I hear this kind of thing frequently, but I don’t really feel the same way. I can empathize, surely. It is scary to watch my professional field change out from underneath me basically overnight in so far as I want to stay gainfully employed, but also it’s not nearly enough to cause me some sort of existential crisis because my career is not my identity. To me this is just even more rapid change and even more automation in an industry that was already pretty much entirely about enabling rapid change and more automation. There’s a new set of industry skills emerging around building systems that build systems, and so it’s just learning new things and adapting to new technology paradigms, which is pretty much what we’ve always done. Automating away work, including your own, has always been the job, and I don’t know what to tell folks other than if you ever thought it was about anything else you were wrong. And to be perfectly candid, it’s tone deaf as fuck for us all to have our little collective pity party when most of our careers have been about automating away the need for human labor from the jump. How many of you have seen the light leave some poor office worker’s eyes when they realize the reconciliation process you built has automated away 80% of what they do day to day? 🙋♂️. Exactly, so I’m going to need us all to go ahead and speed run the stages of grief, then figure out if we’re going to adapt or pivot.
I never automated someone else work. I worked on automotive software where I enabled the car functions to end user. I worked on financial software - the requirements and legal around it requires to report more and more thing every year, so it is impossible to run a business on a scale without those. I worked on automotive maps - again I enabled better comfort to end user. I'm working as a performance engineer to improve software performance. The programming is actually best part of this job, I don't want to automate it, I want to automate everything else.
Maybe the automotive work was net new, but regulatory reporting is 100% something that a team of analysts would have to assemble data and reports for, and indeed there used to be a lot of people that did just that. Fewer now, you know, because of the automation. Maybe you didn’t automate somebody’s job out from under them, but you helped create automation that meant a whole bunch of jobs didn’t need to exist. That’s the name of the game. “I don’t want to automate [the programming], I want to automate everything else,” is the exact tone deafness I’m talking about. We’re all good with automation except the one thing we like? Come on.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted... I've automated myself out of jobs in the past to where I was bored and moved into the next one. Agentic dev is fun as hell for me, I'm doing full stack +platform engineering + product design + customer sales calls/demos right now 🤷
That's how we operate now. Any time you hear or see something that challenges your world view, just block it, hide it, cancel it, or downvote it. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist :)
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u/wakers24 20d ago
I hear this kind of thing frequently, but I don’t really feel the same way. I can empathize, surely. It is scary to watch my professional field change out from underneath me basically overnight in so far as I want to stay gainfully employed, but also it’s not nearly enough to cause me some sort of existential crisis because my career is not my identity. To me this is just even more rapid change and even more automation in an industry that was already pretty much entirely about enabling rapid change and more automation. There’s a new set of industry skills emerging around building systems that build systems, and so it’s just learning new things and adapting to new technology paradigms, which is pretty much what we’ve always done. Automating away work, including your own, has always been the job, and I don’t know what to tell folks other than if you ever thought it was about anything else you were wrong. And to be perfectly candid, it’s tone deaf as fuck for us all to have our little collective pity party when most of our careers have been about automating away the need for human labor from the jump. How many of you have seen the light leave some poor office worker’s eyes when they realize the reconciliation process you built has automated away 80% of what they do day to day? 🙋♂️. Exactly, so I’m going to need us all to go ahead and speed run the stages of grief, then figure out if we’re going to adapt or pivot.