Comment by martin-t
12 hours ago
Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue.
If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company.
To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.
This is just not true at all.
It is always in my self interest to automate my job as much as possible. Nothing looks better for moving up than this. Even more so, nothing makes me happier than automating a business process.
There are always so many various road blocks to automation it is hard to count.
It is like there is a type of entropy that increases over time that people are largely getting paid to keep at bay with simple business processes that can be easily adapted as things change. So often automation works great for a short time until this entropy breaks the automation. It doesn't take that many times for management to figure out the investment in automation gives poor returns.
it's a large human behavior question for me, the notion of work, value, economy, efficiency .. all muddied in there
- i used to work on small jobs younger, as a nerd, i could use software better than legacy employees, during the 3 months, i found their tools were scriptable so I did just that. I made 10x more with 2x less mental effort (I just "copilot" my script before it commits actual changes) all that for min wage. and i was happy like a puppy, being free to race as far as i want it to be, designing the script to fit exactly the needs of an operator.
- later i became a legit software engineer, i'm now paid a lot all things considered, to talk to the manager of legacy employees like the above, to produce some mediocre web app that will never match employees need because of all the middle layers and cost-pressure, which also means i'm tired because i'm not free to improve things and i have to obey the customer ...
so for 6x more money you get a lot less (if you deliver, sometimes projects get canned before shipping)
I had a broadly similar transition in feeling about my work.
It's not about how much I get paid. It's about realizing how much of the value I produce goes to me and how much goes to the owner class.
At least I never worked in a big corporation and I always had the ability to do work that directly benefited people using my code. But I still saw too much of the "I built this company" self-congratulatory BS from people who just shuffled money while doing 0 actual work.
I don't think ownership is theft, I just think it's distributed wrongly - to people who have money instead of to people who do work. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826823
even though my above message wasn't much about the corporate leeches, i did experience the fun of being my own boss in a way during covid doing mini gigs directly with people
there's a blend of "i'm my own man": i get the money and handle the responsibility on my own and it's thrilling feeling
i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut, but there's a kind of pleasure to also do your own business for a while
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Not always:
If you don’t automate it:
1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time
OR
1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road
If you do automate it
2a) your company thanks you then fires you
OR
2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget
————
2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen.
But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential.
Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives.
When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_.
Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation:
1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic.
2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward.
My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument.
What would that look like in practice?
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