[andai]

>Why aren't we spending more time on the beach.

I think this comes down to getting paid per effort invested (measured in time) vs getting paid for the result.

If the average person were self-employed and received income proportional to their economic output, then they would be rewarded for working faster, instead of punished.

If they increased their productivity, by means of technology, they could then simply choose to work fewer hours.[0]

I noticed this before AI. If someone does the same job twice as fast, do they deserve half as much compensation?

What if they find a way to automate an entire process? What if they replace months of "manual labor" (tedious refactoring) with a perl script that produces the same result, deterministically?

A friend of mine once automated a woman's entire job away. He thought he was doing her a favour, freeing her from the drudgery, so she could focus on the other parts of the job. She wasn't so happy, when she revealed to him, that there weren't any.

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[0] But most people aren't in such a position, and have to stay the required number of hours regardless of how much has been achieved. And I'm increasingly hearing reports of some kind of burnout resulting from being expected to keep up with machines that work a thousand times faster than you.

And that's now... Just wait until the big providers switch to Cerebras in a week or two!

(Though at that token speed, the silver lining is the work becomes interactive again, so if you use it correctly, your mental model does not desynchronize from the codebase, i.e. you don't need to spend extra time later catching up. But that deserves its own thread, I think :)

[DennisP]

Your friend could have still done the woman a favor, if he shared the automation with her privately, instead of with their employer.

Doing things like this for yourself is how you make automation work for you instead of against you. Then you can take some of your extra time to automate even more. Or, if you're a dev, to clean up code so it's easier to work on later, or to improve your skills.

How that applies in the vibe coding world, I'm not sure. Maybe by getting better than average at vibe coding. (I'd be interested in your further thoughts on your last paragraph.)

[andai]

You mean by automating it but pretending you're still doing it manually?

[DennisP]

Not for anything scheduled on a server. But if I could turn a 30-minute task into a local button press, sure, I'd often keep it to myself.

You have to decide whether your time is your own, or your employer's. The latter is a road to burnout. I always viewed myself as a one-man business, with my managers being my only customers. I decided for myself how best to keep them happy, while also keeping myself happy.

Another part of all this was estimates. Early in my career I just estimated my median expected time, which meant half the time my boss got mad at me. Later I gave estimates I was at least 90% likely to meet, and worked extra hours on the few occasions it took longer. Managers were happier because I hardly ever missed a deadline, and usually I had extra time, which I also kept to myself fairly often.

For the owner of the business, all this might not have been ideally profitable in the short term, though I think it worked out pretty well in the long term. It's a virtuous cycle if you spend some of your extra time productively. I ended up with a pretty easy job most of the time, but occasionally being the guy they called on to save a failing project, and then I was fresh enough to work like a maniac.