Why I learned to "make things"

Re:Why I learned to "make things" by kyllo on Monday December 17, 2012 @01:16PM (#4933494)

Yes. And this is in a company where many other people are programmers.

If you are in a corporate environment surrounded by people who don't know how to write code, or even barely know how to use Excel, it cannot be overstated how valuable a basic knowledge of even something like VBA, and a little SQL, can make you.

I started learning to program because I was tired of being faced with the same business problems and productivity drags over and over again. Like being asked to log into a legacy system, look up some performance numbers, copy/paste them into a spreadsheet and e-mail it to management. I've even seen people summing numbers together with a calculator and then typing the sum into an spreadsheet because they didn't know about formulas in Excel. That knowledge could free up at least an hour of that person's time per day, which really adds up over many years on the job.

Not everyone needs to actually be a hacker, but everyone who's even remotely curious about programming should learn some basic skills in order to automate tasks and make oneself more productive, if nothing else.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by lectrick on Monday December 17, 2012 @03:39PM (#4934214)

When I visit "business type" offices, I am constantly shocked at the amount of wasted time that goes on that I see. The examples you cited are merely the tip of the iceberg. Part of the reason I'm a programmer, I think, is because I absolutely ABHOR wasted/duplicated effort. This "natural programmer laziness" has always pushed me to figure out the way to "automate out all the boring parts".

I think it's a huge market opportunity for a programmer to merely show some poor bastards how to NOT get by via emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by kyllo on Monday December 17, 2012 @04:08PM (#4934369)

Yes. There are so many companies with wasted productivity in repetitive business process waiting for someone to automate them or "DRY them out." One of the worst examples I saw was a woman whose entire job, as far as I could tell, consisted of downloading a list of system-generated pickup numbers every day and e-mailing it to people. This person was probably being paid between $40-50k per year to do a job that could be completely automated by a few lines of scripting code.

Not that I think automation should be used to lay people off. But if the job she was doing were automated, they could have her on the phone talking to customers and helping out the overworked customer service staff with the call queue instead, with no net expense to the company.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Monday December 17, 2012 @05:24PM (#4934796)

Why shouldn't automation be used to lay people off? Eliminating busywork jobs is a big deal -- how are we going to get to a post-scarcity society otherwise?

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by polshaw on Monday December 17, 2012 @10:10PM (#4935838)

Unless/until there were a revolution, increased automation leads to increased inequality rather than a 'post-scarcity society', though.

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Monday December 17, 2012 @10:16PM (#4935863)

Should we restart the buggy whip assembly lines to "re-create" all those jobs? What about all the jobs lost to car assembly robots, which probably pushed down the cost to make said cars?

Increased automation doesn't have to mean increased inequality -- ideally, it would lead to a gradual reduction in average work hours. Working hours for people in first-world western nations are evidence of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_i...

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by arjunnarayan on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @10:19AM (#4937831)

I think the lesson of the 21st century is that people don't want reduced work hours. They'll just work as hard as they can for even more utilons/status points/dollars.

I mean, it's not like Paul Graham ever had to work another day after he sold Viaweb. Nevertheless, you see him still working. (And he's not an outlier.)

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Re:Why I learned to "make things" by Wingman4l7 on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @05:16PM (#4939906)

That's not necessarily true. There was a study making the rounds ~2 years ago done by two Princeton researchers, indicating that once you hit ~$75,000+ a year in income, your emotional well-being doesn't significantly improve past that amount.

It follows that if you could make $75,000+ working 20 hours a week, you'd be quite happy. I know I certainly would =) (Yes, I'm sure there have been studies done on the correlation of life satisfaction and keeping busy; that's what hobbies are for! I'm sure there are plenty of happy, busy retired people.)

http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/ (press release) http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107 (actual study)

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