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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#11

Post by tynpeddler »

anonu wrote: post #5

As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into nothing... In practise, achieving some sort of "…

A system that requires no outside intervention to perform its job optimally is equivalent to a solved problem. So quants will be out of a job once we understand how to perfectly trade on the stock market.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#12

Post by cellularmitosis »

jmathai wrote: post #2

I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought. We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements. This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspe…

No need to cross your fingers. The demand for software is still out-pacing the creation of new developers. Those 9 have nothing to worry about, other than perhaps dusting off their resume.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#13

Post by TheAlchemist »

tynpeddler wrote: post #11
anonu wrote: post #5

As a former trader/developer/quant I often felt that "automating myself out of a job" was my goal. If we could build properly architected systems that were self-healing when things went wrong, turned themselves on before the market opened, traded all day, made money and shut down for the night... then eventually my role would devolve into monitoring and ultimately into nothing... In practise, achieving some sort of "…

A system that requires no outside intervention to perform its job optimally is equivalent to a solved problem. So quants will be out of a job once we understand how to perfectly trade on the stock market.

Which by definition is impossible...

Once two different traders discover how to 'perfectly' trade, the game changes and as they say 'here we go again'

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#14

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

JakeWesorick wrote: post #3

Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain. Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.

It may or may not be a waste, but why do you believe it to be unethical? The employer employee job is a contractual one. When it is the company that sees me as an inefficiency I will be eliminated for the companies gain. Similarly when I the employee see an inefficiency in the company, I can eliminate (automate) it for my gain. This is the symmetry in the contractual relationship. To say that this relationship should be asymmetric is to grant even more power in the employer-employee relationship to the employer.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#15

Post by zyang »

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…

Just curious, what's in your automation toolbox?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#17

Post by sharadov »

I see this possible in only 2 kinds of organizations 1. Very large - where you are a practically a number and work in a department buried deep. 2. Small - where there is a reasonable amount of technology but no desire or budget to upgrade. It's working, so don't touch it.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#18

Post by jlarocco »

kyleblarson wrote: post #9
JakeWesorick wrote: post #3

Yes the employer is dumb for not realizing the job can be automated. Yes you are smart for writing code that automates the job. But I feel, as an employee of the company, it is un-ethical for you to knowingly see an extreme inefficiency and hide it for your own personal gain. Also, it seems like a huge way to waste your life. Find another job where they can actually use your skill set to do something meaningful.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/spanish-public-...

Not justifying what he did, but that's not possible without a major management failure.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#19

Post by thaumaturgy »

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 the last year, I've used these to produce more and better code than others have, but my responsibilities have only expanded while my pay hasn't.

I've vocally evangelized these practices and I'd love nothing more than to see them get adopted by the other developers, but so far it's not getting any traction.

So I'm shifting towards logging the value of the work I produce -- regardless of whether I'm just copying in a file from my extensive library -- rather than the time it took me to accomplish the task.

And starting to look for a new job.

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