I interned at a company along with a few other interns. I was eager to apply myself to any and all programming tasks. So much so I asked my fellow interns what they were working on.
One of them was working on something very similar to what you had to deal with, manual data entry for massive spreadsheets. They estimated it would take a few weeks to get through manually entering all the values by going to a url and getting another part of the url.
I believed we could automate the task using some url parsing and Javascript magic. They said go for it, but they don't mind doing the work because it was easy.
I spent the next 3 hours bashing my head against the Javascript api's (I hardly had any experience with JS at the time) but came away with a script that looked like it would work as it worked on a small subset of the sheet I was given to test on.
I went up to them and gave them the code. They said thanks, but they aren't going to use it because they want to stay busy.
They spent a few more weeks manually entering the values and then finally used my script to check for errors.
This wasn't my first job, but it was my first experience automating something using programming. It surprised me at how people received it. It seemed like people focused more on doing work than doing their job.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
It seemed like people focused more on doing work than doing their job.
Yep - and for good reason, we largely occupy a society where having paid work is a critical feature, leading to all manner of so-called bullshit jobs. With the advent of automation, either your own examples here or much larger shifts in automation across society, it's unlikely we can continue to rely on having 'enough interesting work for everyone', thus you find interns re-typing data that was already digitised just so they have something to be paid for, or more and more people applying for fewer 'useful' jobs in society and increasing inequality as the money runs out.
There are ways out of this madness: within an organisation, it's typically realising that the humans can learn/adapt to doing more valuable things, leaving the machines to do the grunt work more efficiently - we got the hang of printing presses after a few hundred years; for society, I will point at this splendid talk given by Scott Santens back in 2017: medium.com/basic-income/its-time-f...
Yes, absolutely. This is probably the same behavior when people feared they will loose their job because machines or computers in general in the past.
One thing I’ve learned is, that no matter how much you automate as a developer, there will always be enough work but it might be other work.
They could also be afraid that if they start doing their job faster they'll only get more work, which is almost inevitable in a world obsessed with productivity
I interned at a company along with a few other interns. I was eager to apply myself to any and all programming tasks. So much so I asked my fellow interns what they were working on.
One of them was working on something very similar to what you had to deal with, manual data entry for massive spreadsheets. They estimated it would take a few weeks to get through manually entering all the values by going to a url and getting another part of the url.
I believed we could automate the task using some url parsing and Javascript magic. They said go for it, but they don't mind doing the work because it was easy.
I spent the next 3 hours bashing my head against the Javascript api's (I hardly had any experience with JS at the time) but came away with a script that looked like it would work as it worked on a small subset of the sheet I was given to test on.
I went up to them and gave them the code. They said thanks, but they aren't going to use it because they want to stay busy.
They spent a few more weeks manually entering the values and then finally used my script to check for errors.
This wasn't my first job, but it was my first experience automating something using programming. It surprised me at how people received it. It seemed like people focused more on doing work than doing their job.
It seemed like people focused more on doing work than doing their job.Yep - and for good reason, we largely occupy a society where having paid work is a critical feature, leading to all manner of so-called bullshit jobs. With the advent of automation, either your own examples here or much larger shifts in automation across society, it's unlikely we can continue to rely on having 'enough interesting work for everyone', thus you find interns re-typing data that was already digitised just so they have something to be paid for, or more and more people applying for fewer 'useful' jobs in society and increasing inequality as the money runs out.
There are ways out of this madness: within an organisation, it's typically realising that the humans can learn/adapt to doing more valuable things, leaving the machines to do the grunt work more efficiently - we got the hang of printing presses after a few hundred years; for society, I will point at this splendid talk given by Scott Santens back in 2017: medium.com/basic-income/its-time-f...
Yes, absolutely. This is probably the same behavior when people feared they will loose their job because machines or computers in general in the past.
One thing I’ve learned is, that no matter how much you automate as a developer, there will always be enough work but it might be other work.
They could also be afraid that if they start doing their job faster they'll only get more work, which is almost inevitable in a world obsessed with productivity
Yes, maybe. But it’s never a good advice to make decisions based on fear (except you’re facing a grizzly bear).