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The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job 3

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drawoh

drawoh

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Oct 1, 2002
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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?

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He go fired because he was lazy, selfish, and had zero work ethic.

He was obviously overqualified for the work assigned, yet, for 6 yrs lived off the dole, essentially. He could have offered his services to other departments or asked for more responsibilities or other things to automate. Instead, he decided the "right" thing to do was to pretend to go to work and goof off 40 hrs a week. I'd fire him for his crappy (non-existent) work ethic.

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Well, coders by definition write code. If he could automate his job like that, I also wouldn't say he was being employed appropriately. Which brings us to the real issue - the company.
I suspect most of us have had the joy, at some point, of labouring under some clueless middle management type who wouldn't recognise or care about improvement or innovation unless the upper levels told them to. Hell, they wouldn't be capable of an original thought without specific instruction. If the guy was locked into a place like that, for whatever reason, AND WAS ON SALARY, then, *is* it ethically wrong? The company still gets the value they paid for, in a most basic form of the transaction.
Personally, I get bored too easily to be able to do that. I'd be hunting for other things to do within a week, after the shine wore off.
But, it's an interesting ethics question nonetheless.
 
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Mongrel said:
clueless middle management type who wouldn't recognise or care about improvement or innovation unless the upper levels told them to
Click to expand...

Very true. I've heard of the guy who was given job, office, and then spent 4 years waiting for someone to come over and give him an assignment. Then his contract expired.

I guess "the middle manager" was told that he has to employ the programmer, but was never told why.

I am worried more about places where "system administrators" spend countless hours manually browsing thru files, looking for who knows what, doing meaningless tasks, 95 % of which could be done by a script.

So, what is more ethical, automating your work or putting job security first?

And by the way, what will happen when script stops working and the guy who wrote it is no longer with the company?

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
 
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"spent 4 years waiting for someone to come over and give him an assignment"

We hired a lump on a log like that. He was perfectly happy sitting in his cube, reading trade mags, and waiting for someone to give him an assignment. Gack!

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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@IRstuff: So, in your company you don't tell new hires what they are hired for? Are they supposed to walk around begging for work?

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
 
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They're hired for a position, not a task. The tasks are assigned by the manager, and if you're sitting there without a task, then you're that George in Dilbert. Seriously now, 4 yrs of doing nothing is is likewise a bad work ethic; either that, or he was playing League of Legends with the other guy.

Is that the work ethic you want to teach your children?

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I see so much in terms of processes that never gets fixed because you don't have anyone who is lazy enough to want to put in time to fix the problem. A quote that is attributed to Bill Gates is "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it"

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
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""I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it""

But, they can't be so lazy that they don't report that they solved the problem months ago. I'm not like that; I once had a supposedly VERY DIFFICULT floating point divide problem on a processor that was supposedly going to require months to find a solution and I wound up reporting that the root cause was identified after the second week (I actually figured it out the first week [banghead] and reverified it several times before I reported the solution the following week, which then closed out my contract). But, that would have a clear violation of ethical principles had I dragged it on.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I'd have laid off both programmers' managers for failing to supervise their employees' workload and methods, not the programmers themselves who are obviously significantly better than their predecessors.
 
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I've worked several places that fired people for not finding work. Managers think they are too busy to bother with the task. I think that is a piss poor manager.
 
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That's a new paradigm: employees are expected to act as entrepreneurs, without getting entrepreneurial share of profits.

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
 
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I have had to beg for work at several places but never in consulting.

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
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"employees are expected to act as entrepreneurs, without getting entrepreneurial share of profits."

Haven't actually seen a case of that in this thread. If anything, they essentially kept the company from realizing any productivity gain there might have been.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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they essentially kept the company from realizing any productivity gain there might have been.
Click to expand...

Disagree. Their management kept the company from realizing productivity gains, not the programmers. Individual employees typically have (at most) project management and project budget control, not product/project line control and should not be jumping/billing other projects without management's approval. I can understand disciplining an employee who sat idle a few days without informing management, no manager needs to know employee workload or methods 100% and helping management like this is a matter of basic courtesy. However, an employee sitting idle for years is on their management as clearly management is clueless to both workload and methods and unable to extract value from their employees. I'd wager at some point during this time these employees received positive feedback from the same clueless managers.
 
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I don't disagree that the management was obviously incompetent, but an employee taking advantage of that incompetence for their own gain is not someone I want as an employee either. They could have done the "right" thing by telling their incompetent manager that they automated the process and need more responsibilities, but they didn't do that, and instead they kept it a secret and wasted away years where they could have been doing something productive that would have helped them further their career.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Just to stir the pot a bit: Let's say this guy had, in fact, told his manager that he automated the job. If the manager isn't capable of understanding what he's talking about, or interested in finding out, then what? It's entirely possible to explain in explicit detail something that you've done,and have the middle management type in charge of you just glaze over and pass you off with a "well done, now get back to work". So then you stop and think - maybe there's no other work for you to do at the company. Maybe the job market for your specialisation is saturated, and you can't see another job on the horizon very quickly. And hell, you're getting paid a salary to produce a certain result, which is happening. 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?
 
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