The Automation Trap: Why Manual Work Makes More Money
I know a lot of smart engineers who've tried to start businesses and failed. Not because they couldn't build the product - they're great engineers - but because they spent months building something nobody wanted. We've all heard this advice a million times: "talk to customers first," "validate before you build," "start simple." So why do engineers keep making the same mistake?
I think it comes down to how our day jobs train us to think about problems.
Our day jobs teach us the wrong lessons
When you're working as a software engineer, you get handed problems that have been carefully pre-selected for you. A product manager or business owner comes to you with something that's been sanitized and packaged as "a thing software can solve completely."
But here's what you don't see: that business person already did the hard work of separating the money-making parts from the automatable parts. They figured out which pieces humans need to stay involved in, and isolated the one workflow that can be fully automated. You only see the clean technical problem.
For example, you're asked to build a document upload system for a mortgage company. What's hidden from you is all the relationship-building, sales calls, risk assessment, and decision-making that happens around those documents. You get handed: "automate document storage and retrieval."
The capability expansion trap
Here's the second part that messes with our heads. The business was making money from this process before they called you. If they just wanted you to automate exactly what currently happens, that might only take 50% of your brain power.
But business leaders don't want to waste the other 50%. Since they're paying for your full attention, they'll keep adding requirements until you start to push back. They want their money's worth.
So you end up working on projects that add capabilities and handle edge cases. From your perspective, these extra features look like where the value comes from. But that's wrong. The money comes from the basic workflow that was already generating revenue. The extra stuff is just nice-to-haves they threw in because they were already paying for your time.
This teaches engineers to focus on the wrong things: the fancy capabilities, the edge cases, the ability to scale at near zero marginal cost. When engineers try to start businesses, they bring this lens with them.
How other professionals think about success
Here's what's weird: successful professionals in other fields don't think about success as "never having to do the work again."
Does an architect imagine that career success means designing one building template that customers can just plug requirements into? Of course not. Successful architects want to design more buildings, not fewer.
Listen to what successful architects tell you about their work. Do they say that now that they're famous, they don't do any work at all? No, they say the opposite. They tell you "this is the hardest project I've ever worked on." I get the impression that a lot of software engineers assume it's marketing speak - surely someone at the top of their field has figured out how to make things easier for themselves?
But they're telling the truth about it being hard work. That's why they always want to talk about their creative process and show you all the thought they put into projects. I don't think they're faking those office tours where they show you all the sketches, all the material samples, all the iteration process. I don't think they just made that up and actually wake up in the morning, go to the deli, get a coffee, meet friends for lunch, and get an ice cream. I think those office tours are what they're actually doing. They are in fact doing lots of work.
Take a surgeon who develops a new technique for a complex heart procedure. Do they think "Great, now I can stop doing surgery"? No - they end up specializing in only that technique. Patients fly in from around the world specifically to have this surgeon perform this one procedure. They're not doing the grab bag of simple surgeries anymore because they figured out how to make their job easier. The opposite is true. Successful surgeons are doing more difficult work. They want to go from setting broken bones to performing 12-hour operations that only a handful of people in the world can do. That specialized difficulty is exactly what justifies their premium fees.
Doing more labor is the opposite of how a software engineer thinks about business success.
Let's think about how a software engineer would interpret the work of a successful accountant. During tax season, that accountant is reviewing complex returns, making judgment calls about deductions, advising clients on tax strategies, staying current with changing regulations. They're not just running TurboTax for people; they're applying expertise to navigate complicated situations that software can't handle.
But talk to a software engineer about the tax industry. "Wow, there is a lot of work here that could be automated. That's my business opportunity." They're not thinking "This accountant makes more than me. I should learn to do exactly what they do, achieve parity with their output, then use my software skills to add 20% efficiency - that's an extra $100k a year." There's this consistent focus on automation and complete solutions. Engineers always want software to be the crown jewel, the enabling factor, not just a shortcut in a conventional business.
The pattern across profitable businesses is the same: people make good money by being willing to do detailed, specialized work that requires their personal involvement. They haven't figured out some trick where they don't have to do anything at all. In fact, the most successful ones often make their work harder and more specialized over time, not easier.
The automation-first mistake
When engineers think about business opportunities, they imagine complete automation. The dream is answering support emails for 10 minutes a day while everything else runs itself. They're not thinking: "I'm going to work really hard doing valuable work and make good money at it."
This leads to what I call the "$0.30 tarpit." Engineers look at tiny tasks that might be worth $0.30 if fully automated and think: "This isn't profitable now, but once I fully automate it, maybe I can collect that $0.30 from lots of people."
They never start with something they could profitably do by hand. They skip right to trying to automate things that aren't even worth doing manually.
pHere's a concrete example: imagine using software to find the most valuable landscaping projects, qualify leads, and cherry-pick only the best opportunities. Then you go out and do the physical work. You could probably make $300,000 a year this way. How many indie hackers would even consider it due to all the manual labor involved.
What "do things that don't scale" actually means
There's this famous startup advice: "do things that don't scale." But engineers misunderstand it. They think it means "do things by hand temporarily until you can automate them."
That's not it. The real insight is that the things that make money are workflows that humans can do. Business owners get rich by taking these human workflows and improving them: reducing costs, growing distribution, bringing in more customers, servicing them better.
The money comes from the workflow itself, not from eliminating it. Software helps you do the workflow more efficiently, but you're still fundamentally in the business of doing valuable work for people.
This is why the landscaping example works. The money comes from good landscaping work. Software just helps you find the best jobs. You're not trying to automate landscaping away - you're trying to be really good at landscaping.
Practical takeaways
If you're an engineer thinking about starting a business:
- Look for businesses where you'd be willing to do manual work that pays well
- Use software to make that work more efficient or help you reach more customers
- Don't assume automation is the entire value proposition.
- Remember that other successful professionals make good money by doing lots of detailed, specialized work
The strongest engineers I know who've started successful businesses usually picked an industry they understood, learned to do the core work profitably, then used their technical skills to get competitive advantages. They didn't try to engineer their way out of doing work. They used engineering to do valuable work better than anyone else could.
That's a much more reliable path than trying to build the perfect automated solution to a problem nobody really cares about.