Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to Flowers for Algernon your own productivity just because other folks working in the same firm, in the same industry, in the same country, whatever haven't caught on that computers are eating the world yet. There's nothing unethical about earning the lion's share of the bonus pool assuming the human-assisted script is, indeed, an acceptable substitute for elbow grease. (There are plausible reasons why it might not be but that isn't the way I'd bet.)

There's a common mindset on Reddit that I struggle to find a name for but I know it when I see it: "You're not a scumbag, but the gravy train will have to end eventually. Your company will likely catch on and make changes to the data entry process." The size of the pie is fixed, the allocations of the pie are controlled by other people, and a mouse who successfully steals a few crumbs from the pie is a) stealing and b) must guard his stolen crumbs against the predations of other mice.

That is a mindset I do not associate with rich people. I'd expect them to think something closer to "Now would be an excellent time to contact the decisionmaker at my client and propose restructuring their business process for a 20% discount to the total cost of everything right now."

Here is an anecdote: A similar data-entry grunt creates a set of excel macros on his private time at home, then presents his work to his team at a meeting. He surely expected to be met with praise, for saving countless hours of mind-numbing work so that the man-hours could be used on more creative and challenging tasks.

His high hopes for his fellow coworkers and his own future would be dashed though. The employee was branded as a "hacker" (in the Hollywood movie sense), and was ostracized. He eventually developed clinical depression, and resigned from the company.

Where did this happen? The story is probably not unfamiliar to patio11, who lives in the country where this occurred: Japan.

P.S.: I wish I had been a Hacker News reader back when I lived in Nagoya from 2009-2010. It would have been nice to talk to you in person :).

Happened in America too. Boss took the "hacker" to the side and said "Look, I'd have to fire my entire staff if the higher ups learned of this and then I'd be out of a job too." Ah, nothing like firing the guy who could save your company tons of money just in self-interest.

What was stopping the guy from skipping his boss and talking to the higher-ups himself? He could probably prove his boss right by taking his boss' job.

In most organizations, Management layers aren't layers. They are actually clubs that protect each others interests. This goes on until the system gather enough dust to cause it to collapse.

Its futile to complain to a manager about another manager in general. Those people know each other, and they will never side with you. All that politics will only back fire on you.

Edit: I now realize you are talking about your experience in India, where of course things may be different. However, I would think that even there, 'managers' are a distinct subgroup from other human beings.

Original: That's an unnecessarily negative view.

Managers are people too and come in all the variations people come. Some of them care about whether the company does well, just like people whose title doesn't contain the word 'manager'. Their relation with other managers is exactly like the relation of your manager with you. That someones title includes the word 'manager' doesn't mean they suddenly like all other people whose title includes the word 'manager' and it doesn't mean he suddenly considers them equals. Being a 'manager' is not a binary thing. Team leaders are managers, even when their title doesn't say so.

I know of an organization where if you wanted to purchase say $50,000 worth of new computers, HR (yes, human resources) had the power to make that purchase very difficult.

It wasn't because HR actually had any say in the matter, but instead the head of HR actually sat in on meetings with the CEO and the rest of VPs on a very regular basis.

Now in this case and in this company, they would not have blocked innovation like this. However, had they had different attitudes automation could have easily been blocked.

It's not so much about the manager title, as it is that the graph doesn't look like a bunch of layers that you can just skip one. There are multiple inputs that can can come from people above, below, and beside and that is what makes it a club of people, who generally will protect others in the club.

Don't these anecdotes just reenforce patio11's point though about the difference in mindsets?

These two anecdotes describes places/bosses that seem completely toxic. It's trite to say "in the end you don't want to work at a place like this, they did the well-meaning guy a favor" but it seems to be true - some environments/teams/people cannot be saved.

This mindset is self-defeating in the end, and I don't see why it deserves to be reenforced.

Always know the business objectives of your client before proposing a technical solution to anything.

Sometimes the business objectives are simple, obvious, like make the department more efficient or save the company money. Other times they're more sinister, like increase the head-count in order to earn your boss a higher salary, or to exert more influence over other departments by hijacking part of their process or rendering their people redundant while further solidifying your own base.

For more radical change you'll have to be on good terms with people much higher up in the organization that can save your ass when someone lower down tries to sabotage your work or push you out of your position in often misguided self-defense.

Perhaps the simple equilibrium position in many environments is to just quietly automate your tasks without rocking the boat in other ways.

Happened with me here in India too.

I worked on a project which required generating a report that had to be sent to some senior execs at our client location every Monday morning. The report would essentially give a trend, and the trend would in turn help the execs take a decision on whether further investment in hardware was needed for our existing IT infrastructure.

Originally the process was based on 3-4 people working and generating the report with heavy manual text heavy lifting. When I joined the project it took me 3 weeks of observation and a Perl script to automate the entire report generation process. My manager pulled me up for making 4 people jobless now. And thereby I had denied them billing for four people, I was considered to be making wrong moves for the company. I was given bad ratings for doing so, I lost a lot in terms of cash, and many be a chance to get promoted.

4 people where back doing to heavy lifting job. But six months later our client moved the project to a different outsourcing vendor. His reason 'Inability of the team to automate tasks that could have easily been automatized' and thereby not showing any value to the client apart from day to day work.

That day I learned a very big lesson. Like patio1 says The size of the pie is fixed, the allocations of the pie are controlled by other people, If you don't automate and get productive somebody else almost certainly will.

The purpose of work is to continuously be more and more productive with time. And learn to do work that has a more intellectual demanding than manual labor. I find it strange that people often complain and surprised that they were fired because <insert some manual job> was replaced by some form of automation. Isn't that obvious?

Throughout human history the clock has been ticking, productivity has always increased in a way or the other.

I actually like the what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his book 'Flow'. Every person when he works in the flow enjoys it to the full, until he squeezes the last bit of fun and excellence left in the job. Now he saturates, every thing becomes repetitive and not longer challenging .He is now prepared for the 'next step'.

Everybody must think of these 'Next steps' no matter what you are doing, where you doing it.

>You don't have to Flowers for Algernon your own productivity

Are you thinking of Harrison Bergeron?

I was indeed! Curses, my memory of middle school is failing me.

No worries. I often make the same mistake, to the point where I knew what you were referring to but had to break out the googles because I wasn't sure if it was the right story. Both are excellent, btw.

I agree. I think a business person would either tell his boss or find a way to start a business associated with automating similar data entry. A person who doesn't say anything and tries to "get theirs in the short run" will eventually lose out. It's not a huge ethical concern in my opinion, but it represents an unproductive attitude towards creating value/wealth that you identified perfectly in your post.

I think there's a difficult decision to be made between making decent money working 8 hours per week and taking the risk of leveraging your skills to bump yourself up a level in a data-entry operation. Lacking details, the first scenario seems more attractive to me. I would encourage the OP to develop another money-making operation on the side while he has some free time.

I didn't take away anything like that from that sentence. I felt that he was saying "the pie is not fixed, and when your company realises that they can get the same results with a much smaller pie, most of your co-workers will be fired, possibly yourself along with them, and replaced with the script you wrote. Prepare to find another pie."

... was that an HN profanity filter or an awesome colloquialism? (Flowers for Algernon)

It's a book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon

It's a literary allusion, though to the wrong short story. (See sibling comment.) The right short story depicts a dystopian America where the Handicapper General, a government official, attempts to achieve equality by bringing everyone down to the same level, for example by attaching lead weights to graceful ballerinas so that people who are not graceful ballerinas are not made to feel bad when watching them perform.

The mindset you speak of, using words like "client" and "contact the decision maker", is associated with people who are used to having a great deal more power and influence than somebody hired to be a data entry grunt.

The mindset may be useful for climbing out of the data entry grunt "class", but probably not for "fixing" his existing employer's practices. Someone on that level in a company of any substantial size is going to be ignored, disciplined, or outright fired for rocking the boat.

Part of leveling up from peon to not-quite-sure-but-definitely-not-peon was learning how to talk the part.

(Funny sidenote: About ten years to the day ago, I put in a proposal at a particular megacorp to script up something rather than spending $15,000 having the seasonal data entry clerks give themselves carpal tunnel syndrome doing it manually. It was not accepted, and my hands hurt like the dickens for most of the summer.)

I started wearing a suit and giving screwed-up smiles for answers like the Jim Halpert character on The Office (American version). Everyone at the office thought I was the best thing since sliced bread.

* * *

It didn't hurt that I accomplished more work than everyone else while socializing more (meaning I went to the office parties/brunches and laughed at the appropriate times).

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