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Comment by omscs99 | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off

Seems to me like you’re assuming that the economy incentivizes efficiency. Imo it doesn’t, it’s just a bunch of stupid rich people sloshing money around (for the most part). None of it makes any sense

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I was a temporary worker at a field dispatch office. We had to telephone all of our technicians and enter their time into a time sheet. This was approximately 1990, and it turns out all the technicians had email. Since the time recording format was very simple, I worked out a shell script to Let them enter their time in an email message, mail it to me, then my forward rules would pipe it through a shell script, a couple of ANSI codes later, and the time was entered automatically into the system. I would check it for accuracy, but it saved me having to Tab/enter about 25 times per employee just to get to the part where I entered their time. Literally it was five minutes per person including voice comms time reduced to 30 seconds.

A senior dispatcher got wind of it. She went to the boss’ boss’ boss, and complained that “this boy is going to computerize us out of a job.”

It wasn’t long before I was summoned to appear. Three things happened at that meeting. The Uber boss told me to keep it on the down low. He also gave me a copy of his shell script programming book. And finally, he told me to get the heck out of there, go back to school and stop putzing around at a job like this before you end up becoming a middle manager like himself in a career with low reward.

> if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it?

More likely she would be hauled up in front of a gang of rabid, frightened, myopic and punitive ICT managers where she'd be reprimanded for breaking a litany of "policies".

In these kinds of places you are not supposed to think, there, computers are not intelligence amplifiers or "bicycles for the mind"; they are more akin to the presses and looms in dark satanic mills.

I synthesize proteins to sell on an industrial scale. When I started working here a few years ago I noticed much of the programming/prep work could be easily automated, so I did. In many cases I could at least double productivity.

None of these improvements ever resulted in getting a raise, or a faster promotion, or getting to go home earlier. All it earned me was extra time to do other people's work, or to stare at the floor and look like a lazy unproductive employee.

I never had any real expectations otherwise; I did it out of boredom. But still I feel stupid for having done it at all.

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate.

The reward is more time. Now where that time is spent is another story.

Sounds like you're implying that that newly spared time would be hers to spend and not her employers?

If she keeps her mouth shut about it, definitely.

Of course. She was presumably hired for regular office work, not R&D.

why not? she needs to be rewarded for that automation somehow.

Realistically that reward is going to be:

1. more work

2. nice words and then more work

3. nice words, more work and then she is asked to do the same for another person's task who is then fired

Sorry to be cynical here, but it is very rare for managment to reward the few people that do a better than good job with more free time or less work.

She doesn't have to tell anyone

Exactly my point. But if you are a manager, you might wanna consider if that is the incentive structure you wanna have at your organization: People who do good work get "punished" with more work, people who keep it low don't.

I certainly have left jobs because of that.

I think about incentive structures from an opportunity cost standpoint too.

Everyone has finite amounts of time they can spend on work.

Ceteris paribus, if you spend 90% of your time working and 10% politicking, at most companies you will be out promoted by someone who spends 60% of their time working and 40% politicking.

The parallel IC track that tech popularized solves this to some degree... but most non-tech companies don't have that track.

What mechanisms successfully address this?

> She doesn't have to tell anyone

She doesn't because there is an app on her work machine that gathers all kinds of useful data on usage of such computer. Sooner or later someone will notice and there will be consequences for doing so. There are no trophies for running some unauthorized software on companies data and documents.

I believe dingi is perfectly aware of the realistic outcomes, and is instead describing the normative ones, i.e. what you need if you want an enterprise that actually self-improves, where the best employees aren't actively looking for the door whilst concealing things from management.

It is, however, wholly a management problem to find those actually-rewarding rewards.

Crazy idea: what if employees retained IP of any spontaneous, self-directed R&D? You could then license their tech and make the role redundant, something any ruthless capitalist would consider a win. The employee can go job-hunting with a small passive income and glittering CV, which means they're much more likely to actually tell you so you can get that outsourcing win.

In reality, it seems far too many businesses have moats as a result of excellent decisions made by founders in the past, and as a result can't be outcompeted by companies that do manage talent better.

More time, yes, probably doing something else equally tedious, or looking for a job.

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

One would hope she would be able to move on to more meaningful work, rather than doing drudgery while waiting for someone to eliminate her when someone figures out it can be automated.

That said, a lot of people don't know how to automate processes and it would likely face some push back since the process would be non-standard and tied to an individual. That can have long term costs should the knowledge be lost or a software upgrade breaks something.

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

the reward is the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done, and something to put on the CV for the next job.

automating dumb bureaucratic shit is how I learned to code in the "real world".

> something to put on the CV for the next job.

spoiler alert: you can put anything in your CV without actually doing it. I've had the experience of dealing with people who I have high doubts did this. From the looks of it have been reward for it for more than a decade.

> the reward is the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done,

just because it applies to you do not mean it a universal shared experience.

for some it's not even satisfaction that they get from that it a frustration and a feeling of being cu*ed where they put in the effort and someone else get the reward.

I had a job like this as a student. I automated it and didn't tell anyone and used the newly won time to do other stuff.

I hate this take on optimization.

She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy.

The only reason why I'm as successful as I am is that people understand that I'm so good in optimizing shit that they give me raises.

And alone the time I have to myself to skill up instead of waisting it on repetitive things is ridiculous if you think about return of investment and reinvestment.

> She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy.

Are you kidding? I'm happy your optimisations have been recognised and rewarded, because that's how it should be, but this lady would almost certainly just get more work to fill that newly freed time, for no additional compensation.

Many companies don’t even give top performers raises large enough to cover inflation. Who are you kidding here

I get bonuses because my manager knows very well he has much bigger issues when I leave.

You have to have a certain amount of flexibility of course and be willing to quit.

I'm still very sure that good performance is overall much more beneficial than staying and acting at the bottom.

You are hurting yourself while you do mondaine tasks while the other person gets compound interest and new skills.

Your situation is unusual and you should be grateful. The person described by op is a quasi government employee likely working for a TBTF institution that does not do this

> if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

Because it makes her job easier or improves her performance?

That's why I automate things at work, anyway. Being rewarded by my company for doing it doesn't really enter into the equation for me.

What happens to her if her performance is improved?

That entirely depends on the company she works for, and her own disposition.

Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly. This is why it’s bad to be an employee. If you earn a living by knitting scarves in your house and work out a way to make them faster or better, or both, you’ll make more money or have more free time. If you knit scarves for a salary you’ll probably suffer for doing it faster or better.

> Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly.

Not at most modern companies in the real world.

Jobs have already been so hyper-specialized that you have minimal staff "managing" large portions of the company, amortized over a large number of locations / amount of business.

Consequently, if a job task is taken off their plate, there are innumerable additional tasks to backfill the free time.

And critically, tasks that are probably more intellectually fulfilling than the lowest-hanging-fruit rote tasks that are automated.

"assuming the economy incentivizes efficiency"

In the long run it does. Today's stupid rich people are tomorrow's "my grandfather was x and now I'm middle class"

Happens more and faster than you think.

Economic disparity metrics suffer from selection bias.

But beyond that I think that attitude come from misunderstanding and confusing an ideal of "fairness" with efficiency.

Efficiency and fairness are far and away not the same thing.

Autocracies, for example, can be very efficient.

The same applies to economic competition. Scams and cons are efficient. Crime is efficient. Corruption... All are very efficient at redistributing wealth. So government is needed to enforce fairness.

But when it comes to the example problem here of adding excess value to a low-value job, the efficiency of the market is usually acting at the level of the firm, rather than within it.

People are naturally lazy, and for most people, the imagined ungratefulness of a company paired with an inflated view of their own value causes them to not even try and certainly not persist at innovating.

> Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off

The only reward I need for automating a tedious task is my own sanity.

What the fuck are we doing as a society that we have such a system of perverse incentives in place?

Our society is geared -- at all levels -- towards minimizing expense regardless of the impact on quality or even on society in general. We're all racing to the bottom.

Giving people raises for automating things is minimizing expense.

Suppose Alice is making $40,000/year and comes up with a way to automate a third of her job. So you start paying her $50,000/year and give her some other work to do. Then Bob and Carol each find a way to automate a third of their own jobs, so now they all make $50,000 and have made Don redundant.

The company is now paying $150,000 in total salary instead of $160,000 and only has to pay insurance and provide office space for three employees instead of four. Meanwhile the workers who found ways to improve efficiency are making more money and have the incentive to do it again and get another raise.

Companies may not actually do this, but those companies are mismanaged and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Bob, Carol and Alice might not feel comfortable with costing Don his job.

This can be for purely empathetic reasons, but also because they realize they’re all potential future Dons if these automations continue.

> they realize they’re all potential future Dons if these automations continue.

That isn't how the economy works. Bob, Carol, Alice and the boss are now collectively making $40,000+/year more than they did before. Where does this money go? To buy something they couldn't previously afford, made by Don at his new job somewhere else, which was created to meet the increase in demand caused by the increase in productivity.

The only way automation reduces employment is if it makes goods cost less and then people choose to work less because working less still allows them to buy everything they want. But in general people don't do that. Given the choice between having the same stuff they have now and working fewer hours or having more stuff than they do now and working the same number of hours, they pick the second one.

It's called capitalism. Some confuse that with the more neutral concept of a market economy.

In capitalism, individual wealth accumulation is the primary goal, not employing and paying people living wages.

Since capitalism is a disequilibrium state, full employment is not expected. Busy work is part of the system.

It is not entirely correct to describe the social contract within a corporation as capitalist if you are salaried and compensation is indirectly tied to performance.

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