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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?

#61

Post by blackflame7000 »

xenophonf wrote: post #31

Once, long ago, I did two weeks' worth of work for a multi-person team in about a day, thanks to a little sed/awk magic. The work would have gotten done a lot faster if I didn't have to deal with the completely shitty X-over-dialup remote access setup they forced me to use. The project manager was actually upset with me because now we couldn't bill the client for 80x5 hours worth of work or whatever it was. Needless…

Thats pretty ridiculous. Any business that punishes innovation isn't long for this world. If the PM was really that concerned about billable hours i'm sure he could have found something. Heck maybe you shoulda recommended disabling copy & paste on all dev computers in order to increase profit by 30%

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

#62

Post by jez »

Kenji wrote: post #41
imh wrote: post #21

This question is a beautiful example of typical incentives workers feel and how screwed up they are. On HN people talk often enough about how if you have a worker who gets their job done in 30 hours instead of the company's usual 40-60 hours, you should give them 30-100% more responsibility, but much more rarely "and 30-100% more pay." Butt-in-the-chair hours are super important culturally and it's been that way for…

You have no idea how much I hate the people who are paid for 8 hours of 'butt in the chair' but they only show up for 6 and of course it's their code that breaks first and of course they've already gone home when the bug report comes in and of course the code is so obscure that one would have to ask them or else spend 5 additional hours on it.

Everyone's code breaks eventually. Even the people who spend 8, 10, or 12 hours in the chair. The solution is not to require that everyone spend 8 hours at work.

Rather, it's to require that the code be explained and discussed in code review. After that, there's an on-call team (which may or may not include the original developers of the code!) who handles the system in case of a breakage.

Butt in the chair time is completely irrelevant to this process.

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

#63

Post by mst »

simonh wrote: post #28

If he was a company providing a service this wouldn't even be a subject for discussion. It would be a non-issue. Also he's been pretty much instructed by the company not to rock the boat. It seems pretty clear they really don't care as long as the work gets done. I've known plenty of sysadmins that have significantly automated most of their work and mainly just monitor and maintain, good for them. Nobody ever critici…

> He should stop introducing errors though.

Then the QA team would stop paying attention and if he ever introduced a bug it would be much much worse.

Seems to me that in this case it serves a "test your backups" function.

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

#64

Post by ceejayoz »

crispyambulance wrote: post #42
dkonofalski wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, for the most part, but what other reason or intent would you have in inserting deliberate errors than to be duplicitous or fraudulent? His best bet would have just been to let the script do its thing for as long as he could until he was asked about it. Chances are he never would have been asked and would have been commended for his accuracy. Now, though, he's totally on the hook for fraud if this ever comes…

The purpose of the deliberate errors is to avoid (or delay) having the discussion about the automation. He is not "on the hook" for fraud unless he acts like he's in a sit-com and blurts out that this has been going on for 6-months. He could just say: "...hey, I've been working on automating this task, I think I got it working now."

If you're "not 'on the hook' for fraud" only because you haven't shared material facts ("this has been going on for 6-months"), you're committing fraud.

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

#65

Post by jkern »

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…

When he was doing the same work by hand he was producing data with errors in it. All he's done is achieve the same error rate he had before. I don't see why the fact he could trivially reduce the errors to 0 is relevant when from the employer's point of view the exact same result is being produced.

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

#66

Post by Hasz »

They want x amount of data processed, and are willing to give $y to do it. If the OP has found a way to offer x at a much lower price than estimated, good for him.

People make shitty deals all the time, he is under no obligation to tell tell them to fix it. The relationship is contractual and nothing more.

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

#67

Post by afandian »

kelnos wrote: post #58
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 anyt…

True, I saw an efficiency and exploited it, so in a way I 'won'. And I was taking a bet myself, as I didn't know the precise details of the job before taking it and just how much I could automate it. But they didn't logically 'lose' anything, business-wise, they got exactly what they asked for.

I suppose what I learned is that it's humans who run a business, and humans aren't always logical and act based on feelings.

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

#68

Post by blackflame7000 »

lordnacho wrote: post #55

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.

Moonlighting is often against company's policy because there is a legal concept which applies to all employees called the “duty of loyalty.” Because legally employees are “agents” of their employer, they are required to act in the best interests of the employer during their employment

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

#69

Post by afandian »

6stringmerc wrote: post #57
mikeash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The weird thing is, this was a very small business who hit the jackpot of high Google ratings. They weren't a heaving bureaucratic business.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

imh wrote: post #21

This question is a beautiful example of typical incentives workers feel and how screwed up they are. On HN people talk often enough about how if you have a worker who gets their job done in 30 hours instead of the company's usual 40-60 hours, you should give them 30-100% more responsibility, but much more rarely "and 30-100% more pay." Butt-in-the-chair hours are super important culturally and it's been that way for…

[deleted]
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