fact people know about their employment contracts.

> also, is this feature of salaried employment so misunderstood as to require an analogy?

I would argue yes. Many professionals like engineers and programmers can point to contributions they made to the corporation that have been sold for many times their annual salary. How many of those professionals consider the fact that they could have sold their design for themselves and pocketed the revenue?

This is related to Coase's question: why have a firm in the first place? In modern times it seems that ongoing disaggregation of businesses and reduced transaction costs in software would cause more professionals to consider working for themselves, rather than selling their (potential, uncertain, unlimited) profits for a (certain, fixed) income.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#473

Post by someguydave »

dredmorbius wrote: post #266
someguydave wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is related to Taleb's observation that employment is a kind of "slavery". What he means by this is that you effectively have sold your option to own those to outsized returns in exchange for a regular paycheck.

Thorstein Veblen, in an earlier age.

There are similarities. They are certainly both critical of business. Taleb has a strong allergy toward anyone who appears to be abusing their position of public trust to swing economic rents towards themselves or allies.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#474

Post by Aeolun »

tokyodude wrote: post #262
bradknowles wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submit that having ten thousand node.js/npm dependencies is far worse than any DLL Hell that has ever been experienced to date.

Hmmm, I just tried to install emacs on windows. With all dependencies is 210meg! Tried installing vnc on Ubuntu following commonly found instructions. Required installing 119 packages (each of which is likely built from several libraries). I also tried building smb from source. It required tons of dependencies to be installed. Is npm actually any worse than any other environment?

10000 > 100

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#475

Post by megamindbrian2 »

pensatoio wrote: post #149
megamindbrian2 wrote: post #29

I use a calendar pretty heavily to stay on task. I automatically accepted meeting invites because my job was so boring going to meetings was probably the only good part. My managers found out I accepted them automatically and told me to turn it off. Instead of turning it off I put a 5 minute delay on the invite receipt. I was laid off for "attitude problems".

I don’t get it. What’s wrong (morally or otherwise) with automatically accepting meeting invites.

They said I didn't look at a meeting so they were mad when I'd show up a minute or two late. Of course no one cares when other managers showed up a minute or two late. This was at Charles Schwab. I'd never work or invest there.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#476

Post by thelasthuman »

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…

At some level of understanding, all workers know they don't get the full value of their labor. You just got to see it happen right in front of you in real time.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#477

Post by thelasthuman »

rumcajz wrote: post #463
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. This is why, in 19th century, they've used to call wage labor, as opposed to self-emplo…

Own people? No way! Wrong! How could you ever entertain this notion!

Rent people at sub-subsistence wages? I guess it's okay.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#478

Post by ovrkil »

I'm employed at a company that engineers financial institution software. I have no qualms admitting when I moved to QA I quickly wrote a program to do my testing. Now each release I just update the relevant variables compile load and run. I see no problem with using my grey matter to it's full potential.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#479

Post by gerbilly »

eindiran wrote: post #7

I've automated large chunks of my job away, but I've never felt that I ended up not having things left to do as a result. There are always more tasks to automate and more problems to solve. I get the impression from these stories that the dishonest part of what the self-automaters are doing is that they could do other tasks and use automation to increase their productivity, but instead chose to keep their productivit…

>I get the impression from these stories that the dishonest part of what the self-automaters are doing is that they could [...] increase their productivity, but instead chose to keep their productivity the same

I get the impression that the dishonest thing the employers are doing when they become aware of the automation is that they could increase the person's salary, but instead they keep it the same...

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#480

Post by gerbilly »

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…

> The concept of "just let me run my custom scripts everywhere" is a nice one, so long as you're talking about a dozen or so machines

This is not the recommended way to use Ansible at all. Ansible encourages the use of modules, to perform tasks on the server in an idempotent manner.

There are modules[1] for installing packages, creating, 'editing files' and so on.

Running custom shell scripts for everything is specifically discouraged in their documentation.

[1] https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/modules_by_c...

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