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Coders Automating Their Own Job

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Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#221

Post by peteforde »

eksemplar wrote: post #158
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…

With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sq…

I had to Google RPA. Never heard of any of those tools.

What I have heard of - and directly witnessed - is MS Access and MS Excel being used by non-developers to build surprisingly powerful tools to solve their most acute problems.

They often don't even realize that they are programming.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#222

Post by peteforde »

analog31 wrote: post #176
peteforde wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I find maddening about this topic is the assumption that people who automate their jobs won't take the new time they get back and put it to better use. For some, that could be learning skills or working on a startup, and others might just want to spend time with their kids. That said, it seems incredibly wrong to judge someone for being clever enough to relax and get paid for it. And if someone enjoys…

I wonder if it's possible to turn things around for some people: Sitting around relaxing, and then doing their work in bursts of cleverness, may be a coping mechanism for someone who has a hard time staying continuously busy all day long. Or maybe there's a sliding scale between those extremes. I fall somewhere towards the side that you might guess, since I'm defending it here. ;-) I don't necessarily automate my job…

While not everyone on HN is a developer, it does tend to skew that way so I don't feel guilty pointing out how frustrating it is to measure the output of a top programmer.

Often, a mature codebase shrinks as code quality improves. This drives the efficiency wonks absolutely bonkers.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#223

Post by peteforde »

godelski wrote: post #189
imgabe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this doesn't quite get it. Will "hard work" lead to success? No, not exactly. I don't think anyone believes that. A prisoner in a work camp works hard. Hard work combined with personal agency leads to success. Are you responsible for yourself? That is, are you taking responsibility for yourself? If so, you will find a way to make yourself successful. If you are looking for someone else to take responsibility…

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 propose an alternative lens:

What if "luck" was actually just an individual's ability to perceive an opportunity... intersected with their own feeling that they have permission to act upon it?

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#224

Post by zhte415 »

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…

> the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial.

> Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat.

Absolutely. A minor observation I have, living in Operations/Finance. Don't merge cells in Excel. Observing a spreadsheet is a fantastic indicator of an individual's knowledge of automation vs manual process. Someone that uses lists without merged cells is someone that not only can save days of of the year with pivottables, various forms of looking up, but probably has the idea of 'tables' 'if' and 'for' in their head.

This is a great kicking-off point for coaching through ugly VBA. I like VBA. It's also often the only choice in corporate environments. But it is an option, and the chance to coach someone that's on the edge of...

> I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat.

...to push over that edge.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#225

Post by drawkbox »

hinkley wrote: post #123
pvarangot wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

> The problem with doing something right the first time is nobody appreciates how hard it was.

Sometimes if you do put in quality and do it right in development it costs you in time and then by perception.

When you hit the ship date over finishing the iteration/version/product you have problems after ship from external customers, when you do it right and handle the problem in development before ship, you take a hit in perception internally.

The problems after ship can harm a product/company more than a slight delay in shipping, but today it seems people don't care as much as there is more specialization and larger teams where it is 'not my problem'. Some clients/project managers see a bad product shipped on time as good, and a good product shipped late as always bad. The external perception should play more into that perception not just hitting their part of the project goals/milestones.

Hitting dates is hugely important, but messing up a product with the customer can be deeply problematic. Noone truly remembers a late product after it ships and is quality, creative and functional, they remember a bad product.

I prefer the Valve Time [1] philosophy, get the product right over the date, and don't set dates until you have the product actually ready.

[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#226

Post by maire »

zhte415 wrote: post #224
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…

> the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial. > Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat. Absolutely. A minor observation I have, living in Operations/Finance. Don't me…

It all depends on who is rewarded for the automation. Salaried employees who automate are generally recognized for the productivity that automation provides. Low level data entry people are not rewarded.

Your story reminds me of my son who graduated with a liberal arts degree right after the financial crash. He completely automated his first job (using excel and VBA) and was not rewarded. Long story short, he went back and got a masters in EECS and works where productivity is recognized.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#228

Post by ctchocula »

Zarath wrote: post #202
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…

"is there inherent nobility in work itself?" Nietzsche would hate this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality Working is the opposite of noble in the traditional sense of the word.

Depends on what you mean by "traditional". Even in the New Testament, you'll find passages like 2 Thessalonians 3:10: 'For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.' There are probably examples from the Old Testament as well.

Perhaps Nietzsche, with his critique of traditional Christian values, can be seen as a reaction against Christianity.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#229

Post by Immortalin »

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 "…

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.

Re: Coders Automating Their Own Job

#230

Post by knurdle »

At the first internship I had in the late 90's, part of my job was taking these text files full of data and creating these huge excel reports with them. It was something that would take a few hours to do because of how much data there was. I taught myself VBA and wrote up this little program where you just upload the file and it spit out the report in about a minute. I luckily had a boss who saw the potential in that and while I wasn't promoted, I was just an intern after all, at the end of the summer, I was the only intern the company kept. And they moved me all around the company to different departments and I learned a ton and it was a great experience. I did automate a few departments to the point where people who were doing full time work had their work cut down to couple of hours a day at most. I finally left when my friends who started doing internships at these "internet" companies were getting paid more than I was and I had asked for a raise and didn't get it.
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