Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g.

- If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just got bonuses for doing nothing?

- If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Will you be angry?

- If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away? (assume for a moment that you have the most difficult to automate job in the company)

I mean... this could work if you'd manage to set up incentives so that everyone in the company works together and not against each other. But I'm not sure how to do this, especially in a way which doesn't leave anybody feeling he's being treated unfairly.

> If you automate away your non-tech co-worker ... will he get the bonus?

Yes, and you get nothing. It's fair; just don't automate away other people's jobs, automate away your own.

> If someone automates you away, will you get anything?

Yes, 100% of the bonus. It's not a choice, you must leave. I still think that's fair.

> If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away?

You don't automate away your co-workers unless you like doing free work. Problem solved. If you have the most difficult to automate away job, you entered into it knowingly. The market will ensure that those jobs will be higher paid by supply and demand.

This model doesn't require cooperation to work, just a relatively clear set of job responsibilities and a clear definition of what it means for you to be automated away.

I actually really love this idea, from an employer's perspective.

Ok, so how about when you're an accountant? Now your employer has a strong incentive to pay someone extra to eliminate you, and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.

That's the kind of situation that needs to be handled.

My reply would be that if a programmer can out-account you as an accountant, then you've failed as an accountant; you need to look for another job or learn the necessary skills like programming.

Of course this does mean a lot of people out of jobs, which is the crux of the article, but I don't think it's a fault or weak link in this employment model.

> and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.

Automating existing work is more than just programming; a big part of it is expertise provided by people knowledgeable about the existing workflow. None of the projects I've been on that involved automating existing work involved only programmers and no one with experience doing the work.

Yes, I know, and I appreciated that fact in the post upthread. The point here is, if you go with the suggestion of 'redemeer that "if you get automated away, you get 0", said accountant will have no incentive to help with the automating, and every incentive to make it as hard as possible - which I think is not the result we want to have. To get a happy ending for everyone, we need coordination, not competition.

> The point here is, if you go with the suggestion of 'redemeer that "if you get automated away, you get 0", said accountant will have no incentive to help with the automating

If you go with a principal that if you are involved in automating the job away, you get some reward, the accountant may have some incentive to help (especially if it is likely to happen, but with perhaps lesser quality -- but still perhaps a net cost savings to the company -- anyway, which would result not only in the company getting less than if the accountant was actively involved, but the accountant getting less as well.)

> "if you get automated away, you get 0"

No, I actually said the opposite.

If you get automated away, by yourself or by anyone else, you instantly get the bonus and you're instantly fired.

The accountant has every incentive to either be an amazing accountant so that any automation would be a pale imitation (everyone wins), or he can choose to automate himself away, move to the next job, automate himself away and pick up the bonus there, and so on (everyone gets their due).

This is competition, and I think it's a happy ending for meritocracy. The only people who lose are those who desire to continue to be paid while not generating value.

Oh, I'm sorry. After re-reading your comment for the third time I realized you said something exactly opposite than what I thought.

Isn't what you just describe about automating other peoples jobs away a huge part of IT to begin with... we take paper forms that have long review chains and turn them into electronic forms (more effective data entry, fewer needed) with mostly automated review chains (cut middle management)... yeilding higher returns.

This is why IT is considered White Collar (especially software developers and engineers)... It's our job to automate people out of jobs... which then churns the need for jobs developing ever more complex systems that aren't human. Often badly written.

We'll never reach greater than say 60% unemployment... there's just to much crap to shovel (even in automation).

Definitely depending on the type of organisation, you'd need to tweak the incentive structure. And yeah the ideal scenario would be the entire organisation working together to automate all of their processes, and for everyone to share in those benefits.

The basic, not fully thought out idea, was that if you automated your own job you got the full bonus. If you automate another person's job, you both split the bonus 50/50.

I think with most jobs, automation would definitely involve programming and tech skills. But there would be a lot of non-tech tasks as well, such as thoroughly understanding their workflow and processes and identifying more efficient practices.

"Automation" can also be a combination of computer and human outsourcing too.

In the small web dev company I was working for (launching internal startups), the "creative process" of designing website mockups was incredibly time consuming. I suggested we collect all of the customer requirements and collateral, and automatically outsource the mockups via API to something like MobileWorks/Freelancer/Elance/99Designs/DesignCrowd etc

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