Ask HN: Is it optimal for a hacker to work as a programmer?

When I was in the army my job mostly consisted of doing tedious data entry work in legacy software. After a couple of weeks I decided to program a script which would automate my entire job. I would show up at work 8am and leave 4pm without having done anything.

The legacy software would run in a RDP-like session and we had no privileges to run scripts or programs. My script would therefore run as a Visual Basic macro in Excel using the Win32 API to move the mouse and use SendKeys to enter text. After a while it was extremely advanced and handled all edge-cases of my work, making it more accurate than my colleagues. It's one of the best hacks I've ever pulled off.

My Lieutenant could not believe how quickly I got work done. This made me realize that I had to be more careful and make it look like it was me doing the work. My pay was fixed so there was no economic advantage for me to feed the script more work.

In retrospect this experience has made me think. Working as a programmer is perhaps not the most optimal economic choice for a hacker when you consider workload vs pay. You can not automate software development in the same degree that you can automate jobs that mostly consists of repetitive tasks, like brain dead data entry.