This article came up on Slashdot, and is linked to an article on Atlantic. I wonder just how complicated these jobs were. Was the first guy fired because he had automated himself out of work, or because his automated self was doing crappy work?
"I can see where the guy would decide, well, I told the boss, he doesn't care, and I have a secure job here. How hard do I really want to rock this boat?"
Sure, but wasting 4 years playing League of Legends? That basically makes that guy a "doesn't care" guy too. Apparently, he didn't share his app with any co-workers either.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
They were hired to do a job. They did the job. Nothing wrong with that. Why should an employee feel obligated to deliver more output than current market conditions suggest his pay is worth. If employees are to be entrepreneur's as individuals even while working for a company then finding ways to deliver the requested work for less personal input is their right. What is the employees motivation to improve his efficiency if he gets a small fraction of the benefit in return. I know the old moral rule from prior times about everyone doing their best at all times is ingrained in some peoples thinking but recent corporate management trends have eliminated that motivation in anyone who thinks about his situation as an employee. We are told from some corners that it's every man for himself. Well ya reap what ya sow they say.
"We are told from some corners that it's every man for himself."
That's basically anarchy, which is the opposite of civilization. We don't shoplift the grocer simply because we can and because they don't have sufficient cameras or whatever.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Whilst this discussion is about coding , automation can happen in other ways too. Back in the 70s I worked for a company that had a printed circuit board division. They were making jumper cards for a cable company, thousands of them. The workers took the cards printed like a bunch of postage stamps, sheared them apart in one direction, then the other direction to get the finished card. They then had to deburr the card. They were paid on a piecework rate for this. I made a frame carrier to enable the entire pc board layout to be put into a turret press, found a flat punch and die set of the correct dimensions, and in 2 minutes produced an hours worth of pc jumper cards. When the boss saw the number I had produced at the price they gave for the hand produced cards, he went berserk, calling me a cheat and refusing to pay.
Of course this kind of reaction is what causes people who find quicker easier ways to do their job to shut up about it.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
"When the boss saw the number I had produced at the price they gave for the hand produced cards, he went berserk"
This is one of the guys that should definitely be sacked; luckily, not all managers are that dimwitted. A halfway smart manager would have immediately recognized the opportunity to multiply their profits many-fold. He would copy your approach, hire one guy at a fixed hourly wage to do what you did, fire all these other guys, charge the same amount for the product, and make out like a bandit.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Ir,
They did not do that. We had a group conference with my manager, the industrial engineer and the companies general manager. I got paid a small bonus for coming up with the idea, the industrial engineer re-planned the job utilizing the new methods, I had, come up with, and they set a much lower piecework price for the job. I never did get the original piecework price for the original batch of parts produced by the new method under the old route sheet.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
I was giving this some thought while commuting the last week.
I think the problem is not the employee, not the manager, but more the company culture.
If you somehow automate your job, your employer could say "Good job!", give you a big bonus, and put you to work on something more important. Or they can say "Great! Well, we don't need you any more, don't let the door hit you on the way out!" So accomplishing that could work very much in your favor, or could put you out on the street. I would venture to guess that most employees have a pretty good idea of which way this would go at their particular places of employment. And likely, the ones mentioned in the article simply acted accordingly.
Note that a third avenue is, having figured out how to automate your job, simply don't do it and don't tell anyone, and keep doing things the old way for the benefit of job security.
I remember a former boss bemoaning the fact that "Employees don't have any company loyalty anymore, not like in the old days!" Now, this was at a construction company, and their practice, if a crew ran out of work, they got sent home, no hours, no check, no pay, so basically just laid off the minute they hit a dead spot. So the company had zero loyalty towards employees, but couldn't understand why employees didn't have loyalty towards them. But employees do figure this stuff out, and if you're out the door the first time the company can save a nickel doing it, employees are going to keep that in mind as they go about their business.
J Stephen,
You used to see that a lot in the aircraft industry. They would have a contract for a finite number of aircraft and as the contract wound down, people would get slower and slower, because they knew, that when those parts were finished they were out the door.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
Somewhat related post about finding one’s own work and being an entrepreneur.
I just started my second job and have ended up in a similar situation to my last workplace where I have no real day to day tasks and I have the opportunity(trying very hard not to take it) of being lazy similar to the programmers in the story.
This is more of a sanity check than a request for advice. Are engineering corporations like this everywhere nowadays? Does anyone train or manage young employees? I have yet to work somewhere where I feel like I’m not sitting on the fringes of a dysfunctional corporation. I am perfectly fine taking ownership of a problem and don’t need to have my hand held, but I feel as though I am adrift in an ocean trying to be useful in some way.
The issue is really more that most managers rise up from being normal engineers, and the faster a company grows, the more likely it is that the managers don't know how to manage, mainly because they've not had good examples.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
It looks more like managers are rising from people who don't understand what engineers do and how they do it.
So they are totally clueless about how to task engineers and how to follow-up.
"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
"people who don't understand what engineers do and how they do it"
Not necessarily; just because you know how to follow orders does not mean that you can generate multiple orders for multiple people in a meaningful way. This is pretty obvious on any of the cooking competitions where individual chefs are great, but they often suck at trying to get a team to a common goal.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Sounds like the worst variety of inefficient management - micromanagement. Managers shouldn't be assigning tasks, only projects, they have enough to worry about firefighting their team's various projects' needs and reviewing work/direction, budget, schedule.
