Coding Oneself Out of a Job

Coding oneself out of one’s job – that’s an interesting concept but this article says that there are a few that are doing it. Note, these programmers are self-motivated to automate the routine boring part of the job. I have always automated aspects of my job but not to the full extent as these coders do. There are probably two reasons for this: 1) I probably don’t know how to program some of the logic to automation and 2) there’s some decision making, such as forecasting, that I don’t leave to automation. I use whatever tools I have on hand to help me do parts of my job better. If all of my job was automatable and I could program it, I probably would have tried to do so just out of curiosity to see how I would do it.

The other interesting part of the article is what one would do with one’s freed up time. It seems like some of the programmers just played games or watch video or things of that nature. A few would try to seek new challenges and learn something new. Interesting…I’ve never thought about using that freed up time to “play” around as I had so much other stuff to do, mainly a lot of stuff that I knew I could automate and would promptly set to work automating. Or I would work on seeing if there was anything in the data that could be gleaned. I always found some other challenge to work on. If I’m playing around, then it would generally be because I’m looking for ideas on how to do things better or what is coming around the corner that I might co-opt for my job.

Finally, the third interesting thing about the article is the fact that some employers would fire their employee for programming their job. Instead of saluting them, giving them a raise and saying what else can you do, the employee would be fired. That seems to be a waste, although I’m not really surprised that it does happen. I once had quasi-automated my team’s reporting system, thus enabling us to put out approximately 100 reports every two weeks (something no other team was doing) and yet, my boss told me that each person in my team had to produce their own set of reports rather than use my “program”. Needless to say, I was stunned. How could one not want to take advantage of a system that benefited my team and our project managers? I had to tell the head of the project managers that the reporting system was going away and that prompted him and his assistant to call for a meeting with my boss, where we all agreed to continue to use my system. I dodged the bullet there.