Coders Automating Their Own Job

> It's similar to how most people will complain about the traffic while a very small number of people will start companies to dig tunnels for maglev vehicles to travel on.

Well to be honest there's only a small number of people with the means and connections to even start such a venture.

The problem is automation is never truly automated in most jobs. There's always things that go wrong, always changes being proposed, always explaining needing to be done. Sure, you may find it easy to automate a report or data entry, but what if that data changes or the format changes? Then you have to fix the code.

The code is almost never trivial either. It often involves integrating complex systems and making sure that they work which, if done right, involves writing several unit tests.

Using God is a poor excuse to determine ethics because there's no evidence one exists. It's especially a problem when you don't share the code because then, instead of creating improvement to the job for the company as a whole, you've written a pass to be lazy. The real job comes from supporting whatever you write to the masses. If you don't have any interest in that, you're simply selfish.

The problem is people react in different ways, but it seems like the most common way is to not tell anyone which in my mind is foolish because even if you do get fired, you've improved your skills enough to find a better job anyway. Not only that, I can just as easily come up with an example of someone getting promoted for automating job tasks.

Yes, 'converts'. That's a whole different story.

Someone who is a 'huge believer' is utterly something different from someone who was born and raised Jewish, or Anglican and was raised that way.

Growing up Jewish/Catholic is mostly a matter of culture, tradition, community, it actually has less to do with faith. That's why I focused on 'attendance'.

They tend to be small-c conservative: normal jobs, kids attend school regularly, don't do drugs, eat reasonably well, vote, take out the garbage, stable family etc. etc..

'Converts' are a whole other issue because ironically people who grow up in a regular faith aren't likely to convert to much at all. Seekers, people who are emotional about stuff, people who have had major tragedies, drug problems, who had major family problems, maybe lived on the street ... those 'new beginning' people are often the most outwardly 'believing' but they represent a totally different cohort of behaviours.

The guy who was abused by his parents, lived on the street and smocked crack and then 'saw the light' and is a 'true believer' - this guy is going to bring most of his broken habits with him. This guy is not Ned Flanders.

The other issues is type of religion: Evangelicalism is kind of like a 'Church of Converts' - they are 'living in faith' type thing. The type who mostly watch 'Church on TV'. This is not the camp of people I mean. Again this is not about how someone outwardly talks about / believes in Jesus or whatever.

Old-school, traditional, mainline Churches are full of boring, very conscientious, small-c conservative people. This is my point. I'm not saying so much it's about faith per say, although that's probably related.

This is race to the bottom behavior which we largely got away from him post industrial revolution. It's well and good to want employees who are passionate about their jobs, but no one is passionate 100% of the time. The rest of the time, they're going through the motions of pretending to be so they don't get fired. We know this leads to bad results for society in the long run. Mass burnout isn't good for anyone. Which is why we have (mostly cultural) enforced limits on what employers are "allowed" to expect from their employees (like a 9 to 5.) No one has the energy to go above and beyond 100% of the time, and honestly expecting them to do so is delusional. Of course it's beneficial for individual companies to find ways to compel their employees to work more (whether it's "culture" or otherwise,) but it's very bad for the "system" if everyone is doing it. People need to have time to spend money and engage in meaningful leisure to keep the economy spinning.

The only real exception is employees who are really committed to the vision of the company. Ultimately though that's usually only the executive team and early hires since they're the only ones who (usually) materially share in the actual success of the vision beyond just keeping their job. Most of your frontline employees are not going to get any benefit from sacrificing their energy (and there is a real cost to this) and time to fulfill a vision they don't even really contribute to forming, besides just keeping their job. The incentives just aren't usually there. Furthermore, It's common for founders to be very deluded about how "laudable" the vision for their company is. There are very few companies that act as clearly morally good agents in the world. It's not a given that profit-seeking entities inherently behave in a way that's ethical. I just don't see how anyone could possibly expect employees to be 100% committed to executing on the vision of most b2b or even consumer facing businesses. Especially when they don't really reap the benefits of company success.

And yeah, you can argue that you're buying someone's time and you're entitled to expect 100% of their mental capacity etc... during that time. But like anything else in capitalism, you get what you pay for. There are plenty of other employers that don't expect that or don't have the time/resources/collective IQ to determine that you've automated, and I don't see why your employees wouldn't just go work somewhere where they can get away with doing 1/4 of the work for the same salary vis a vis automation unless you provide some extraordinary benefit just for being a "member" of your company. And if being challenged is important to the employee in question (I'm one of these) I'd just go find a job that pays 4x (or make my own) where I could be challenged. In general, you can't eat a corporate vision and it's just not that valuable for most workers (there really are exceptions, companies that are clearly "morally good", but that's the exception and not the rule.)

Which isn't to say it's fun to work at a place where people are just jumping through their daily assigned hoops. But speaking as an employee, I'm certainly not willing to put in extra effort at a company paying at or below market rate with bland corporate vision/culture and/or uninteresting problems. Which seems to be the expectation of most employers. I'm lucky to work at a company where even though I'm ambivalent about moral character of the product (it's b2b stuff, so morally neutral,) I'm well compensated and enjoy a flexible corporate culture and have interesting technical problems to solve. Ultimately though, most companies are bland (in terms of vision) somewhere on the scale of utterly toxic to tolerable (in terms of culture) and totally boring (in terms of the nature of the work.) If you're not paying above market rate in these situations, it's completely absurd to expect employees to give anything "extra." Speaking from experience, most founders/CEOs are completely deluding themselves about how many of the boxes on compensation/culture/vision/interest their company is checking.

And the beauty of being a trader/quant is that once you come up with such an automation, you will capture a lot of the upside as the company will not want to have you leave for a competitor and implement a similar strategy there.