Now that I'm a mid-career software developer, I'm making my highest salary so far and I do maybe two hours of work a week, so I agree with the "more pointless the job, the higher the pay" comment. At least when I flipped burgers, people were being fed.
Sometimes people are really busy because they are doing a bad job.
Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice.
The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.
> Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
[0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...
This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the company 8 hours a week because somebody was doing by hand what I did in a few lines of code.
Is that "positive value"? Sure, I made the company more efficient, but what's this person doing now? Did I make their job "more pointless"? I mean, I can't see what I did as a bad thing per se but... I just don't know how it plays out in the end.
I feel like there's a huge piece of the "work" puzzle that's missing in our culture.
When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could easily maintain what I had left behind.
And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should work; people should think."
I believe I am dead weight at my company.
Maybe, but that's not the whole explanation. The whole explanation includes job duties that now involve managing a team, performing analysis and leadership functions for several business areas, setting agency standards, and so on. None of those tasks appear as commits in the version control system but still are assigned tasks that take up time.
When I am working on code I often still don't have the commit. A team member may come to me, "I have a question, I'm stuck on this part..." Then together we will investigate and discover a way forward. I'll then leave it to them to complete and commit it. Their name is the only name on the commit, but did I add any value? I hope so!
The end result was that the more responsibility I had, the less code I wrote.