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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?

#171

Post by cshenton »

nemo44x wrote: post #169

He should approach management and offer to automate this process for a lump sum of x-years pay. If they plan on using this method for 5 years then offer 4 years of salary for this tool. Everyone wins. They save a years salary and don't have to deal with data entry errors. He wins because he is paid and can continue to earn more. This is an example of automation and capitalism revealing their best features.

Except that under most contracts, the company already owns the code currently used to automate the job.

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

#172

Post by viraptor »

Theodores wrote: post #119
hedgew wrote: post #10

The way I see it, this is the employer's problem. In a good company, what benefits the company, also benefits the employee. In this case the employee and the company have different incentives, and the company does not care enough to solve the problem of incentives. There are many, easy ways the employer could solve this problem so that both parties benefit. The employee does not have the same ability to pursue mutual…

It is the employer's problem, there is also the matter of the competency of the line manager. Have you ever been asked to implement a feature with the first question being 'how long will it take?' for you to pluck a figure out of the air? In these scenarios a voice inside my head wants to ask 'well, you are the manager, aren't managers supposed to know these things?' There is an aspect of this going on here. The mana…

> In these scenarios a voice inside my head wants to ask 'well, you are the manager, aren't managers supposed to know these things?'

That's a double edged sword. What would you think of a manager saying: you're on this task, it's going to take you 2 days? It's not better in my experience.

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

#174

Post by wfunction »

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…

> If you've ever thought "I'm done for the day, but I'm going to hang out a little longer to leave at a more respectable time," then you're feeling (and doing) the same kind of thing.

Not quite. First, this guy went out of his way to lie and insert extra bugs in his code to make it appear like manual labor. Second, this guy is doing it all the time, whereas normally people might only do this on occasion. You can argue about whether the latter is right or wrong, but there's quite a clear line between the two, making the former far more indefensible.

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

#175

Post by spynxic »

austenallred wrote: post #144
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…

It seems the greater question is, "What is the employer paying for?" Economic theory suggests an employer pays for value created. After all, if an employee is generating less economic value than they're consuming, it makes sense to fire that person. But that's only true in a fantasy world where you can perfectly measure and compensate that kind of performance, like performing physics equations without air resistance…

> It seems the greater question is, "What is the employer paying for?"

This agreement is typically unspoken upon initial employment, leaving many employees at a position to take a loss during the production of assets outside of the initial workload.

The most an employee can wish for in this position is merit.

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

#176

Post by icebraining »

hsod wrote: post #159
icebraining wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Why? Virtually all companies keep secrets both from their employees as well as their clients. In fact, these are even protected by force of law. Why is it dishonest for the employee to act towards the company in the same way? Isn't t…

I addressed this pretty directly in my second paragraph. Some people are interested in behaving ethically even in the face of unethical behavior. It is absolutely a double standard, but one that a person willingly applies to themselves.

No, it's not a matter of "they're unethical, so I can be too"; I don't see why keeping a secret is necessarily unethical in the first place. Are trade secrets unethical?

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

#177

Post by gutnor »

kelnos wrote: post #48
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…

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…

> And at the end of the day, the company thinks they are paying the guy to do one thing, which they believe takes a significant chunk of time, but that's not the case. If he wasn't remote, and had to come into the office every day, his deception would probably be quickly found out, so in essence he's abusing his remote-work arrangement.

Good litmus test to know if there is abuse is to reverse the role. Is it wrong for a company to charge market rate if they can produce order of magnitude cheaper than their competitors ?

Sure the employee-employer relationship is not the same as B2B and we don't know exactly the contract he signed, ... but if you, like me, are down that line of though you have already implicitly admitted that although it is clear the company is right but somehow it feels wrong for the employee ? Well in that case, the employee is right not to say anything. And to align with your advice, like the company above, use the opportunity to use the time to the most profitable fashion.

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

#178

Post by wfunction »

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…

They were annoyed at you because you exploited an information asymmetry between the two of you (which is how long the job would actually take).

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

#179

Post by pmlnr »

mmastrac wrote: post #132
rljy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

Piecework (and Mechnical Turk!) probably makes more sense in an environment with Basic Income. That gives the employee a chance to decide if the effort is worth the $/piece without compromising on their health and welfare.

This is exactly what I tried to describe to a non-engineer, and failed.

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

#180

Post by LeifCarrotson »

ruricolist wrote: post #167
rljy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

The problem with piece work (in an agricultural context, at least) is that is reveals a wide discrepancy in productivity between workers. The most productive workers are usually about 8x as productive as the average. Employers balk at the prospect of paying that much extra, so they create various kinds of mixed schemes that cap the worker's pay regardless of how much actual work they do. So the practical result of pi…

Do you have a source for that 8x figure? I have heard the term tossed about in the context of engineering, but agriculture is a surprise!

When I picked blueberries as a summer job there certainly wasn't an 8x difference between workers. Perhaps between us and the you-pick people?

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