Embrace Automation
Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating? — Dr Terence Parr
There is a huge sense of anxiety amongst people from IT industry these days. Everyday we hear news of people made redundant, potential job cuts and intelligent machines taking over jobs. While I am not sure how many have lost their jobs, or will in the near future. I am certain that it will happen and we have to be prepared.
What’s happening around us is nothing new, it is just the proof that humanity is evolving continuously. Just as our ancestors made fire, invented wheel, transitioned from horses to steam engines and cars. Evolutions eradicates existing jobs and creates new ones. Survival of the fittest applies to all of us, no one is an exception.
Let is step into our own industry. The growth, especially in the last decade and a half has been humongous. As the industry grew, tools and infrastructure have matured. Our insatiable appetite for delivering better products faster and faster has resulted in need to automate even more. Over last 5–6 years, automation in UI coding, service delivery, integration and maturity of dev-ops practices have improved delivery pace exponentially.
Sadly, this has resulted in some of the traditional skills to be not required. What was done with 15–20 people team 15 years ago is easily accomplished by 5–6 member teams now, thanks to better tools and automation. As lots of things can be done in shorter time, multiple roles have merged into one, for instance we have a full-stack developers instead of front-end and back-end developers.
So what does this all mean? well, in short to stay ahead of the curve we need to embrace automation and start wearing multiple hats. As a person embracing automation you immediately improve your value, by bringing in the capability to reduce delivery time and improve quality. It is also fun as the opening quote from Dr Terence Parr states it generates a lot of value.
What does this mean for various team members?
For technical team members, i.e developers / senior developers always find ways to automate anything you do, don’t hand code CRUD classes, generate them from specs. Use appropriate automation tools or even better write them to perform your work. Pick up some good books like Code Generation In Action By Jack Herrington or explore how tools such as yeoman work.
For Managers and Senior Executives, use automation to plan, execute and control tasks. Encourage your team to embrace automation, work with them to identify repeatable tasks and help automating them. Consistently challenge yourself and your team to reduce the time taken to deliver.
What are the benefits? personally, I feel that embracing automation allows you to think in a more abstract sense. It helps you deliver a better quality product. It makes you special, wanted and relevant at all times. It is also extremely fun to automate and experience the result of the automation.
Moral
Automation is real, it will continue to exist as long as humanity exists. Adapt, learn to automate and stay on top of the pyramid. Remember, only the fittest survive. You can always choose to be the person who creates the automation which threatens to take your job away.
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