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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?

#441

Post by qb45 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #123
kungito wrote: post #106

Earlier 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.

Yes, they may have rights to this script. But he probably doesn't owe them any documentation and certainly not training or maintenance. Depending on situation, he may still be able to get something from it and probably he should if they didn't want him to automate that and didn't pay him a real programmer's salary.

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

#442

Post by tome »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #214
smallgovt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, something is wrong with your value set when you're actively destroying productivity solely to seek alignment with your personal values.

It's like the old Milton Friedman story told by Stephen Moore: '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 p…

Cool story, but did Milton Friedman genuinely do in his head the optimization between the social benefit of the jobs program and the infrastructure benefit of the new canal?

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

#443

Post by dkersten »

jpindar wrote: post #314
dkersten wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you see work* as punishment, I wouldn't want you working for me anyway. Bye. *assuming you're being paid a decent wage and we're not talking about work being done to extraordinarily tight deadlines for no reason, in unusually poor working conditions, or something like that.

It was a rhetorical question to make you think. In reality, if I finish my task, I take a new task from the task list.

My point is just that there's no real incentive to work more efficiently (eg by automating or by smartly planning ahead) and my employer is happy as long as I stay ahead of milestones and generally work well, and its somewhat demoralising knowing that there's an infinite stream of work and no matter how hard I push myself, this doesn't get smaller, I don't get to leave earlier etc. This can be especially frustrating when other people on my team who are being compensated roughly the same as me are not pushing as hard. Why should I?

(In case someone who knows me is reading: this isn't actually the case, I'm asking hypothetically for the sake of this discussion)

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

#444

Post by [deleted] »

wfunction wrote: post #422
WaxProlix wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel like this guy owes X company jack shit? Just like every other business in existence†, they'd drop him on his ass in a heartbeat if it helped their bottom line and you and I know it. This is business to them and it should be to him, too. † Yes, some places at least act like they care. It doesn't matter if your dad's dad had or worked for a place that seemed to give a damn, that's not the point and you…

You don't understand the difference between honesty and dishonesty? This has nothing to do with who cares about people and who cares about money, it's a question of who is honest and who is dishonest.

[deleted]

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

#445

Post by dkersten »

axontaxi wrote: post #273
dkersten wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not so much punishment, as the employer is trying to increase profit by maximizing their employee's throughput.

My point is: whats in it for the employee if that throughput increase takes more energy/effort on the employees part?

I usually hear that you get rewarded with more responsibility and such, but the increase in responsibility is rarely matched with a fair increase in compensation given that more responsibility usually means some combination of greater workload, more effort, longer hours, more stress.

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

#446

Post by dkersten »

iaw wrote: post #318
jpindar wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you see work* as punishment, I wouldn't want you working for me anyway. Bye. *assuming you're being paid a decent wage and we're not talking about work being done to extraordinarily tight deadlines for no reason, in unusually poor working conditions, or something like that.

You can't retain the best workers with that attitude. Most workers don't see work as punishment but the time it takes is an impediment to other aspects of their lives that generate more personal value that their job. If you take a worker who operates efficiently to increase their own personal time and increase their workload without providing some offsetting "carrot." The worker has two rational responses in a liquid…

I would argue they 1) leads to lower performance over time due to its demoralising effect and stress.

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

#447

Post by tripzilch »

WalterBright wrote: post #255
danielharrison wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Not everyone has this bias. Are you sure about that? As research in "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman shows, people exhibit the usual cognitive biases even while adamantly asserting they do not.

Did you check the cited research paper in that book, just to see that the experiments actually test for this, and the results actually match that claim?

It's bad but I found with Kahneman (and Taleb)'s books it really pays to check. The stories told in the books can sometimes be wild extrapolations of the actual research experiments.

For instance, did they test subjects' assertions for all of "the usual cognitive biases"? I doubt it. Or just one particular bias but extrapolated it holds for all of them, but on what basis? and is that relevant in the context of which you cite it now?

I urge you to actually go check. The outcome may surprise you. Tasty clever anecdotes with mildly counterintuitive experimental outcomes sell books.

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

#448

Post by tripzilch »

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…

> That is what it is, but if the company is allowed to be driven by profit motive, he should be too. It is within the best interests of his profit motive to continue with the automated work. For some reason when the person is an employee, it's no longer okay to be a sociopathic profit-motivated machine, we're actively disgusted by this type of behavior.

I can go along with this fairness argument, but you can hardly argue then that the one obvious solution must be "well, then everybody should get to act like a ruthless sociopathic profit-motivated machine".

Obviously the reverse would be a much better outcome for all.

The mistake is accepting companies behaviour like that.

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

#449

Post by DogPawHat »

Right, look, This guy is doing everything that is being asked of him for the price agreed. None of the more wonky ethics of the situation change that, and I don't subscribe to the belief that he owes the company anything more then his fair-priced labor.

The only thing he is doing wrong is under-utilizing his own talents and potential productivity, for which the optimal solution is for him to find a better job. As he seems to indicate that the current options are to stay working 1-2 hours of work or be highly to be unemployed, I believe he seek to preserve his employment in future actions he may take regarding disclosure, and wait for a better opportunity to present itself.

If it's ultimately a choice between providing for him and his son and not, its pretty much no choice at all, ethics be damned. I know which outcome I would prefer.

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

#450

Post by jsjohnst »

xxSparkleSxx wrote: post #168
jsjohnst wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it shows willful deception. In a court of law, this would likely be a significant point in the case.

Could using printed fonts that look like hand-writing to advertise count as willful deception? You're trying to trick the consumer into thinking a human made the sign (and by extension the product as well), which was actually made my machines. I don't see a difference. When I buy a product, there is no disclosure of the manufacturing process. I could only see a good lawyer losing this case if OP signed a contract tha…

In your scenario, I don't see a correlation with the facts you presented vs the previous example. In the previous example, they provided evidence of a potential (IANAL or a judge or on a jury for the case, thus potential) crime, I merely stated that I believed the willful deception would likely be a significant point in the case. Without knowing the "case" in your example, I can't know if the font used would be significant or not.
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