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Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

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Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#51

Post by doingmyting »

treehau5 wrote: post #33
afandian wrote: post #27

When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but all sales were done by phone (early 2000s). They wanted to pay me by the hour, but I negotiated paying by the page instead. Of course, I automated the job. And surprisingly, at least to naïve me, they were annoyed that I automated it. Even though they got the sa…

> I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what. Get paid for your output, and not your time?

People pay for perceived value. Emphasis on perceived.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#52

Post by posixplz »

hessproject wrote: post #38

There are two ethical lines the poster may have crossed. > I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human. As a few others in the original post pointed out, this seems to be the biggest issue. He is intentionally misleading his employer as to the nature of the work he is doing. The automation itself isn't immediately unethical, but the intentional misdirection could be. Th…

Furthermore, because there is significant financial gain in the deception, the actions taken would almost certainly meet the legal requirement for fraud in a modern jurisdiction.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#53

Post by setq »

mikeash wrote: post #44
afandian wrote: post #27

When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but all sales were done by phone (early 2000s). They wanted to pay me by the hour, but I negotiated paying by the page instead. Of course, I automated the job. And surprisingly, at least to naïve me, they were annoyed that I automated it. Even though they got the sa…

I think you learned not to tell people how the sausage is made.

This sums it up nicely.

Also, if it's easy and you've done it a million times, charge an inflated fixed price. If it's new territory, charge by the hour.

Edit: before I forget, if you let them know how it's done then you need to charge for the several times they won't come back again afterwards.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#54

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

The poster there is referring to current state of things being automated. He is the expert of that particular system. If there are changes upstream, his automation will fail and if he isn't there, then what?

When upper management changes and someone would like to change the system or business process it supports they will need him.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#55

Post by lordnacho »

I'm surprised nobody has suggested he takes a second remote job. He's looking to send his kids to college after all.

I don't see the problem with doing your job super efficiently. Adding bugs is just "a duck", not a real productivity loss.

I don't see how you can claim the company wants hours rather than work done.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#56

Post by justboxing »

jarym wrote: post #37

Seriously... Op could quit his job, then go tell his employer he'll maintain the system for a fixed monthly subscription. They'll have less headcount and op will be free to pursue other activities.

> and op will be free to pursue other activities.

Nope. I think op has evaluated this angle and here's what he says in his post.

> Although I get the feeling there’s a specific audience at Stackoverflow, mainly the type of people who I imagine can not appreciate living in a place where jobs aren’t aplenty. Most likely they can walk out of their silicon valley office and shout “I want a job” and get 3 offers to start the next day. Unfortunately, there are places in the country that just aren’t like that.

and

> If I could get another job, of course I would. But the fact is, it would not be that easy. And as mentioned, I work remotely..

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#57

Post by 6stringmerc »

mikeash wrote: post #44
afandian wrote: post #27

When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but all sales were done by phone (early 2000s). They wanted to pay me by the hour, but I negotiated paying by the page instead. Of course, I automated the job. And surprisingly, at least to naïve me, they were annoyed that I automated it. Even though they got the sa…

I think you learned not to tell people how the sausage is made.

Bingo. Besides, people are scared by humans capable of doing tasks much faster than previously thought. When in doubt, sandbag!

See also: the scene in the film "Big" when grown-up Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) gets the lecture from a Co-Worker (Jon Lovitz) to slow down his data entry as to not get everybody fired by going at a leisurely pace.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#58

Post by kelnos »

afandian wrote: post #27

When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but all sales were done by phone (early 2000s). They wanted to pay me by the hour, but I negotiated paying by the page instead. Of course, I automated the job. And surprisingly, at least to naïve me, they were annoyed that I automated it. Even though they got the sa…

> I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what.

You learned that, despite the fact that you negotiated to be paid by output rather than time, the pay that the company was comfortable with was actually based on their impression of the time it would take to build each page. If they had known you could automate it, they likely would have expected you to agree to a lower per-page fee.

I don't think you did anything wrong, but I don't blame them for being annoyed. Essentially you were a shrewd negotiator, and "won" that interaction, and _that_ was annoying.

But yeah, as a sibling said: don't tell people how the sausage is made. If it's clear up front they're paying for the sausage, and not for the time it takes you to make it, I'd say you're ethically in the clear.

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#59

Post by renlo »

I graduated in the recession without any real skills or an applicable / usable degree (lib arts in a language I could barely speak).

The first job I got after college was for data entry where I was expected to go to an email inbox which received some automated messages with some strings in them and to copy these strings and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet.

I was expected to do this for ~6 hours a day every day. Sitting there, copying and pasting strings from some email. Then this spreadsheet would be forwarded to my boss who would forward it to some other people (I don't remember who these people were, probably for auditing of some kind).

After a couple of weeks of this I really started to hate it. I had taken a class on spreadsheets when I was a kid and knew that there was a way to automate it all, so I did a couple of Google searches and figured out a way to copy all of these numbers automatically. It was done using some VB script IIRC and some spreadsheet formulas.

I stupidly told my boss. So now he had me doing other stupid and mind-numbing work for those 6 hours I would have been copying and pasting strings from the emails (like manually burning hundreds of CDs one after the other with Windows XP and a CD-burner which only worked half of the time).

I quit a week or two later, but learned a valuable lesson. Don't tell your boss. Side note: this is how I became interested in pursuing programming as a profession.

It would be great if there was a means for people to sell technology like this to their employers, for those rare cases where someone goes above and beyond the expected solution. In reality employers don't care because they own your output regardless so why do they need you?

Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

#60

Post by logfromblammo »

If you can trust the company to act in an ethical manner rather than a purely profit-seeking manner, there should be no problem in telling them you have automated your own job out of existence.

They pat you on the back, license the software from you for 0.5x your former salary every year, move the folks that formerly did that same work to other projects, and put you on retainer to update the program if it ever needs it. Then they offer you different work, to see if you can work more magic.

That said, I would only trust one of the companies that I have ever worked with to do that. The rest would screw me over good and hard, giving one excuse or another.

By the Hillel principle ("If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?") you have to consider the impact on yourself as well as upon others. Will the company fire me? Will it keep me and fire my co-workers, since I can do all of their work for a week in a single day? Will it pay me more to do so? Do I have a duty to act in the company's best interest if that conflicts with my own? What if it is best for myself and the company, but ruinous for innocent bystanders?

Clearly, if this is a typical US company, the ethical course of action is to not inform the employer. This is an unfortunate loss for the economy as a whole, but it is the only appropriate response to the modal behavior of business management. Maybe also file a patent on the method of automation, if able.

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