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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 pkrasimirov on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:40AM (4 children)
And here I am fighting with people at my work place who are trying to un-automate stuff so they justify hiring a hoard of outsourced "resources" just to become bigger managers, headcount-wise, then jump the ship with better-looking CV.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:08PM (3 children)
Same. Biggest issue is our "user provisioning" team. A year ago, if you needed a new account on a Unix server you submitted a ticket, had your manager approve it, and got the new account in under a week.
Now you submit the request, and they have to approve it, so that they can send it back to you so that you can send it to your manager so they can approve it to send it back to the user provisioning team so that they can actually work on it. Or, more likely, they'll kick it back again and tell you that you gave the wrong user ID (ie, it says "user ID" and we used to always use our username, but now they demand it be our numeric employee ID instead -- so why isn't it a numeric-only field?) or put something in the wrong format -- often without actually explaining what exactly it is that they want you to change, frequently without even mentioning which part of the form has an issue. So now it takes two or three weeks to even be allowed to ask your manager to approve the ticket...and they don't even notify you when they return a ticket, so you won't know until you go check it manually. Meaning they get to claim that they've greatly improved their response time while doing less actual work and doing it slower. There's even certain classes of errors which the ticketing system used to reject automatically, but which it now allows through just so that they can wait a couple days and reject it manually so it's not sitting in their queue...friggin' ridiculous, and our department's management knows they're doing this, they've called them out for doing this, but nobody cares and nothing changes because the only thing that's REALLY important is the stats they send to the C-levels. Doesn't matter if the stats are faked at the expense of actually getting stuff done, the important thing is that the stats look good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:13PM
I am currently being paid a lot of money to sort this type of cap out and get it surrogates end to end.
Hard to do even when the tools work but well worth doing. Great job satisfaction when it goes in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:27PM (1 child)
SN should have a thread for everyone to contribute their "war stories". I love reading these, and have a few crazy things to contribute myself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:02AM
It's called http://thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]