This is freaking hilarious.
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LOL he should set up a company automating software testing, Genius!
Actually as more jobs become more automated I think we should be able to hand our jobs over to our automated brethren/creations but still get paid. Unfortunately the only way to do this now is to set up an automation company to do your former job.
As a dreamer I love the idea of turning up to a job with a robot, setting it up to do my job and walking out.
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Showed the article to an engineering friend of mine. His response was âIâd have been working multiple places âremotelyââ.
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At one of my previous jobs, a big part of my duties involved creating graphical mock-ups of user interfaces. The business people and back-end folk would get together in a meeting, and determine what they wanted the software to do. Once they had hashed that out, they would throw their guidelines over to me and tell me to put together some static images to show them what the final UI would look like.
I was pretty good with Photoshop, so I put together some basic templates that would speed up the process of approximating the web-structures that the application would eventually be made out of. And I used these templates to cook up the mock-ups they wanted. The process took a while, as creating UI in a static drawing program doesnât just happen at the push of a button. But since I was already very familiar with HTML and CSS, I was able to get everything looking REALLY close to what it would eventually become. My employer loved the mock-ups I created, despite the time it took to crank them out.
But I was also a burgeoning programmer, and constantly getting better at it. Instead of just continuing to crank out static JPEGs, I peeled back the HTML and CSS of the application, and started standardizing and consolidating it into a more efficient form. I learned how to create dynamic directives using the companyâs server-side scripting language, and created a version of their front-end system that was way more clean and efficient. Once I had done this, I started using THAT to create the mock-ups, instead of the Photoshop files I had previously created. Now I could just use some quick-and dirty scripting to create a static, logic-free version of the interface, and just take a screenshot.
While I shared my accomplishment with some of the programmers on the team, I never actually bothered to tell upper management that I had altered my workflow in this fashion. They kept all of my projected time-lines the same, but thanks to what I had built, I could now finish the same amount of work in a fraction of the time. Mock-ups that used to take me ten or eleven hours now took less than one. For the last four or five months of that job, I basically got to coast, delivering the same amount and quality of work, but for a fraction of the time and effort.
Automation is the bomb.
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Yeah, seriously
If you are good enough to automate one job and get paid for it, do a second job remotely so that it looks like you are doing your first job, and make twice as much money
Then again, he could have just automated like 3 jobs at once, and if he got away with it for this long, he probably could have just put a maniquin with a picture of his face taped to the front of it and most of his coworkers probably wouldnât have noticed.
Seriously though, why would someone be so short sighted to do so little work that you forget all of your skills? I kinda donât feel bad for him probably not being able to get another job ever again. He sorta deserves it
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It is but if you look at the historic trend lines for income and GDP you will notice that it does not get people paid more, for doing more!
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LOL Technology is skill absorption, inherently you should be making better tools and technology to make your job easier e.g Unity â Multi-Platform Game Development.
All advances in technology reduce the skill / knowledge / energy / manpower needed to do a given task.
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Very true. This is part of the reason why I wasnât very aggressive in sharing my achievement with management. If they had ever fully grasped what I had created for them, they could have fired me, handed off what I had created to the nearest intern, and gotten similar results from them for a fraction of the cost. I had been in the business long enough not to shoot myself in the foot like that.
A clever programmer can use automation to reduce their workload in a hundred different ways. A wise programmer will make sure that they donât automate themselves out of a job. A lot of employers these days are far too eager to treat employees as disposable assets, instead of talent.
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Chances are he is among those who enter college to make a career of programming for reasons other than actually enjoying it. He could have simply slipped over time into bad work habits that resulted in this degree of automation but I canât imagine anyone who actually enjoys programming wouldnât at least try to keep current on their own.
If his job were stressful I could understand not spending much time on his own but that clearly wasnât the case here.
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Well, I donât disagree with that, Iâm happy as hell to not be writing my games with punch cards and crap like that. Making work easier and more efficient isnât a bad thing.
Iâm just saying this guy did this, then forgot how to program? He could have been more productive during those 6 years, not forgetting how to do what got him the job in the first place. Like, if I were in this guys shoes and did what he did, instead of just wasting away for 6 years, I would have probably been working on some awesome game. That way, I could work on the kind of work I actually wanted to do, while using the automated job money to pay the bills, and had a game I could sell on the side. And I wouldnât have lost my skills because I was too busy screwing around.
This guy just kinda sounds like a douche. If he hadnât become a lazy dirtbag in those 6 years, maybe heâd still be employable.
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remind me of that
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I think the problem is not in the programmer, itâs in the company he worked for, they should have spotted his talent and promoted his approach to automating the drudge out of work.
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Well thats the thing about this guy, he never looked to better himself, once he automated his work, he just kinda sat and screwed around for 6 years instead of trying to improve upon what he had built or try to become more valueable to the company, because he didnât care about his work.
I see no reason to promote someone like that. Granted, the blame falls to both sides, if it really took them this long to notice that they were effectively paying this guy to do nothing.
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Therein lies the problem of automation, do your work automatically and your classed as doing nothing, still expected to work the same hours, this is crazy in the very age of automation!
It could make a nice (horror?) story about a programmer that slowly but surely automates away every single person in the company.
It also reminded me of a (fictional) story used to explain common lisp macros. It had a guy that created a lot of snippets, then made snippets that create more snippets and in the end ended up automating everything.
Maybe itâs an industry thing? In my industry automating your own job is kind of expected.
My first boss told me in almost my first week âItâs not an engineers job to do the same thing twice. If you have to do the same thing twice you failed the first time.â The expectation is to automate common tasks, properly fix things so they never break again, and hand off low skilled repetitive work to low skilled workers (read cheaper workers).
Its generally expected that when you start a job you spend all 36 hours in a week on it. After six months you only need to spend 30 hours on it. After a year or two the same work might take 20 hours. You can spend the extra time improving your own skills, increasing the scope of the job, or preparing for your next role.
I got my first promotion largely as a result of automating some of the common job tasks I did. One of my early databases saved the company about 20 hours of labour a week. The company was happy to pay me a higher rate to do more work in less time. Later I did some mistake proofing on a system saved them millions of dollars in lawsuits, again the company was happy to increase my salary.
Its worth remembering that many businesses operate off of getting things done, not off of how many hours are worked. The worker in the OP should have approached his company after everything was first automated and said 'Guys, Iâve streamlined my 40 hour week down to 30 minutes. What else would you like me to do?" Any decent manager would have promoted him straight away, and set him to automating other tasks. A worker that can turn 40 hours into 30 minutes is incredibly valuable.
The worker was fired for his dishonesty and lack of initiative. Not for his ability to automate things.
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I think youâve articulated the point I was trying to make much better than I could. He never took it upon himself to better his skills with that extra time, and instead justâŚI wouldnât say took advantage of the company nessessarily, but this is what I mean by getting paid to do nothing. Yeah, he did make a very efficient system, which is a good thing, but the fact that he then did nothing after that is what would annoy me if I were the employer.
So what I mean is not spesifically the act of automation, so much as this spesific case. Above is what I was trying to say, except better
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What if that was his first job, was it really his fault?
Lack of inititive and dishonesty are traits that transcend work experience.
If he was skimming money from the company bank account, should he have been let off the hook because âit was his first job?â
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