Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script
Coders Automating Their Own Job
141–150 of 499 posts
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#142It 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…
Think about the cottage industry of programmers who produce and maintain Wordpress websites for their clients. I think just like any other industry, there is need for products on many points of the [mass produced bespoke] spectrum.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#143What's disappointing is the opening story of the QA guy who automated his job and then proceeded to spend time playing video games. To each their own how to use new-found efficiency, but if this person had truly automated their job in 50 hours, I'll bet someone within the company could find him something more interesting to do, for a lot more money.
I read r/financialindependence from time and time, and it's not uncommon for me to read about people who have nothing to do at their job. From their account, they ask for more work, but nothing comes, and they spend their days redditing and watching youtube. Thus, they want to retire ASAP as they find this mind-numbing.
This is completely bewildering for me. All managers I've had were always eager to pile on more work on my desk when I was starting to look like I was finishing something, sometimes to a fault.
Is it a US thing? Have you guys experienced something like that? What is it, something like having to keep people around to justify budgets?
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#144One perspective I haven't seen here yet: these employers are willing to pay an entire person-salary to get this task done. Therefore, if there was a SaaS service that did the same task, the company should be willing to pay a person-salary worth of money for that SaaS product.
So why not build the automation in your free time, knock out a little website with a Stripe subscription form to sell it, convince your boss to pay for this SaaS service instead of paying you to do it, and then ask if they have any other work for you to do?
If they do, great: now you're making 100% of your salary from the SaaS (and you can grow it from there if you like), and then 100% of your salary again because they've retained you to do a new thing.
If not, great: now you can quit and do what you like and continue to receive 100% of your previous salary in passive SaaS-business income.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#145It 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…
Those "operations" engineers can be moved to making sure Ops are running well at home (you apparently have an API) or into Technical Sales if they'd rather stay in the field. Informing the customer of all the configuration that is available to them, for example. Just because there's a nice graphical configuration tool, doesn't mean any clients are actually going to look at it when they have an issue. They'd much rather call you up and bitch about it. Operations guy's job is safe, but he might be able to address more customers than he could before.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#146I'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 progr…
just came back from the Grace Hopper Celebration, I love this as a summary of her work! really cool person who I hadn’t known much about before
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had senior people change habits and practices but at the expense of huge failures or years of leading by example. The patience and the effort are humongous and almost ridiculous when you compare them to how quarterly or even bi-quarterly planing cycles look.
Early in my career, the concept that someone might know of a showstopping problem and chose to do nothing left me appalled and feeling rather betrayed. Fifteen years later I sit in meetings telling people (some of them still older than me) not to touch the stove because it will hurt, and I have to patiently wait until someone gets hurt before we can discuss the proverbial oven mitts. The problem with doing something…
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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#148One thought that keeps me awake at night is that my past automation work has cost others their jobs. I understand that that's "how the world works", but it still deeply affects me that people have lost their livelihoods because of my actions.
That makes no sense. If people were doing jobs that could literally be replaced by automation, they were not great jobs and either soul destroying or they would have gone away anyway. Progress enables productivity which is a net win for everyone, your work has contributed to productivity a LOT more than the work of the people who needed to move on. Without technology we’d almost all be in poverty.
You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions there.
In the end you're probably right for a population of people. I'm not talking about that, though - I'm talking about very specific people with families to feed.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#149I 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.
Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job
#150Earlier 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…
Body shops don't work like this. Their purpose is to put butts in seats, regardless of whether or not that butt is attached to anything else that is functional. Functioning in this manner would actually be counter-productive for them, because it would reduce the number of butts that they have to put into seats, and would reduce the number of seats into which they could put butts.
If you know of a development agency, odds are that it is probably a body shop.
The places that do work like this are more like Unicorns. And Unicorns are damned hard to find and hire -- or get hired by them.