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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?

#241

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

sprafa wrote: post #232
BeetleB wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

TPS The manager must know the work, otherwise he can't manage. Doesn't sound like the case.

What does TPS stand for in this context?

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

#242

Post by hinkley »

Retra wrote: post #215
timthelion wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's bad for the same reason all short-sighted goals are bad. You can't repeatedly institutionalize short term goals over long term goals without suffering long term failure. 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.

In both, the bullies end up with more stuff in their basket.

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

#243

Post by taneq »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #180
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…

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?

I'd guess no matter the original context, once you're being 8x more effective than your colleagues, it's due to some kind of engineering. So in agriculture, your 8x hay mower is the one who's built himself a scythe instead of using a hand knife.

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

#244

Post by Natsu »

jgamman wrote: post #201
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…

everyone knows that quote but I doubt you've read WofN - about 1 paragraph later he says that this will drive the worker insane and may literally lead to the collapse of society: "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out exped…

That sounds about the same as normal factory work if we're being honest, which is still around. Yes, it really does bore you to death. No, it doesn't make you incapable of thinking. Usually the people who take a crap job like that simply don't spend that much time on intellectual pursuits to begin with. What it does do is to drain you of all energy such that it's hard to get away from it to something more decent.

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

#245

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

rljy wrote: post #183
jnwatson wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piecework is perfectly legal in the US: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/industrialhomework

No it is not. You are allowed to pay by the peice, but you must pay at least minimum wage, you must pay sick leave, you must pay health insurance, you cannot fire for unjust cause (at least in Europe). That marks the definitive end to piece work as we knew it in Adam Smith's time when a stranger could show up at the factory door and be paid by the piece for one day or one afternoon, something which really was even co…

Setting a floor for piecework pay isn't the same as making it illegal. There's still payment according to widgets produced in all other cases. I agree that it does change some of the incentives for piecework, and perhaps you could argue that it's effectively prohibited, but piecework per se is nevertheless perfectly legal.

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

#246

Post by naasking »

wfunction wrote: post #237
BeetleB wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I don't see the difference. I've known people who intentionally work slowly or pretend to do manual labor when they've already got a process for automating it. They'll just goof around for a while and then run the automation. Whether you're introducing bugs to f…

> I don't see the difference. Really now? Are you sure it's not a case of you not wanting to see the difference? > Whether you're introducing bugs to fix yourself or pretending to work - the effect is the same. Being at work and not working is quite a far cry from actively lying that you did things that you didn't do, or from inserting defects in your code so that they pay you to remove them. It's at least honest to…

> What kind of world do you live in where intentions and honesty don't matter, and only "effects" do?

Probably the business world. If we momentarily put aside the intentional insertion of mistakes which takes the ethical considerations to a whole new level, we're still left with an interesting ethical question of whether automation of your own job requires you to inform your employer of how you're doing your job.

That answer isn't so clear to me. You're hired to do a job, and you're doing it to the best of your ability. Do you consider that unethical?

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

#247

Post by fragmede »

danielharrison wrote: post #206
WalterBright wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because presumably it bruised their pride. Even though it was strongly in their interests. We all do that. For example, I'll hold onto a bad investment because selling it means admitting I screwed up. It's a tendency we all have to fight.

Not everyone has this bias. I think it comes down to how logically or emotionally driven the individual is.

Sometimes it is the most intelligent and logical people that have that bias the worst because they believe themselves immune to emotion.

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

#248

Post by hinkley »

BeetleB wrote: post #182
wfunction wrote: post #174

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…

> 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 I don't see the difference. I've known people who intentionally work slowly or pretend to do manual labor when they've already got a process for automating it. They'll just goof around for a while and then run the automation. Whether you're introducing bugs to f…

Management almost always treat estimates as promises, and you get what you measure. If you automate and that reduces the best case time for a task, it might not improve the average case very much, and the worst case not at all.

That means the difference between the usual case and the worst case gets worse, and you'd be a fool to invite that sort of criticism from the management team more than twice.

Your smartest path is to do the task at or under the usual time and spend any remaining budget on improving the situation for next time. Only when you can draw down the worst case time (or frequency) should you set new expectations with the organization.

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

#249

Post by throwaway91111 »

rljy wrote: post #129
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 la…

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

Well, you'd have to use mechanical turk to train it, so maybe you should just ask the trained turk.

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

#250

Post by wfunction »

naasking wrote: post #246
wfunction wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see the difference. Really now? Are you sure it's not a case of you not wanting to see the difference? > Whether you're introducing bugs to fix yourself or pretending to work - the effect is the same. Being at work and not working is quite a far cry from actively lying that you did things that you didn't do, or from inserting defects in your code so that they pay you to remove them. It's at least honest to…

> What kind of world do you live in where intentions and honesty don't matter, and only "effects" do? Probably the business world. If we momentarily put aside the intentional insertion of mistakes which takes the ethical considerations to a whole new level, we're still left with an interesting ethical question of whether automation of your own job requires you to inform your employer of how you're doing your job. Tha…

> If we momentarily put aside the intentional insertion of mistakes which takes the ethical considerations to a whole new level, we're still left with an interesting ethical question of whether automation of your own job requires you to inform your employer of how you're doing your job. That answer isn't so clear to me. You're hired to do a job, and you're doing it to the best of your ability. Do you consider that unethical?

I'm not going to "momentarily put that aside". The active lying and sabotage of this case are extremely material facts of the entire discussion. The alternate circumstances you're asking about form an entirely different question that is worthy of a separate post and discussion, and I'm not going to get derailed trying to change the subject and address it here.

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