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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?

#121

Post by blackflame7000 »

pinewurst wrote: post #111
blackflame7000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's paid based on task completion then no ethical violation. However, if he is paid based on hours worked then there is a grey area of whether he is actually working.

It says "full time job" hired as a "programmer" which to me at least, makes an hourly wage unlikely.

I'm a salaried contractor for the Military and yet everyday I have to fill out a timecard. Even though I can come and go as I please, I am still required to fulfill those hours of work regardless of how long it actually takes me. Any sort of government work is going to require timecards.

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

#122

Post by slantyyz »

threesixandnine wrote: post #16
davidw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free time The employer is paying for that time, so... he should be doing something for the company. Ideally, he'd tell them of his accomplishment and get a raise and a job helping other people automate their jobs, or something like that.

No. He is working remotely and the employer is paying for getting the job done. There is no way of something ideally happening in this case. The amount of taking the higher moral ground on Stack and here (in only a few minutes) is laughable. He is a single parent trying to get things working for him and his son. He is even questioning himself about this. This puts him into 5% of the honest population. I am old enough…

>> No. He is working remotely and the employer is paying for getting the job done.

To me, the test of whether he is being paid for results or time is whether he is paid more if the work required more than the 40 hours.

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

#123

Post by matthewmacleod »

kungito wrote: post #106
emodendroket wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure that's not true – in the UK at least, any work created during a course of employment belongs to the employer. There's nothing in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act that explicitly defines what 'course of employment' means but a court would certainly consider it valid were the works produced on company time using company equipment.

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

#124

Post by hsod »

Ethical behavior generally requires honesty and forthrightness. If you are only concerned about your own ethical behavior, you should tell them. Keeping it a secret is effectively lying.

If you want to do some ethical calculus, you can probably quite easily determine that your employer (or the general economic system) is less ethical than you keeping this a secret, which may give you some "ethical leeway" when dealing with them.

Furthermore, you could determine that your employer is likely to behave unethically towards you if you told them, in which case you may be able to determine that keeping it a secret is a net-positive ethically speaking.

But yes, it is unethical to lie to your employer about how you're doing your job.

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

#125

Post by arthurjj »

slantyyz wrote: post #122
threesixandnine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. He is working remotely and the employer is paying for getting the job done. There is no way of something ideally happening in this case. The amount of taking the higher moral ground on Stack and here (in only a few minutes) is laughable. He is a single parent trying to get things working for him and his son. He is even questioning himself about this. This puts him into 5% of the honest population. I am old enough…

>> No. He is working remotely and the employer is paying for getting the job done. To me, the test of whether he is being paid for results or time is whether he is paid more if the work required more than the 40 hours.

Agreed. Assuming he's salaried and not hourly there's no argument in my mind that he should feel required to tell them. If he's hourly I'd say it might be a gray area.

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

#126

Post by webnrrd2k »

kazen44 wrote: post #25
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…

> Butt-in-the-chair hours are super important culturally and it's been that way for a while it seems to me that this is directly related to the fact that many parts of management theory have been developed as part of a manufacturing industry instead of a service/"tinkering" industry. With manufacturing, more hours directly correlates to more units produced and thus more value created. This is not the case anymore tha…

I think thst there is also a fundamental imbalance between people's general expectation of what's fair for a company to do, and what's fair for a person to do. After all, if a company had discovered a way to make, say, an expensive medication for almost nothing, would the company be expected to disclose their secret? Would a company be expected to announce to the world: "we can make this for almost nothing now, so were dropping the price to almost nothing!".

In the case of the OP, I think the company should have made it clear that employees wont be penelized for doing their job well. he would certainly deserve a bonus, and some extra vacation time, for directly contributing to making the company better. He shouldn't need to worry about loosing his job.

Honestly, if the employee expects to get screwed over by his bosses or the company, then I can see why he wouldn't disclose the programming and automation.

Maybe he can open up discussion by asking his manager what would happen if he could make his job, say, 10% faster or easier by automation. Just see where that goes and figure out the next step...

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

#127

Post by WalterBright »

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…

Yes, that's the crux of the matter. Is his arrangement for time, or for the results?

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

#128

Post by icebraining »

jsjohnst wrote: post #105
jkern wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What law would he be breaking?

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

#129

Post by rljy »

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…

Adam Smith began his wealth of nations with a description of the division of labor and an essay on how this division leads to an increase in productivity. Specifically, he gives the example of a worker who's sole job it is to make pins, and who devises a way to make them by machine, while previously, each pin was hammered out by hand over a matter of minutes, the new machine makes them in seconds.

This division of labor is often cited as the thing that makes capitalism great.

This kind of optimization can be incentivized by way of piece work. Piece work is when workers are paid per piece rather than by the hour. Piece work is outlawed in the west. In the US, it was outlawed during the great depression when the minimum wage was instated. In Europe, I'm not sure when it was outlawed, but it is illegal here as well. In Asia and India, it is still legal. I feel that things like Uber, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, are rejuvenations of the illegal piece work payment method.

Would it be unethical to apply AI to solve Mechanical Turk tasks?

I don't know if I think that piecework should be legal or illegal. The reasons for banning it were very compelling at the time.

Edit: spelling

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

#130

Post by pbh101 »

logfromblammo wrote: post #90
kelnos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular case is weird in that they hired a programmer to do the job of a data entry person. It turns out that they -- accidentally -- made the right decision, because it's frankly stupid to pay someone for a month of work when you could spend a little up-front time automating it and eliminate the need for the job entirely. So, honestly, I don't think it would be wrong for the company, if they knew about the a…

No, the company didn't make the right decision. They hired a programmer to do the work of a data-entry person. If they hired that programmer to do the work of a programmer, the automation software would be work-for-hire, and would belong to the company. Since they hired the programmer to do different work, in the absence of an explicit agreement saying otherwise, the automation software belongs to OP, to use (and lic…

Most of the time, employers are savvy enough to write employment contracts which cover this eventuality and lay broad claim to all work products and require the employee to do any sort of work.

My guess is that most programmers are employed under contracts that give them no additional recourse if, for an extreme example, their employer decided that they should now spend their time on janitorial duties.

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