Willfully putting bugs in code is ridiculous - that alone would be grounds for firing. The OPs concern about ethics has made his actions unethical that would otherwise not be.
Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
221–230 of 543 posts
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#222I have mixed feelings about the post and what I would do.
1. In my current situation, having a wife that has a job with pretty good family health insurance, living in an area (not SV) that has a great job market, and with in demand skills, my first thought is that I would look for another job and explain that I automated myself out of job. That would be like saying I was laid off from Netflix because they didn't need me anymore after I lead the transition from hosting servers on prem to AWS.
2. But he isn't in that position. He needs to work from home to stay with his kid and according to him
Most likely they can walk out of their silicon valley office and shout “I want a job” and get 3 offers to start the next day. Unfortunately, there are places in the country that just aren’t like that. I’m not trying to have a go, I’m just saying that the situation absolutely does matter.
If I were in that position would I voluntarily tell them I've automated the whole thing? I'm not sure. Hopefully I would not intentionally add bugs. I would definitely be using the time to study and keep my skills up to date.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#223I 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
It's not personal, it's just business. Your moral disgust has no purchase here.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stretching it a little bit here are you, now? The guy figured out how to automate his job when no one else before him did it. Let the small guy get the fruit once in awhile. What do you think they will do if he tells them? As he said, they will just take the software and get rid of him. They won't even ask themselves if it is morally right or wrong. I say keep the good work and spend the time with your son. I wish I…
I wasn't trying to make any comment about the job-automation situation; for what it's worth, I find arguments both ways to be very persuasive. Rather, I was commenting that the moral system in the grandparent comment of essentially "decide what values are important to you, and if your country's laws don't align well enough, feel free to break those laws" is quite an eyebrow-raiser. Do you disagree?
> "decide what values are important to you, and if your country's laws don't align well enough, feel free to break those laws" is quite an eyebrow-raiser. Do you disagree?
This is itself a moral judgement and the answer has been debated since the invention of law :) Some might argue that obeying an unjust law is morally wrong (i.e. civil disobedience).
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#225If 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.
That's probably the best argument against everyone else saying that it's fraud.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The guy is actively and explicitly lying to get paid money that he otherwise likely would not , and yet you "don't think there's an ethical consideration here" ? What has this world devolved into?
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Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The guy is actively and explicitly lying to get paid money that he otherwise likely would not , and yet you "don't think there's an ethical consideration here" ? What has this world devolved into?
Communication isn't the value he's generating, and he's not causing harm through deception.
Companies employing me all my life have lied by omission to me, about my value to the company and how much more they benefit from my work over and above my salary. Is that ethical?
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#228I know this is an ethical question, but I wonder, would it be possible to have him license the script to the company for some annual fee and then offer the company a support contract as well in case new quirks are found that need to be updated? Combined license + support contract cost == his current salary. Or does the automated script he created already belong to the company?
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#229As 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 t…
I think that's just about the right thing to do, the changing job market and availability of work is a governance issue, trying to tie technological progress to governance is like tying a brick to a unicorn, the results undesirable at best. One of my big pain points is unemployment, I was taught that the last thing a economic entity wants in a capitalist environment is a scarcity of labour that might drive up the cost of production, therefore my government, and many others, have in their remit a less than 100% employment strategy, the unemployment of X% is financially of benefit to GDP, it seems overly cruel that we punish the unemployed with a low salary, they are a crucial part of the machine that is supposed to care for all.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#230Like others have said, there's unethical deception involved in inserting arbitrary errors - especially to make it "look like it’s been generated by a human".
But my feeling is that in addition to paying the OP to "do a job" the company is also paying him/her (him from now on) to "be on call". Yes, they want X results but they also are paying a salary so that they can tap him whenever they need to. This aspect of the job is referred to when he says there "might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email".
To some companies (especially those with very little other in-house expertise) having "the computer guy" on call to handle all of that mysterious stuff is worth a great deal of money. The company could consider it their insurance against catastrophe.
Nevertheless I would say the OP should come clean at the next performance review.