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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I find a lot of people are actually happy that they can offload mundane parts of job to automatons and to be really busy with the interesting parts.

It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job.

While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.

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I keep hearing my this very much, so I have a question: what fun parts are there left for me?

It feels like this message of “offloading mundane tasks so you will have more time to do fun parts” is being pushed so hard, but in reality the opposite is happening. Fun parts are being offloaded while I’m left doing the soul sucking and mundane parts

I need a bash script for example. I don’t like dealing with bash or debugging scripts written by others.

I have that part covered by AI so I can get multiple servers up and running and then eventually fix some config or networking here and there which I like.

Instead of bashing my head against the wall.

Different strokes I guess. I love using bash.

I love churning out crazy Bash scripts, though. The first scripts I wrote sucked, as it always goes with a new language, but Bash is an awesome swiss army knife now that I know how to really push it. It sucks that doing this by hand now is so heavily discouraged because so many people see this as drudge work (that they never cared to learn).

I do know how to write stuff in bash.

I dislike the tooling and debugging experience that is not existing compared to let’s say Python. With Python I have whole IDE which help me set breakpoints and inspect variable state. With bash I have to pipe output to text file and inspect that. Feels like working with Stone Age tooling.

I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell. Ive never got on with bash, it feels like too much of the friction is incidental to the problem, whereas with nushell I find I get to the fun intrinsic difficulty of a problem. YMMV but give it a try if you haven't before

I'm a bit odd, it would seem, in what I find enjoyable and not.

I've happy to take the tasks like SQL optimization which other would run away from, for instance, or the bash trickery mentioned elsewhere. People don't believe me, I've had looks of surprise and derision when “if you take on this role, you can give X to others and not have to worry about it” is responded to with “I like doing X, can't you ask one of the others to take on the other role and let me stay as I am?”…

It is increasingly looking like I have the choice: change to a role (automaton farmer) that I expect to hate, or leave dev, or maybe leave tech entirely and go wait tables or something. Those tables are starting to look very attractive.

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