Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue.

If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company.

To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.

▲ agumonkey 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

it's a large human behavior question for me, the notion of work, value, economy, efficiency .. all muddied in there

- i used to work on small jobs younger, as a nerd, i could use software better than legacy employees, during the 3 months, i found their tools were scriptable so I did just that. I made 10x more with 2x less mental effort (I just "copilot" my script before it commits actual changes) all that for min wage. and i was happy like a puppy, being free to race as far as i want it to be, designing the script to fit exactly the needs of an operator.

  (side note, legacy employees were pissed because my throughput increase the rate of things they had to do, i didn't foresee that and when i offered to help them so they don't have to work more, they were just pissed at me)

- later i became a legit software engineer, i'm now paid a lot all things considered, to talk to the manager of legacy employees like the above, to produce some mediocre web app that will never match employees need because of all the middle layers and cost-pressure, which also means i'm tired because i'm not free to improve things and i have to obey the customer ...

so for 6x more money you get a lot less (if you deliver, sometimes projects get canned before shipping)

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martin-t 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I had a broadly similar transition in feeling about my work.

It's not about how much I get paid. It's about realizing how much of the value I produce goes to me and how much goes to the owner class.

At least I never worked in a big corporation and I always had the ability to do work that directly benefited people using my code. But I still saw too much of the "I built this company" self-congratulatory BS from people who just shuffled money while doing 0 actual work.

I don't think ownership is theft, I just think it's distributed wrongly - to people who have money instead of to people who do work. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826823

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agumonkey 15 hours ago | parent [-]

even though my above message wasn't much about the corporate leeches, i did experience the fun of being my own boss in a way during covid doing mini gigs directly with people

there's a blend of "i'm my own man": i get the money and handle the responsibility on my own and it's thrilling feeling

i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut, but there's a kind of pleasure to also do your own business for a while

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martin-t 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut

I don't wanna dismiss them either but (along with management):

- It's not positive-sum work. It doesn't produce positive value for society, it's just necessary work which needs to be done as a side effect of actual positive-sum work being done.

- The pyramid should be inverted. Managers, layers, accountants, etc. should be assistants. The people doing the actual work should (collectively) decide to hire them when they think it would make them more productive or be otherwise beneficial to them. Not the other way around.

	▲	agumonkey 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		it's an interesting question as of why the management layer has always been seen as more important than the builders, crafters, designers below

▲ Libidinalecon 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is just not true at all.

It is always in my self interest to automate my job as much as possible. Nothing looks better for moving up than this. Even more so, nothing makes me happier than automating a business process.

There are always so many various road blocks to automation it is hard to count.

It is like there is a type of entropy that increases over time that people are largely getting paid to keep at bay with simple business processes that can be easily adapted as things change. So often automation works great for a short time until this entropy breaks the automation. It doesn't take that many times for management to figure out the investment in automation gives poor returns.

▲ Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not always:

If you don’t automate it:

1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time

1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road

If you do automate it

2a) your company thanks you then fires you

2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget

————

2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen.

But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential.

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martin-t 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives.

When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_.

Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation:

1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic.

2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward.

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Esophagus4 18 hours ago | parent [-]

My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument.

What would that look like in practice?

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martin-t 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't have a full theory yet, it's something I started thinking about recently.

That being said, it's clear that in the current system, rich people can get richer faster than poor people.

We have a two class system a) workers who get paid per unit of work b) owners who capture any surplus income, who decide hiring/firing/salaries, who can sell the company and whose wealth keeps increasing (assuming the company does well) whether they do any work themselves.

Note: I see very few things which have inherent value - natural resources (plus land?) and human time. Everything else (with monetary value) is built from natural resources using human time.

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If a company starts with 1 guy in a shed, he does 100% of the work, owns 100% of the company and ... it gets muddy here ... gets 100% of the income / decides where 100% of the revenue goes - if it's a grocery shop he can just pocket any surplus, if he's making stuff, he'll probably reinvest into better tooling or to hire more workers.

A year later, he hires 9 workers. Now he does only 10% but still owns 100% of the company.[0]

There's a couple issues here:

- He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on.

- He still gets to decide who gets paid what. He has more information when negotiating.

- He can sell the company to whoever and the workers have no say in it. He can pass it on to his children (who performed 0 work there) when he dies.

The solution I'd like to see tested is ownership being automatically and periodically (each month) redistributed according to the amount and skill level of work performed.[1]

So at the end of year 2, the original founder has done 2 man-years of work, while the other 9 people have done 1 man-year of work each. This means the founder owns 2/11ths of the company while everyone else owns 1/11th. This could further be skewed by skill levels. I am sure starting and running a company for a year takes more skill than doing only some tasks. OTOH there are specialized tasks which only very few people can perform and the founder is not one of them.

The skill level involved would be part of the negotiations about compensation.

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This is complex. I am sure somebody is prone to rejecting it based solely on that. But open a wiki page about e.g. bonds[2] and see how many blue words just the initial sentence has and ask yourself whether you could explain all of them (and then transitively all the linked concepts on their wiki pages).

Slavery is very simple but very unfair. Employment is more complex and less unfair. I have a theory that the more fair a system is, the more complex it is because it needs to capture more nuances of the real world.

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[0]: Some people think this is right because owners take all the risk and employees take 0 risk. That is misrepresenting what really happens - sane investors/owners don't risk losing so much they would go homeless/starve if they lose it all. They can also optimize their risk by spreading it across many companies. Meanwhile workers get 100% of their income from one company and drop down to no income if the company goes bankrupt. They can also be fired at any time.

This was argued here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731811 in the comment by kristov and the reply by me. I also have other comments there with relevant ideas.

[1]: What happens to monetary compensation? I don't know, I see multiple options:

a) Everybody gets paid monetary wages like today, plus (newly) a part of their reward is the growing share of the company they own. If we allow selling it to anyone, it has high monetary value but then ownership gets diluted to outside investors. If we allow selling it only back to the company, it has value only relative to the decision-making power it gave. If we don't allow selling it, its monetary value only comes from the ability to vote on dividends.

b) Everybody gets paid a portion of the income divided according to their share. This sounds simple but likely wouldn't give enough money to newly joined workers to survive. There could be a floor. (Or, because hard cutoffs suck, a smooth mathematical function from owned percentage to monthly compensation which would have a floor at minimum wage.)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_(finance)

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hunterpayne 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Two things:

> - He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on.

1) If you believe this, then you have a massively simplistic view of employee value. The distribution of actual value provided by employees is probably log normal, and certainly not normal (gaussian).

2) This is basically the labor theory of value. That is an economic theory that was discarded as wrong about 150 years ago. If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0.

	▲	martin-t 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you have a massively simplistic view of employee value That's why I talk about skill levels later, but briefly because this is a comment, not a book. There's also a difference between how much value is provided can be attributed to a particular person vs a particular position. Some positions allow a much wider range of possible outcomes. How much extra wealth does a 90th percentile carpenter produce over and average carpenter? What about programmer, fashion designer, manager, salesman, doctor? Does this mean the value of life of different people is based on how productive they are? Because each person has roughly the same amount of time available to them and if they are spending an equal amount of it building a company, does one deserve to own more of it? Should this distribution be the same or different from the (monthly) monetary compensation? These are rhetorical questions (mostly) but they are questions society should be discussing IMO. Tangent: a carpenter who has no salesman and is so shit at selling his furniture that he gives it away for free is still producing value for society, even if he goes broke doing it. OTOH a salesman who has no carpenter and is so shit at making furniture that nobody wants it even for free is not producing any value at all. > This is basically the labor theory of value Ok, I need to read up on LVT. Seems like I am finally getting somewhere because I can't believe I am the only one saying things like this but at the same time I have not found anybody else with similar opinions. At best, I've seen people try to pattern match my opinions onto something similar they were familiar with but actually different. > If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0. I don't know how this results from LVT yet but it seems what I am proposing must then be fundamentally different depending on how you meant it: a) You meant gold as a natural resource with inherent value. It is necessary for making e.g. some electronics. The only question remains how to distribute the reward for discovering and mining it. b) You meant gold as a substitute for money, ignoring its value as a natural resource. In that case, yes, money is a medium of exchange, you can't eat it or make anything out of it (maybe a fire?). Having more money in circulation does not bring any extra value for society, it just multiplies all monetary values by a number slightly larger than 1. (OTOH for the person discovering and mining it, it would be beneficial but only because he now has more relative to others. The same way as if he printed more money.)