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Coders Automating Their Own Job

theatlantic.com

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#131

Post by kbenson »

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…

> there exists a large contingent of people who believe with all of their heart that God wanted them to find it, that the person who lost it should have been more careful, that they are just having a lucky day.

A large part of how America sees work, poverty and wealth was historically influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic, and I think that lingers quite a bit today. I think it's why a lot of people view the poor as lazy (because obviously if they weren't lazy, they wouldn't be poor, right?).

If you fervently believe hard work will lead to success, how else do you explain the unsuccessful?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#132

Post by DennisP »

ohopton wrote: post #108
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.

Bluntly put, smarter programmers than you are automating you out of a programming job. Not pretending for a second I'm safe.

That's been happening ever since the first computers. The first programmers hand-entered machine code, then someone automated that with an assembler. Then the first compiler automated much of the work in writing assembly code. Since then we've gotten ever more powerful languages, libraries, and all sorts of tools. None of this has reduced the demand for programmers.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#133

Post by Hysterisis »

A few years ago I was working for a QA department and trying to apply my programming skills wherever I could. There was a weekly report that someone in upper management produced to send to their peers, which was basically two filtered and cross referenced CSV dumps. I briefly took over that task while the manager was away, and was able to automate it pretty easily. I even produced a small GUI that made it easy for the manager to use later. Ultimately the manager chose to keep doing it by hand for 40 hours per week. I left that organisation a few months later.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#134

Post by tialaramex »

I've always seen this as the _point_ of what I do. The promise is there in work by Church, Gödel and Turing, but Grace Hopper is the one who made it tangible. She called the thing she's responsible for a "compiler" but today we'd understand it as a linker.

Grace understood in engineering terms what Turing et al. grasped only as a mathematical principle. We can get the machine itself to take the tedious parts of programming the machine and automate them, so that we're left only with some higher level task, and then, we can just automate that too, this recursion continues forever.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#135

Post by honopu »

josephjrobison wrote: post #89
kradroy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to suggest this from my experience. I hate to burst GP's bubble, but the attitude and environment at his next job probably won't be any better in regard to "best practices." It's extremely difficult to gauge how your attitude toward development compares with a prospective team's after an hour of chatting. I became a manager last year and quickly discovered that changing others' behavior and habits is next…

As a non-developer, how can I hire someone (or a team) like OP that focuses on automating menial stuff and focuses on the most important? Does a development agency that focuses on this model exist? Of course they should be paid more per hour (or other unit) than your average, less optimized agency, but the sum total should be less than hiring inefficient agencies. (P.S. I understand the best developers probably don't…

I’d hope they all do. If you get an experienced developer they should want to automate all of this. My former boss took the model of improving processes and revenue, then taking a cut of the difference ongoing. He had financial freedom already, so this was the best use of his time. With some companies you aren’t given all of the information to make the right decision for efficiencies sake, or they write such a rigid spec there’s no room for improvement. Personally I love spending the time where I can see it saving so much time for the end. You might not need an agency, you might just need a developer to help write what you want to create and work a spec that you can give to an uncreative team/agency to create. Agencies make a decent amount on the discovery phase, so you’d be cutting that out. At that point you could go directly to someone that could implement it.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#136

Post by dinkudunk »

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.

It's almost as if profits are nothing but exploitation and that you're nothing but a tool for the governing class.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#137

Post by honopu »

bmj wrote: post #128
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.

What about programmers automating other programmers out of jobs? My employer's core product line is designed in such a way that it can be configured for specific customers via an API. Much of that work is done by "operations developers." The complexity of their work varies based on the customer's needs. We are currently developing a designer tool that will allow the configuration to be developed via a graphical inter…

That’s creating efficiency, that’s what we do. Or am I missing something?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#138

Post by vinceguidry »

3pt14159 wrote: post #129
vinceguidry wrote: post #4

If you're coding for a non-technical business, i.e. one in which they're not directly selling your productive output, then it's not hard at all to get to a point where your daily tasks don't take more than a few minutes a day. After all, it's other people that are actually driving the revenue. You can ask for more duties, but their capacity to define tasks for you is never going to outpace your ability to deliver. My…

The key for this type of setup is to make sure that they understand your job is like that of a security guard. You're there for when all your carefully coded alarms start going off. You're not there to help shovel the sidewalk because then you might miss your alarms. As long as that is properly understood you can get a contract that is permissive enough to allow you to work on something else at work when nothing is b…

The key to this, and I meant to edit this into my comment, is to be super-responsive to any requests. Always be willing to drop whatever you're doing at a second's notice and help whoever it is that thinks you might be able to help them out. The word gets out and everyone in the company just loves you.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#139

Post by derefr »

honkycat wrote: post #118

I've never understood the profound lack of drive and ethics it takes to automate your own job and then conceal it from your employer. The worst jobs I have ever had have ALWAYS been the ones where I'm not contributing to my company in an obvious way, or at consulting firms where we consistently kick ass and finish our sprints early, and then goof off for days on end.

> profound lack of drive

That assumes you want to be doing the thing you're doing, rather than some other thing (which potentially doesn't generate money.)

Professionally, I'm a programmer. I write code for money.

But vocationally, I'm an author. You know what the best job in the world would be, for me? One where I'm paid a living wage to do nothing at all. Then I would have the free time, the energy, and the resources to write books.

"Why not just become a professional author?" Well, because being a professional author is only a little bit about writing books. A lot of being a professional author is about selling books. Going on tour to signings, appearing on morning talk-shows, and just generally running the business of extracting royalties from your book.

But I am not, vocationally, a businessman who happens to be good at writing books, and so sees that as an appealing strategy toward an end-goal of "making money." No, I'm an author. I love writing, not money. I love seeing people's smiles when I reach them with my writing. Money is a means to that end—a way to keep me alive so I can keep doing the thing that makes me happy. If I could be kept alive and functioning and able-to-write without any income, I'd gladly have none.

I would say that I have plenty of drive. Just... not for doing the thing that I do for money.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#140

Post by sbinthree »

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…

Diligence is morally but not necessarily economically valued.
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