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Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

It's never good when so many people lose their jobs but I can't stop thinking that if so many people can be replaced by automation, something must have gone awfully, awfully wrong in the process of wisely spending taxpayers money. Why were they using people in the first place to perform tasks best left to machines?

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I don't think these changes are about expense, but about security. I suspect there will be little cost savings, at least not immediately. Instead, you're just shifting the workload from (manual) system administration to automating the system administration.

To use an example - now a human swaps out a backup tape and has physical access to it. By replacing this with a tape robot, you've taken the insecure part - that person - out of the loop.

Because at one point they were necessary. Welcome to government provisioning. Optimization comes only when someone's political career is on the line.

Big business works similarly.

If you had unlimited budget, and disgruntled ex-employees were a greater risk than current employees, what is your short term strategy?

I don't see how disgruntled ex-employees would be a risk if the correct policies are put into place like, you know, the whole confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements.

You just did describe a new problem and process. If you have someone on staff you can watch him closely. On the other hand "exit day" brings complications ... especially for sys-admins.

Edit: and so it wouldn't surprise me if a government department with huge budget tended to accrue employees over time. The "easy" path is retention.

Find something else for them to do, lower risk, and let a few of them go here and there over the next decade.

The tech may not have been there at the time.

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