This is what happened in my first job out of college. I joined a publicly traded software company and was helping marketing drive leads.

This involved calling engineers at their desks and offering workshops where they got some continental breakfast and to try out some very expensive IC design tool.

The company had a web application written in ColdFusion that had a bunch of forms to fill out each time a phone call or email exchange was performed with a lead. Enterprise sales would use this information to move sales through the pipeline.

I got bored really quickly of tabbing through the page and the repeat data entry based on call or email outcome. So I found a windows macro tool and wrote 5-10 macros that handled 80% of all call outcomes, making it trivial to add details.

Ideally, the web application would just get this kind of automation. However, some of the macros were campaign specific--they just didn't do it.

When my manager saw how I was pulling off the call volume and results, (which were modest--it was still largely cold calling), everyone on the team got a license to the macros and I was asked to share the macros around.

They were all RCGs or recent masters grads, so it wasn't really a problem. But it immediately set a floor for "why are you typing that and using your mouse to finish this call? We have a tool to do that" kind of thing.

Yeah. Why would anyone do things that reduce their own leverage? Assuming rewards proportional to the value of one's work is magical thinking. "If I save a company $100,000, they will give me a significant portion of it." No such deal exists! They're just as likely to give us raises and bonuses as they are to pocket the profits for themselves and assign us even more work.

I have a nice coffee mug that I got for the end of a multi million dollar deal. I dont drink coffee. They would not have got that deal done without me. As I was one of two people on the planet who knew how that code worked and the other dude left years earlier. They then wondered why my productivity jumped off a cliff.

I'm so sorry. You deserved so much better than that.

I have been thinking this for the last decade of reading this perspective on HN, but it's worth saying: if this is true, it's at best a dramatically bimodal situation.

The incredibly-slack labor market this describes wasn't reflective of my experience or that of anybody I knew as of ten years ago. After a decade of tightening in that market, this is even less true.

As I said, it's likely bimodal: certain geographies/verticals/perhaps specialties probably still afford tech workers a 1990s-like level of market power.

But it's worth pointing out that what you're describing is not remotely the norm for at least some dense subnetwork of labor (of which I'm a part). Further, it's potentially the case that entry into this labor market is accessible to those who are currently in the looser market, especially as IMO talent doesn't account for the entirety of the gap.

I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying this isn't your experience?

Isn’t that the whole point of software engineering? You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job. If I’m dealing with the same issues I have today, a year from now, then I’d view that as a personal failure.

The whole point of engineering is to engineer yourself out of your current job? What? I think I must be misunderstanding you. Are people who engineer planes supposed to be engineering spacecraft or consider themselves failures or something? I'm confused.

They are supposed to engineer machines that engineer planes during their free time obviously

Good point. I meant us fake software engineering, not you real engineers with “PE” at the end of your name. My original comment has been clarified.

They engineered themselves out of their current job and still get paid for the job they don't have to do. Sounds like they engineered it pretty well.

I hate this mindset. I’m not trying to make my job and the job of others obsolete. I just want to get paid so I can fuck off and do some other shit I want to do.

There's always going to be people who don't care about/ take pride in/find meaning in their work. That's a totally legitimate way to approach it, but it's sort of an orthogonal discussion to the one we're having.

It's also pretty weird to "hate" that others have managed to find meaning in their work, and discuss the manner in which they do so. I don't get much enjoyment out of cars, but if I noticed that I _hated_ it when others talked about cars and insisted that they treat them only as generic conveyances, I'd probably want to do some self-reflection around my emotional state.

I think the judgmental language is a large part of the reason for the reaction, as the parent seems to be making a blanket judgement of those who aren't engineering themselves out of a job, saying they'd "view that as a personal failure". The blanket nature and talk-down tone of "You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job" is also not likely to win broad support.

To re-use your metaphor, it'd be like a car nut telling you your quality as a person is less for not liking cars as much as they do.

I'm not sure I follow this.

The initial comment was "to do your job well, you should do X". The response was "I hate this type of comment. I don't care about doing my job well".

That seems like a pretty bizarre reaction. If someone said "it's hard work, but you should focus on [XYZ] to ensure your code is well-tested", and someone responded "I hate it when people talk about how to make code more robust. I don't care about doing my job well", would you find that a reasonable response as well? Or in response to parenting advice, "I hate this type of comment. I don't want to have kids". It seems to me that the implicit context for how to do your job well is....people who care about doing their job well?

Most technical jobs aren't like engineering, where the work-product is the process/design and the assumption is that the engineer will be moving on to a new design afterwards. This sounds more like a technician improving their personal set of tools, to me.