Companies treat us so unethically why are we so gracious to them?
Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
261–270 of 543 posts
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say I thing about your browsing, but I would give you more work :)
Why should the person who more efficiently does their work be punished with more work when others can do less and still get paid the same?
Hey, it's high-school again! :)
For some magical reason, I stopped being a disruptive student when I moved to a school where the approach was that if I finished my work I could read a book, rather than being given more work...
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 un…
I imagine you're familiar with reasoned argument, similar to programming, where one starts with some generally agreed premises upon which one can build to ever more sophisticated conclusions. So again, do you have an opinion on the specific question I asked?
I really don't have an opinion on your hypothetical situation to present here. Nevertheless, you can still build your argument assuming one way or the other, if that's really what you're trying to do. People can question the assumptions if the need arises.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if the contract says so. And just because the contract says so doesn't mean it's morally correct, only that they managed to get you to sign it.
I'm pretty sure that's not true – in the UK at least, any work created during a course of employment belongs to the employer. There's nothing in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act that explicitly defines what 'course of employment' means but a court would certainly consider it valid were the works produced on company time using company equipment.
If you offer to automate something and the employer says "no, don't mess with our system; it works for us", then automating it behind their backs might not be a work for hire even though it's clearly work-related. This even sounds like the author was being treated more like an independent contractor than an employee.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#265In business this is called innovation.
If a business found such an internal optimization would it tell its customers what a killing its making or keep the profit and grow the business?
Telling the boss is peasant thinking.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#266If you believe in the Gervais Principle,
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
then OP is a "loser", and most answers divide into "losers" ("coming clean will be worse, so just keep doing the bare minimum") or "clueless" ("it is unethical to mislead your corporate masters"). I'd like to see what's the "sociopath" answer.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's a reference to the movie Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy3rjQGc6lA
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say I thing about your browsing, but I would give you more work :)
Why should the person who more efficiently does their work be punished with more work when others can do less and still get paid the same?
Something I've thought about is, how do you quantify work? What are the units of measure? Joules? JIRA tasks? Hours?
The problem is, that it's really hard to figure out. The only answer that seems to make sense is that work is measured in the same way that other kinds of value are measured: In dollars. The value of a dollar's worth of work is one dollar.
Or it could be measured according to the value added per unit of factor input, which in an efficient labor market, is equal to your salary. But we don't live in an efficient market, and nobody has a foolproof way to measure your work.
So your boss measures your work by the extent that you seem to be fully occupied. It's not a great measure, but is something that he can at least wrap his head around, and more or less keep track of.
TLDR: I don't have a good answer to this puzzle.
At my day job, my own productivity comes in bursts, and so I would also be in a predicament if my boss noticed that I was idle a lot of the time.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Usually the people who take a crap job like that simply don't spend that much time on intellectual pursuits to begin with.
There are many who through circumstance or poor (or good?) choices ended up with the crap job but nevertheless pay attention to the larger world around them learn as much as they can. Maybe they studied history and are working in an Amazon warehouse. There is a lot of "squandered" intelligence and curiosity and unapplied ability in the non-knowledge-worker workforce.
Re: Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
#270Earlier 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?