Programmer automates his job, gets fired after 6 years | Hacker News Reader

Programmer automates his job, gets fired after 6 years

interestingengineering.com

27 pointstonteldoos14 comments

Oh, I have an even better one for all of you along similar lines. Dug it out of Wayback Machine. Company thought it was one of those "advanced persistent threat" malware from super-hackers in China. Nope. The enterprise just hired someone who was as enterprising as them. :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130320154454/http://securitybl...

Led me to create a security scheme for pulling off the same thing without detection. Depends on circumstances of course. Posted it on Schneier blog with the rest of my essays. I still wonder if I was first to do security scheme or protocol for self-outsourcing. Fun thought experiment if nothing else.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/friday_squid_b...

...and that's why it's a bad idea to separate QA from your dev team. In the long run, everyone would've been happier if his role on the dev team had been to automate the tests and then continue to work on more interesting things. If he and his company had taken that route, he'd be a very well-qualified and well-paid senior engineer right now.

Let me doubt this quite a bit. What he did was an impressive display of lack of foresight, career savy, professionnalism, interest in his professional work. What I'm saying is, engineers are thinking workers that need some indidual drive and forward thinking to succeed. He showed less ability for intrinsic motivation than a seven year old.

Probably a promotion would have been a better idea

I'd say $95k/year is a reasonable price to pay for something that (apparently) ran consistently and accurately. Would have been awesome to see what happens to his system now he's gone.

I'm assuming he made no documentation on his 'project'. If I was a dev who was assigned to the task of figuring out how it worked I'd have a jolly good time.

Would be amazing to see someone who is really good at software development doing something cool like that.

It absolutely would have been if he'd demonstrated what he'd done right at the beginning and went to work on something else. But to sit around collecting a paycheck for years is inexcusable. It doesn't matter how brilliant someone is.

> But to sit around collecting a paycheck for years is inexcusable. It doesn't matter how brilliant someone is.

Why is in inexcusable ? I wont mind if my employee does it. A lot of smart programmers finished their job in 4 hours and went home early. Got pay raises too.

Efficient work is hard to argue, but personally I see it as holding a level of contempt for your company.

I don't think I will punish my employee for having contempt for the company. That is how dictators work. If a smart employee holds my company in contempt I should probably figure out why.

I don't feel that it's the same thing here. I do agree that if someone is unhappy a decent manager should find out why and do what can be done to change it.

However, I see someone sitting back for six years without offering any input on improvements or anything, just literally collecting a cheque and doing nothing as not being efficient or showing motivation for the company.

I agree, it shows he's smart, though he doesn't show commitment in my opinion, which is why I wouldn't justify a promotion. That's just my thoughts on the matter.

Maybe in communism. Nothing wrong with a programmer taking a monkey automatable job and collecting pay checks after automating their job in capitalism. Imagine if he was self employed and did the same...

He got all the work that he was assigned done. There is nothing unethical about collecting a paycheck for getting your work done.

It's pretty clear management at that company is woeful if it is possible to automate all your work on a damn software project. Woeful management embarrassed by it and busts out the fire-hammer. Who are they? Short them?

Maybe he should work in dev ops...

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