I, maybe naively, thought that when I automated a particular boring tasks that it would free up those people to do more interesting work. I made the mistake once of measuring time savings in hours saved, and did the math to determine one particular task was using the equivalent of 3 FTEs. When the task was automated, instead of people doing more interesting work (there was more than enough to do), 3 people were laid off. It's been about 10 years and I'm still upset about it.

Not only did that destroy moral, but it destroyed the trust in the team. I didn't matter how much repetitive work that team had, they never complained... at least not to anyone that could automate it. If we wrote some automation and it broke, they wouldn't tell us, they would just carry on and do it manually.

The reason I learned to code was because I had a job that required doing the same thing 1000 times, and I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I wrote code for myself, to make my life easier, shared that with the team to make their life easier, then that led to the software engineering position where I was automating stuff full time. I never wanted to replace anyone, I just wanted to make their jobs less annoying.

Though looking back, sometimes removing that annoyance also made it boring... "push this button." It also led to a loss of skill, or a lack of development. Not too dissimilar to how some people feel coding with AI.

So I guess I did the same thing to them as AI is looking to do to me, even when I felt I had nothing but good intentions and was just trying to give people the same stuff I wanted for myself... stuff I started making for myself. I guess I have a lot to think about.