At my last job, something I tried to push unsuccessfully was a company-wide automation initiative.
Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity.
So now you're out of a job. But if you can automate other jobs in the organisation, you also get bonuses.
Eventually the majority of the company becomes automated, hopefully generating the same or greater revenue and value for customers, with less overhead costs. Which is great for any stakeholders who can continue to receive revenues, but terrible for employees. So it would be good to include some kind of equity and/or revenue sharing model. The sell could then be "hey, let's all work together to automate this company, we'll get bonuses for doing so, and when the whole thing is automated we can continue to receive income while sitting on the beach".
This sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g.
- If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just got bonuses for doing nothing?
- If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Will you be angry?
- If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away? (assume for a moment that you have the most difficult to automate job in the company)
I mean... this could work if you'd manage to set up incentives so that everyone in the company works together and not against each other. But I'm not sure how to do this, especially in a way which doesn't leave anybody feeling he's being treated unfairly.
> If you automate away your non-tech co-worker ... will he get the bonus?
Yes, and you get nothing. It's fair; just don't automate away other people's jobs, automate away your own.
> If someone automates you away, will you get anything?
Yes, 100% of the bonus. It's not a choice, you must leave. I still think that's fair.
> If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away?
You don't automate away your co-workers unless you like doing free work. Problem solved. If you have the most difficult to automate away job, you entered into it knowingly. The market will ensure that those jobs will be higher paid by supply and demand.
This model doesn't require cooperation to work, just a relatively clear set of job responsibilities and a clear definition of what it means for you to be automated away.
I actually really love this idea, from an employer's perspective.
Isn't what you just describe about automating other peoples jobs away a huge part of IT to begin with... we take paper forms that have long review chains and turn them into electronic forms (more effective data entry, fewer needed) with mostly automated review chains (cut middle management)... yeilding higher returns.
This is why IT is considered White Collar (especially software developers and engineers)... It's our job to automate people out of jobs... which then churns the need for jobs developing ever more complex systems that aren't human. Often badly written.
We'll never reach greater than say 60% unemployment... there's just to much crap to shovel (even in automation).
Ok, so how about when you're an accountant? Now your employer has a strong incentive to pay someone extra to eliminate you, and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.
That's the kind of situation that needs to be handled.
> and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.
Automating existing work is more than just programming; a big part of it is expertise provided by people knowledgeable about the existing workflow. None of the projects I've been on that involved automating existing work involved only programmers and no one with experience doing the work.
Yes, I know, and I appreciated that fact in the post upthread. The point here is, if you go with the suggestion of 'redemeer that "if you get automated away, you get 0", said accountant will have no incentive to help with the automating, and every incentive to make it as hard as possible - which I think is not the result we want to have. To get a happy ending for everyone, we need coordination, not competition.
> The point here is, if you go with the suggestion of 'redemeer that "if you get automated away, you get 0", said accountant will have no incentive to help with the automating
If you go with a principal that if you are involved in automating the job away, you get some reward, the accountant may have some incentive to help (especially if it is likely to happen, but with perhaps lesser quality -- but still perhaps a net cost savings to the company -- anyway, which would result not only in the company getting less than if the accountant was actively involved, but the accountant getting less as well.)
If you get automated away, by yourself or by anyone else, you instantly get the bonus and you're instantly fired.
The accountant has every incentive to either be an amazing accountant so that any automation would be a pale imitation (everyone wins), or he can choose to automate himself away, move to the next job, automate himself away and pick up the bonus there, and so on (everyone gets their due).
This is competition, and I think it's a happy ending for meritocracy. The only people who lose are those who desire to continue to be paid while not generating value.
My reply would be that if a programmer can out-account you as an accountant, then you've failed as an accountant; you need to look for another job or learn the necessary skills like programming.
Of course this does mean a lot of people out of jobs, which is the crux of the article, but I don't think it's a fault or weak link in this employment model.
Definitely depending on the type of organisation, you'd need to tweak the incentive structure. And yeah the ideal scenario would be the entire organisation working together to automate all of their processes, and for everyone to share in those benefits.
The basic, not fully thought out idea, was that if you automated your own job you got the full bonus. If you automate another person's job, you both split the bonus 50/50.
I think with most jobs, automation would definitely involve programming and tech skills. But there would be a lot of non-tech tasks as well, such as thoroughly understanding their workflow and processes and identifying more efficient practices.
"Automation" can also be a combination of computer and human outsourcing too.
In the small web dev company I was working for (launching internal startups), the "creative process" of designing website mockups was incredibly time consuming. I suggested we collect all of the customer requirements and collateral, and automatically outsource the mockups via API to something like MobileWorks/Freelancer/Elance/99Designs/DesignCrowd etc
The problem there is the perceived unfairness that occurs when someone else in the company, sharing your approximate job, puts you out of work via automation.
How do you compensate those who lose their jobs as a result? What if they were also trying, but just happened to not be first to succeed?
It's a really cool idea though. (As a manufacturing engineer in a fairly old-fashioned company, I am currently trying to automate as much as possible; no idea yet about individual bonuses since I'm <1 year on the job)
Yeah it would need a lot of thought around the incentive structures.
The original thought was that if you fully automate your own job you get your salary as a bonus. But if you fully automate someone else's job, you both split their salary 50/50 as a bonus.
Now both of you are free to work on automating other jobs in the org. So you'd end up with various teams working together to automate jobs in the org.
As a byproduct, it would also free up a lot of human capital in an organisation to focus on pure R&D and intrapreneurship.
Why would a good capitalist pay years of salary, percentages of the company, or whatever else you're talking about offering, when they can simply outsource the automation job for $5,000 to China? And then fire you.
And then hire you back on a $5,000 1099 contract to automate other people's jobs?
You seem to be trying to come up with some sort of "fair" system, as if that were how compensation works now or ever will work.
That's why I hate political labels. What do you mean by saying "he's a marxist"? Does subscribing to one of Karl's ideas require automatically subscribing to every other?
I know you meant this as a joke, but I want to emphasize a general point - one of the things that totally dumb down conversations about economy is people grouping ideas under labels like "communist" or "libertarian" or whatever and evaluating them in batches.
To be a bit contrarian though... there is a useful aspect associated with using labels, even in political/economic discussions, in a way that is similar to ascribing names to things called "design patterns" so that one can communicate concepts more tersely.
If done in good faith, I think it's legitimate to start with approximate labels, like "libertarian", and the arguing parties can then proceed to make their position clearer if necessary. Hopefully, this saves time.
Also, I think it's fair to describe someone that believes in the importance of "workers should own the means of production" as a marxist (at least it's more accurate than socialist or communist).
If done in good faith is the key though. I'm complaining because I've seen too many discussions derailed by people assigning labels to each other and then calling it a day. The argument goes like this: "you said that, it sounds like what Marx would say, and Marx was wrong in something completely unrelated, so therefore you're wrong too". It's a trap people too often fall into.
Well, you can start with the same question and reach different conclusions. Does this mean that you're still wrong? And does the fact that Marx was wrong about one thing means he was wrong about everything else? It's too easy to group some idea with some others and then dismiss the whole thing by noting that one the other ones are wrong.
The founders, directors and investors could still own 51% of the company.
Heck, if they wanted they could offer only the bonus payout incentive structure with no equity or revenue share. In essence that would still encourage employees to automate the company. Employees work themselves out of a job, and the owners reap all of the automated revenues.
It's hard to change the status quo, specially when there are paychecks directly involved.
At a company I worked for, after they realized that things couldn't go on anymore without massive automation, their first approach was to introduce it into the infrastructure lifecycle and require all new infrastructure to be heavily automated. That allowed the legacy stuff to die slowly without much disturbance.
Another different idea entirely would be spin off a subsidiary with those ideals and slowly migrate the work there. Perhaps too much work, but if the situation is desperate enough..
It's definitely a scary proposal for management to accept. The company I pitched this to was a 15 year-old web dev / digital agency with ~15 employees and <$2m in revenues. So a pretty tiny and poorly performing company. Management liked the idea because almost all of their revenues were going into wages.
But there must be a particular type of company, at a particular scale, with a particular ethos out there that would be up for giving an automation initiative a shot.
If it worked, it would make for an impressive news story which could spark others to follow suit.
Imagine an economy where everyone's job was to automate their job...
Really small web dev company. Almost 15 years in business. 15 employees. <$2m annual revenue. Something like 90% of the revenues went to wages, and their processes were ridiculously slow. They had 3 actual devs, 3 designers, 2 SEO people and the rest were managers or admin staff. So many manual processes that could clearly be automated.
Imagine a company-wide incentive structure for automation whereby if you automate 90-100% of your job, you receive massive bonuses. If you completely automate your job, the bonus could be the entirety of your annual salary as a single payout. Or perhaps a combination of bonus and equity.
So now you're out of a job. But if you can automate other jobs in the organisation, you also get bonuses.
Eventually the majority of the company becomes automated, hopefully generating the same or greater revenue and value for customers, with less overhead costs. Which is great for any stakeholders who can continue to receive revenues, but terrible for employees. So it would be good to include some kind of equity and/or revenue sharing model. The sell could then be "hey, let's all work together to automate this company, we'll get bonuses for doing so, and when the whole thing is automated we can continue to receive income while sitting on the beach".