51–60 of 499 posts
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.
One 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.
I once landed a job by telling the CEO something like, "If you're doing it right, programming is all about replacing yourself with automation." In Cybernetics there is a formal measure called Variety which is something like a limit or measure of complexity of a system. Programming can be considered the art of extracting the low-variety parts of a process into automation, leaving the high-variety parts to the (high-va…
I've done it a bunch of times, sometimes by accident.
In one case I was going to be assigned to do testing every evening. But I wanted to go home at 6 every day, so I automated the tests on my first day, then came back in the morning and started 'working on my next task'; never realizing that previously the testing job had been a full time position.
I ended up doing about 5 people's worth of work there that summer.
Of course, it's probably because the project wasn't particularly organized, and our team was explicitly given a free hand to find inefficiencies and fix them. Still, it's a nice story to tell people ;-)
One 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.
I once landed a job by telling the CEO something like, "If you're doing it right, programming is all about replacing yourself with automation." In Cybernetics there is a formal measure called Variety which is something like a limit or measure of complexity of a system. Programming can be considered the art of extracting the low-variety parts of a process into automation, leaving the high-variety parts to the (high-va…
> "If you could write a program that could replace yourself, would you?" I've done it a bunch of times, sometimes by accident. In one case I was going to be assigned to do testing every evening. But I wanted to go home at 6 every day, so I automated the tests on my first day, then came back in the morning and started 'working on my next task'; never realizing that previously the testing job had been a full time posit…
Granted the value created by such tasks usually isn't fairly compensated so there are a lot of societal issues.
In other words, I am automating away the job I don't want to do, to focus on the job that I want to to, and that will bring more value for the company. I don't expect the workload to ever decrease, just that our team will be able to tackle bigger issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'
It's fairly addictive automation, I'm finding all sort of functions and jobs that could / should be automated to the growing frustration of my colleagues :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we both have loose morals but I don't see it as cheating the employer anymore than one "cheats" an employer by driving to work instead of walking.
>I don't see it as cheating the employer anymore than one "cheats" an employer by driving to work instead of walking Can you expand on this? I don't understand the anology
Perhaps they're saying that the employer has to (indirectly) pay for a parking lot to accommodate them?