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from the auto-programmatic-asphyxiation dept.
The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job
In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: "From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work." As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality assurance job, he had fully automated his entire workload. "I am not joking. For 40 hours each week, I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years, I have maybe done 50 hours of real work." When his bosses realized that he'd worked less in half a decade than most Silicon Valley programmers do in a week, they fired him. The tale quickly went viral in tech corners of the web, ultimately prompting its protagonist to delete not just the post, but his entire account.
About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?" The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry"—and, six months ago, writing scripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, their employee simply did flawless work.
The post proved unusually divisive, and comments flooded in. (It's now been viewed nearly half a million times.) Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. Etherable never responded to the ensuing discussion. Perhaps spooked by the attention—media outlets around the world picked up the story—the user vanished, leaving that sole contribution to an increasingly crucial conversation about who gets to automate work, and on what terms.
Call it self-automation, or auto-automation. At a moment when the specter of mass automation haunts workers, rogue programmers demonstrate how the threat can become a godsend when taken into coders' hands, with or without their employers' knowledge. Since both FiletOFish1066 and Etherable posted anonymously and promptly disappeared, neither were able to be reached for comment. But their stories show that workplace automation can come in many forms and be led by people other than executives.
Career suicide: The most important job for programmers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:50AM (4 children)
I'm a manager. I manage a team of 5 support engineer. When I joined my company, the team - that was already there - was overworked, and among other things, I was hired to prioritize emergencies, deal with angry customers and try to streamline the support process. I was also hired to produce KPIs every months - something the previous manager never found time to do.
It turned out the team wasted a lot of time doing stuff inefficiently in our inept ticketing system, and wasting a lot of time issuing the same commands and waiting for the same slow results from stupid online tools all day long. As for the KPIs, it involved wrangling data out of said ticketing system, then literally spending days massaging it in gigantic Excel files.
So the first thing I did was code tools to augment the ticketing system's capabilities and automate repetitive tasks, and gave them to my guys. I also made a cron job that generates the KPIs automatically every 20 minutes - complete with graphics and everything - into a couple of webpages, the URL of which I gave to my boss. All that took me about 3 months.
Now my team has a normal-to-low workload. I have spare man/hours to ask the guys to create documentation on the side, create more useful tools of their own - so they can automate their own job any way they want - and follow training sessions to improve their skillset. Net result: the whole team sort of manages itself now. I pretty much just watch it tick along, tweak this or that process to make things even more efficient, and deal with people stuff - things that aren't really rocket science.
The guys are happy because they have time to work correctly and without stress. The customer are happy because we respond quicker. My boss is happy because he has his indicators in real time. I'm happy because I'm well paid to do an easy, no-stress job. Did I ever do the management I was hired for? No: I coded my way out of it. Best of all: I did it with my boss' full knowledge and blessing :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)
I see a lot of inefficiencies similar to this that I complain about, but the complaints are ignored despite giving lots of details and anecdotes. I don't rank high enough and/or don't have enough connections. I'm not management-level.
I don't mean to demean your profession, but general management doesn't have to hire a project manager to find out the bottlenecks, just ask around and/or do a survey.
Get a draft list of alleged bottlenecks, and have everybody rank them, and add up the scores to see which are the biggest.
However, project managers are useful for coordinating teams to implement solutions once known.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:13AM
I see a lot of inefficiencies similar to this that I complain about, but the complaints are ignored despite giving lots of details and anecdotes. I don't rank high enough and/or don't have enough connections. I'm not management-level.
I don't mean to demean your profession, but general management doesn't have to hire a project manager to find out the bottlenecks, just ask around and/or do a survey.
My "profession" as a manager (it's not really a profession if I'm honest) is misunderstood: bad managers obviously waste everybody's time and money. But good managers appear to do that too, because everything seems to work well without them seemingly doing anything.
As for the inefficiencies I found when I arrived, maybe I had the liberty of deciding to deal with them myself without asking anyone's permission because I'm management-level and I can (still) code. The guys in the team were perfectly aware of the things they wasted time on, but none of them had the authority or the time to say "I'll stop doing what I do and I'll fix the tools now". I did. So maybe a manager shouldn't have been doing what I did, strictly speaking, but in the end I was useful :)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:07AM
Years ago I did this kind of thing. It was fun. Something I did on the side. Then it became my job. Spot the manual repetitive work, propose and spec a solution, build it, deploy it, do it again. Then we merged. I felt the synergy. The new manager, newly promoted during the merger even though they were "finding efficiencies at the mid level manger range" told me bluntly to find a real job. They could not believe that I came to work and did no work.
You do what? Continual service improvement? You 'replace people with a small shell script'? No. Not any more. We arr not paying for that.
So I became an admin for a team looking for a spare administrator.
A couple of years ago they started saying Agile this, collaborate that, innovate everything.
Duck that. Duck them all.
I watched them struggle to innovate. Fail to automate. Fail to connect systems. Waste money.
Recently I found a new job. It's the same job I had over a decade ago. The Wheel came full circle. Note I am an Automation Specialist. Go figure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:40PM
Let me give you a peak at your future. The next market downturn will see your 5 person team reduced to 2. It just hasn't happened yet.