In my personal experience this generally isn't an issue. If you have the necessary skills to automate your own job, chances are your employer has other work they want you to do.
I worked at a fintech company for a few years a while back. I started in an entry level role doing daily operations stuff within their proprietary system. It was boring but I could see that most of it could be automated if enough effort was put into it. We were 4 people at that time. No way our dev team had the time to do it as they were always slaughtered with an endless list of demands from other teams and higher-ups. And no budget would ever be assigned to this. So I took it upon myself to learn how to do it through code. Six months later I had a solution up and running which automated about 80% of the daily work for the four of us. Did they fire the other three people and just leave me to do that remaining 20%? No, they took me and another one of the technically savvy people from the team and took us off the boring daily stuff entirely and put us on a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow. They promoted me. They also promoted the person who had been there the longest to make them the manager of a new Dallas team that was being created for us to pass off the remainder of the boring stuff do, as well as new initiatives that they weren't able to capitalize on because lack of headcount to handle the work. The fourth member of the team also migrated into different projects around the division. Basically, it freed everyone to do a bunch of stuff the business wanted to do but didn't have the budget for or did have the budget for but standard corporate bullshit got in the way of. This was like a godsend to them because they viewed it as getting 3 people just thrown in their laps for free.
Great story of how automating one's own job led to more meaningful productivity, rather than being made redundant.
> a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow
Sounds wonderful - and surprising too, since businesses typically seem afraid to trust their own teams this way.
What's striking is the autonomy given to the team, after the boring stuff got automated. This kind of higher-level decision making is exactly what cannot be automated (at least for now) - to diagnose areas that need improvement, and to plan and self-organize to implement it.
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In my work, I've also been putting much effort into automating parts of my job, i.e., build/deployment and remote management of applications.
Far from making myself redundant, I'm trusted by the company with more (and higher) responsibilities, and more autonomy to manage my own work and its direction.
Also, with the increase in efficiency and productivity, we're able to hire more people.
Glad to hear things are working well for you as well. Any halfway intelligent manager wouldn't be stupid enough to just toss you or anyone like you. They see value/skills that can be put to use elsewhere. Anyone with a growth mindset would use that human capital productively. I think only in a very stagnant, established business with no growth opportunities would they let someone go after automating a lot of things. Because they wouldn't be able to put you to use so the only way to capitalize on your improvement would be to gain your compensation back.
Yeah, the level of autonomy I was given is pretty rare. I think it was because of two main factors. First, I had several bosses over a short period of time (lots of "structural changes" at that company during that time and it was a bit hectic) and the current boss then was in London and had other issues to deal with. Second, I don't think they knew precisely what to do with me in general but since I had built up a substantial amount of good faith/reputation in such a short amount of time and surprised everyone, I think they just decided to just let me figure out what I wanted to do since I wasn't shy about telling them what I was interested in.
It was a good situation but at a company that was very messy and all over the place. A lot of things were constant fires and battles (both internally and externally). Thankfully, I had good managers when I was there who had a lot of good sense. Otherwise, someone else probably would have just clamped down on me and dictated everything they wanted me to do with this new found time.
I worked at a fintech company for a few years a while back. I started in an entry level role doing daily operations stuff within their proprietary system. It was boring but I could see that most of it could be automated if enough effort was put into it. We were 4 people at that time. No way our dev team had the time to do it as they were always slaughtered with an endless list of demands from other teams and higher-ups. And no budget would ever be assigned to this. So I took it upon myself to learn how to do it through code. Six months later I had a solution up and running which automated about 80% of the daily work for the four of us. Did they fire the other three people and just leave me to do that remaining 20%? No, they took me and another one of the technically savvy people from the team and took us off the boring daily stuff entirely and put us on a DevOps style team where we managed ourselves and were told to just attach ourselves to whatever projects we want and just add value somehow. They promoted me. They also promoted the person who had been there the longest to make them the manager of a new Dallas team that was being created for us to pass off the remainder of the boring stuff do, as well as new initiatives that they weren't able to capitalize on because lack of headcount to handle the work. The fourth member of the team also migrated into different projects around the division. Basically, it freed everyone to do a bunch of stuff the business wanted to do but didn't have the budget for or did have the budget for but standard corporate bullshit got in the way of. This was like a godsend to them because they viewed it as getting 3 people just thrown in their laps for free.
Win-win for everyone.