I am indebted to Slashdot for drawing my attention to this incredible story which gives a very clear example of the benefits of automation. It concerns a programmer who worked for “a well-known tech company” but did nothing for six years. Well, to be fair, he did work for the first eight months, so he actually didn’t do anything for five years and four months.
Instead, he filled his days doing whatever he felt like doing. How did he manage that? Automation. When he started his software testing quality assurance job, he seized the initiative and spent the first eight months “automating all of the programming tasks”. Once that was complete, he let the computers do the work while he raked in his salary of $95,000.
In his own words, he confesses that “in the past six years, I have maybe done 50 hours of real work”. And it’s not as if the company was unhappy. “Nobody really cared. The tests were all running successfully… nobody ever talked to me except my boss and occasionally the devs for the software I was testing”.
Sadly, now he has proved just how effective automation can be, he’s also written himself out of a job. Not only that, he’s quite possibly ensured the company doesn’t need to recruit someone to replace him either.
The problem for FiletOfFish1066 (FOF), as he freely confesses, is that because he hasn’t been doing anything for the last few years “I literally do not even know how to write good software anymore. I basically forgot everything.” That said, the “success” of his automation is a pretty convincing case study of how well he used to be able to program. If he dared to put it on his CV, perhaps he could have a future as a ‘consultant’ being brought in to help companies automate their processes.
In any case, it’s not as if FOF’s going to starve in the short term because he managed to save $200,000 over those six years by living at home.
There’s a part of me that’s slightly sceptical about this story but there’s another part of me that wants to believe it’s true. I think I like it because it provides a different view of the impact of automation on human work.
For the most part, automation has led to people losing their jobs and being put on the scrap heap but what FOF has done is manage to automate his job while continuing to receive his salary. In an odd way, that seems fair enough because the automated process which is doing his job doesn’t need any money and he does.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers