Great engineers try to automate their way out of a job. It would seem like their employer would reward them for using a little ingenuity. Why wouldn't he just come clean about it?
Why would he be rewarded? They would likely try to save that $90k by replacing him, or give him a lot more work with very little increase in comp.
If there's anything I've learned in 10 years, you keep your mouth shut when things are easy because if you speak up they screw you with more work and the same (or nearly so) pay.
This is a very cynical way of looking at things. And maybe rightly so given your experience. Every job I've ever had though there's never been a shortage of work - the few examples that I can recall of whenever one of my engineers frees up a significant amount of time I gave them harder things to do and a recommended a raise (Im a lead not a people manager) to go along with it.
Using "cynical" in looking at the job market when compared to potential abuses is a very boomerish thing.
Us millenials and zoomers see how this society is played out. You work hard for a company - you get more work for same pay.
They demand 2 weeks notice but have no issue in hauling your ass out with no severance on a term.
Managers promise increases and you get 2% , or 1/3 of inflation.
Companies' recruiters target their own employees for their own jobs at $20k more than they're making. And new people (without experience) get more than the experienced ones.
Health insurance costs more and more each year, all the while covering less and less.
And the harassment. Damn, the harassment.
And you, individually, cannot do much of anything regarding the company when negotiating grievances. Unions can, but tech people have this poisonous mindset that they can somehow do better than a union.
So yes, I am /r/antiwork . I've lived through enough of stupid shit. And we're done with it.
I'm not anti-work. I'm just anti-work for exploitive jerks. I have no problem working hard for myself (projects, chores, improvements, etc).
I think we both just realize that the rewards are simply not commensurate with effort in most cases. Executive and management pay goes up, yet they are just overhead, not production. So essentially they have to take advantage of the value produced by their worker for themselves. We recognize this and are unmotivated.
In the US with its dominant at-will, employer-favored asymmetric, antagonistic worker-business employment policy model, unless the employee is in a hot du jour skill (and trust me, this current local maxima programmers like us are enjoying will come crashing to an abrupt, sobering end) where they can with 100% certainty quit one day and pick up a new job in a couple weeks, or they observe from history they report to a leadership structure like yours that they can trust coming forward, the incentives are all aligned against sharing such productivity gains with the employer. At least until the employee has another job lined up.
This is because the leadership incentives are massively tilted in favor of taking big, quick wins off the table as soon as they appear, and the details are not transmitted up the reporting chain. Eliminating a position and maintaining its work output through automation is bonused far more than "just" the automation by itself. The numbers of the elimination show up on the books, but the skills, organizational knowledge, innovation, organizing, perseverance, and other attributes it took to bring the automation across the finish line do not show up as numbers or even slide decks with conceptual angles.
When faced with showing a 2X or greater cost savings plus a productivity boost, or a 0.10-1.00X valued productivity boost and re-positioning the employee to another role with a spin-up cost, the effect on bonuses is noticeable. When the leadership's tenure themselves is uncertain, is it any wonder why incentive choices fall where they do?
I come at this from the consulting side, and I see far more short-sighted incentivized leadership than leadership like you in my client accounts because of the prevailing incentive structures in my clients. This is interesting to me because one of my theses I'm observing for is going forward, the high-margin companies are going to be the ones that buck this trend. I suspect this is because those companies are tapping into what I believe is a growing successfully adaptive response to the technologically-driven complexity increasingly associated with high margins: you need high capital, low time preference, and high+deep trust. It used to be with sufficient capital and moderate trust at just leadership levels, you could power through nearly any business, but I'm seeing signs this model is increasingly mal-adaptive to economic structures with strong network effects affinities.
Because he doesn't care about the job being done, but only about getting paid for the results. It's like admitting someone already owns a goose that lays golden eggs when you can instead sell them the eggs.
Why, its a law firm, not a tech company, there are no other jobs for him to do. By giving them the script he would literally "automate himself out of a job". What would be the incentive to keep him?
