Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

workplace.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 543 posts

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

#101

Post by lordnacho »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #68
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

It might be against some contract he's signed, which would make it illegal.

Aside from that I'm not sure I buy this "duty of loyalty" idea. What social purpose does it serve? Sounds like something that's common because at some point it became normal to be able to get people to agree to it. After all, most people in history could not work remotely.

There's also plenty of other professions where you can work for several people at once, for instance you can be a columnist and do prep work that's useful for more than one column.

What I don't like is this idea that he's being paid for his time, not his product. It seems pretty clear cut he's being paid to maintain this legacy system. He's doing it. If something happens, he should be available, but otherwise he should be able to do whatever he wants, including other work.

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

#102

Post by emodendroket »

Falling3 wrote: post #34
pmoriarty wrote: post #29

What is considered ethical or unethical always depends on who you ask. Ask most slave owners a few hundred years ago if it was ethical to whip slaves (or even own slaves, for that matter) and you'll get one answer, but quite a different answer from the slaves themselves. You'll get different answers to this question whether you ask it of employers or employees, capitalists, socialists, or communists, people who feel…

You're right that ethical axioms are subjective. But most arguments tend to center around the application of those axioms . I often find that people are in complete agreement in their axioms, but come to different conclusions in real world scenarios - due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons (I know this is wrong, but I really want to do it).

Maybe so, but I don't think that accurately describes the groups the parent post listed.

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

#103

Post by emodendroket »

jkern wrote: post #65
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.

It seems hard to claim making a mistake and deliberate sabotage are the same.

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

#104

Post by emodendroket »

skolos wrote: post #100
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…

This reminds me one study that I've read sometime ago (sorry my google-fu is not good enough and I cannot find link to it) - when people call locksmith and get inexperienced technician that takes an hour to do the job they felt the charge was reasonable and justified. If they get experienced technician that does same job within 10 minutes, people feel ripped off when they pay same money as in the first case.

It wasn't a study; it was a guy who talked to a locksmith recounting their conversation.

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

#105

Post by jsjohnst »

jkern wrote: post #65
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.

Because it shows willful deception. In a court of law, this would likely be a significant point in the case.

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

#106

Post by kungito »

emodendroket wrote: post #92
dsego wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's his tool, why give it away for free?

Well, I mean, generally, any tools you create on company time, with company resources, are assigned to the company, if you're an employee.

Only if the contract says so. And just because the contract says so doesn't mean it's morally correct, only that they managed to get you to sign it.

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

#107

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

There are two and a half competing forces in companies.

The first is the pursuit of profit. The second is the maintenance of hierarchy and status.

(In more humane companies the half force is an explicit dedication to benign personal and social improvement of all participants. But let's ignore that for now.)

Many companies are willing to sacrifice profits in order to maintain hierarchy.

Aside from the bugs, which are questionable, the only "crime" in any of these stories is lèse-majesté - the narcissistic wounding of someone who considers themselves a superior in the implied hierarchy.

People with authoritarian tendencies tend to consider this a far more serious crime than petty theft.

Being more competent, better informed, and more efficient should be a positive attribute, not a social challenge. But it's incredibly hard to set up a corporate culture which is a genuine performant meritocracy where status depends entirely on competence and ability.

Most companies are a very long way from this ideal. Many have an explicitly feudal mindset, where innovation and competence in underlings is not only threatening, it's terrifying.

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

#108

Post by contravariant »

protonfish wrote: post #22

I did not expect to see so much contention about this. A company is paying him to do a job, and he is doing that job. Is the problem that he isn't miserable? This baffles me.

Well, the question was whether it was unethical, and the ethics to me seem pretty clear. He is lying to the company about what he's doing and when he's doing it. He also had an agreement with the company to work 40 hours for wages, which he has clearly broken. Neither of those things are ethical in any way shape or form.

However resolving this in a just way is now extremely difficult (this is mostly his own fault but still). The way I see it he (morally) still retains the rights to the code, since the company didn't pay him to write it. However the company has also been wronged because he has lied to them and broken his contract. The question now is if the value of his code is enough to compensate the wrong he did to the company, and if so by how much. That's not an easy question to answer, hence the discussion.

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

#109

Post by jenkstom »

mst wrote: post #63
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.

Like his own personal chaos monkey.

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

#110

Post by DugFin »

Falling3 wrote: post #34
pmoriarty wrote: post #29

What is considered ethical or unethical always depends on who you ask. Ask most slave owners a few hundred years ago if it was ethical to whip slaves (or even own slaves, for that matter) and you'll get one answer, but quite a different answer from the slaves themselves. You'll get different answers to this question whether you ask it of employers or employees, capitalists, socialists, or communists, people who feel…

You're right that ethical axioms are subjective. But most arguments tend to center around the application of those axioms . I often find that people are in complete agreement in their axioms, but come to different conclusions in real world scenarios - due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons (I know this is wrong, but I really want to do it).

>due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons

That's not the entirety of it. The problem is that these ethical problems exist within a certain societal framework, and that framework is made of multiple overlapping assumptions, habits, traditions, and expectations, some of them contradictory. Two people's axioms might be identical, but they may come to two opposite conclusions over whether these identical axioms apply to a given situation based on how they each subjectively weight the assorted related circumstances. They'll BOTH claim that the other's bad conclusion is due to "flaws in their reasoning", and can still both have perfect internally consistent reasoning for their own conclusion. Ethics isn't physics. There often ISN'T a right or wrong answer, only a variation in assumptions.

Post reply on HN