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

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

#191

Post by BeetleB » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:50 PM UTC

undersuit wrote: post #153

gerbilly wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learned that people value effort over results. Here's a common situation from programming. A programmer, Steve, works long hours but writes sloppy code. Steve is often seen by management fixing critical issues in production, and 'saving the day'. Eventually Steve, leaves to work at a bigger company and is replaced by a new programmer, Dave, who is more methodical. Dave eventually cleans up the code and gets it to…

So how much does adding drama to my work routine help my compensation rate?

Sadly, it helps.

The guy in my former group who complained a lot and would push back to the management heavily was the one the manager respected the most.

The problem is: His complaints were often ridiculous and did not have merit - no one was fooled by them - not even the manager who usually ignored his complaints.

But his behavior (regardless of the content) was used unintentionally as a measure of how engaged the employee is and how much he cared about the work (complete BS - the employee was a good friend of mine and I knew him well).

This isn't just my view of the world. The manager essentially told me this.

Now of course, he was a pretty poor manager, but I do believe that unless a manager actively guards against these kinds of judgments, they will be the default.

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

#192

Post by hsod » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #176

hsod wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Keeping a secret is not necessarily unethical, deception is (with the same caveats as above). For instance, your employer isn't ethically obligated to tell you how much money your co-workers make. However, if they do tell you, they are ethically obligated to tell you the truth.

In this case, the author has told the employer that they are doing this work in a certain way. They are continuing to lie about it in ongoing way by intentionally including mistakes to make it look as if they did it by hand. This is unethical deception.

If the author truly believed that the employer didn't care, then keeping it a secret would not be unethical. But clearly this is not the case.

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

#193

Post by ohyes » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

abramz wrote: post #149

ohyes wrote: post #46

I think the real question is whether this person is salaried or hourly. If they're hourly, then yeah, billing 40 hours a week when you only did 2 is fraud. If salaried, I think it's okay. Here's why: Individuals in the company will be good or bad, ethical or unethical. The company itself will (likely) be largely amoral and driven solely by a profit motive. So when this person announces that he's automated himself out…

So the guy is acting ethically because tit for tat? Fuck no

I guess the question is: Why is the ethicalness of this action a consideration at all? It's an economic transaction.

If enter into an exclusive deal to sell the number of widgets I make in a month for a flat rate and then I make a widget machine that creates widgets is that unethical? I think most of us would agree it's just a business arrangement.

We might say that it is unethical to lie about them being hand-made or to introduce defects for the appearance that they are hand-made. I think that's the most compelling argument for his lack of ethics. But I think that's kind of tangential to the business concerns.

Thinking about it, if 'guy' were a company with a board of directors and shareholders he would be under a fiduciary responsibility to maximize his profits. He would be required because of his responsibility to his shareholders to undertake such actions.

What are the ethics of the people who he'd leave without employment? Not just him, but also the QA team. Presumably the impact of downsizing would be more than just this one gentleman now that he's given away the golden goose, so to speak...

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

#194

Post by obmelvin » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:52 PM UTC

afandian wrote: post #67

kelnos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you 'winning' was exactly the reason they didn't particularly like it. In you agreeing to charge by page and not time, they very well may have thought they were having you. In the sense that they believed it to be a slow process and by you not charging per time they were getting a deal by possibly paying less if you were slow.

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

#195

Post by nthcolumn » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

As software developers we implement change which often mean others lose their job. I've worked myself out of more jobs than I care to remember, automating ruthlessly, fixing even when it meant I was redundant as a result. To not do so would make me guilty about all those systems I wrote which made others redundant. That's really what I.T. was for years ago. Was a time I was like some horrible spectre. If you saw me that meant yo' ass. Once I interviewed some users about some task they were meant to be rekeying, they hadn't done it for months as the old requirement had gone. I followed it back to the person who was sending the first part, a nice little old lady and told her gleefully she didn't need to do that onerous first collection task anymore, whereupon she informed me that it was literally all she did. I just left.

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

#196

Post by bjourne » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

What's wrong with us workers? Do you think the Apple executes have some secret message board where they ask questions like: "Is it unethical for us to sell iPhones for $800 when they only cost $20 to produce?" Capitalism is what it is, you play the game and shouldn't feel bad the (few!) times you win.

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

#197

Post by untog » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

camiller wrote: post #83

posixplz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud. That said, just because it might be legal doesn't mean it is ethical. Personally I'd tell the boss "I've gotten this task down to where I have some spare time, what else could I do" and try to get some more work to do.

> Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud.

I'm not sure I've ever had a job that outlined my specific duties in the contract. It usually says that I am to work X hours a week.

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

#198

Post by EpicEng » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

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.

He's willfully deceiving his employer by inserting bugs and lying about his status on a weekly basis. We can debate hours v results, but I can't ignore that bit.

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

#199

Post by _0ffh » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

timthelion wrote: post #185

ruricolist wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it bad for the employer to get 8x as much out of some workers?

I think the point of the comment was: Nothing, as long as she's prepared to pay 8x as well, which she usually wasn't.

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

#200

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jun 28, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

posixplz wrote: post #52

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.

I don't think it's ethical, but it's not legally fraud. Fraud requires, among other things, a misstatement (or an omission of some fact the party is bound to disclose) that is material, and that the other party actually relied on and which reliance proximately caused the other party harm.

He's not under any legal duty to disclose to his employer how he does the work. The original post suggests that he might have misstated when he completed each batch of work (though, even there, he could have phrased it in a way that simply omitted that information). And the incorrect entries might count as misstatements. But neither of those facts is likely material. And even if they are, there's no harm to the employer arising out of those misstatements. The harm has to be traceable in some more or less direct fashion to the material misstatement. Any misstatement about when the author did the work, or the errors the author introduced did not cause the employer any harm. Any harm that occurred to the employer--say, paying the author for a job that was automated--arose from the employer not knowing about the automation, not from a false statement the author made. Finally, even if the author flat out said "I'm doing this by hand, not using a script," it's not clear any causation would be sufficiently direct. The scenario in which the company saves money by firing the author is a speculative outcome, not a certain one.