211–220 of 543 posts
You should tell the company. There's probably a $20 gift card in it for you. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3845107/argos-worker-who-came-...
Whenever I see this kind of thing come up I think of the chicken nuggets scene from The Wire.
tl;dr Just code to the spec, and leave your creativity for your own time.
https://mortonandgeorge.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/the-wire-on...
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 argu…
Companies exploit employees all the time; if something made by an employee happens to be particularly valuable, it's not like the company gives the employee a big chunk of the profits. It's not like big hits can be manufactured on demand or incentivized by bonuses, so why would they let the employee keep some of the windfall?
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…
The office door was shut, and when I saw him an hour later, he told me he had decided to not worry about the money "for various reasons." He's still expected (required) to work all overtime, it's billable, he's just not going to be paid for anything beyond the standard 40 hours.
I'm surprised nobody suggested going back to doing it manually. If he can live with the moral compromise of what he's already done, he can eliminate any concern on a going-forward basis simply by deleting his script and doing things the old-fashioned way.
In my opinion, something is wrong with your value set when you're actively destroying productivity solely to seek alignment with your personal values.
'At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”'
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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?
Sometimes people produce less for reasons that are actually very important. This should be doubly clear in software, where "line of code" are not an accurate measure of successful work.
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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.
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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…
> With my coding errors I often jest that these are 'deliberate mistakes' there to just see if anyone is paying attention. I have also joked before now that there is 'one deliberate mistake' in there to check that people are doing the testing properly. If I was your manager, I'd have an issue with this. Testers are there to methodically work through the code, acceptance test, and so on. Not to play "find the possibly…
With people that are not versed in how to test in a proper disciplined manner with some methodology to it there are occasions when you need them to focus more than they otherwise might. This could be important documentation rather than code. In these circumstances you can include a 'deliberate mistake' and set them the task to spot it. So long as you point out the answer if they don't spot it then all is good. This is harmless and is a good way of achieving the primary objective of getting your work double-checked outside of a formal testing environment.
This is a bit like the legendary M+M's in the rider that bands have. If the venue gets the M+Ms right then there is a good chance they will have got the other requirements of safety, etc. correct.
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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.
That's how hard Americans have been brainwashed into the idea of corporations and business as "Good" -- that a man is asking whether spending 38 extra hours a week with his son is built on an "unethical" foundation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 argu…
I don't think there's an ethical consideration here; it's a transactional relationship, value delivered for wages paid. If the company could get the job done cheaper in a different manner, it would do it and dismiss the employee. Is that defensible? The employee is creating value for the company. They're holding up their end of the bargain. Companies exploit employees all the time; if something made by an employee ha…