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by svachalek 1615 days ago
20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of my teams that were basically just template generators. Another table, write code with all the new columns and types.

Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now but I'm sure there are still a lot of jobs everywhere that can either be easily automated now, or would be easily automated except for one little obstacle the worker is doing everything possible to play up and preserve.
2 comments
barry-cotter 1615 days ago
> Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now

This seems unlikely. There are lots of companies with 50 employees with no programmers, hobbyist or pro, on staff. That's why taking a business' excel spreadsheet nightmare and turning it into a program is a viable consultancy.

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bcrosby95 1615 days ago
Having a dividing line between the worker and the programmer is where the problem lies. There's tons of jobs where it makes sense to have the worker write a script to automate, which would make no sense for me to come in and automate for them.

This is why I think some basic forms of programming should be standard. You don't need to be a specialist to get a lot out of it.

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