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Comment by jcr | Hacker News Reader

The general observation of the author is correct, but his claimed reasons for it are flawed; it has little to do with breaking concentration.

I was at a party with a dear friend of mine, Pat Davis, who is an expert PCB layout engineer at Millennium Design (www.millenniumdes.com). When I was healthier, I used to do some occasional PCB and automation work for his company. While the two of us were talking with another mutual friend, I said, "Working with me can be, ummm, interesting. I have zero patience for poorly built machines and programs." And then I asked Pat for affirmation from his own experience working with me.

Pat replied, "Sure, you can be tough to work with, but there is a real upside to it; if I never want to do something manually again, I just make Jon do it three times. He'll lose his patience and automate the living snot out of it."

As much as I hate to admit it, his answer was completely truthful.

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Put me in the 'automate the crap out of it' category, too.

We had a sysadmin that spent most of his time on 2 tasks, 1 was an internal maintenance task, and the other was email.

When he quit, those tasks fell to me, the sole programmer at the time. THe internal maintenance task, I did it for about a week before I decided that it needed to go away. So I wrote scripts and an interface for it, tested it for a while, and turned it over to customer service, which was the department that was requesting it anyhow. They were ecstatic because it meant they no longer had to request it and wait... They could just do it instantly. Much better for everyone.

The email was easier. We just moved to Google Apps.

The remaining tasks that the sysadmin did were now just a tiny fraction of my time.

As the company grew, those tasks increased until management realized they needed an actual sysadmin again, and they hired one.

Very much agreed. The real trouble is, the automate-everything mentality is unfortunately very rare due to the simple fact that if successful, you've just made your own job unnecessary. I actually want to work my way out of a job, but most people are far more concerned with keeping their job security.

In some jobs, that's true. Fortunately, many companies have more work than workers, so it isn't a problem.

It can be true, but I've found as often as not that work can grow to fill your time like a gas. No matter how much of it you can automate away, it simply means you can do more stuff.

The key to avoiding this is to stop thinking like a programmer, and start thinking like a sysadmin.

A programmer will automate some tedious repetitive task, and then boast about the automation to his programmer peers and managers. The programmer will then be rewarded with more tedious tasks to deal with.

A sysadmin automates a boring task, and tells nobody. The only way anyone can request work done is to file a ticket in the ticket tracker. The work gets done, but nobody besides the sysadmin knows how it was done. If the sysadmin is good at his job, he is rarely seen at his desk, and often seen playing foosball.

No wonder people's impressions of sysadmins are not overwhelmingly positive. (I'm envisioning Wally from Dilbert here.)

If you can replace someone's job with the proverbial small shell script (or apt-get install $OPENSOURCEPROJECT), sooner or later that is what will happen.

We started directly on Google Apps and now for security reasons we will have to go to Exchange... Hell is coming...

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