Broadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities.

I probably spend half of my time and way more than half of my energy on removing work we shouldn’t even have to do ourselves, first the random sources (machine bookkeeping beats human bookkeeping almost every time) and then persistent drudge work that steals resources from more important matters.

One job where I was mad about not getting any credit for this, I sat and did math and in six months I had saved us one head count, and I don’t know how much stress (seriously bullshit things). I joked that I could not show up to work and still provide as much value as people who they liked.