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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?

#481

Post by jason_s »

afandian wrote: post #27

When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but all sales were done by phone (early 2000s). They wanted to pay me by the hour, but I negotiated paying by the page instead. Of course, I automated the job. And surprisingly, at least to naïve me, they were annoyed that I automated it. Even though they got the sa…

there's that anecdote (apocryphal?) of Steinmetz at GE: [1] (grrr yes it looks like it is apocryphal [2]; I wish people were more honest and careful about where they get their information and what they do or don't know )

----

In the early years of this century, Steinmetz was brought to General Electric's facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant -- not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now.

Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem.

After he departed, GE's engineers found a large "X" marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly.

And indeed it did.

Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1000.

Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice.

They soon received it. It included two items:

1. Marking chalk "X" on side of generator: $1.

2. Knowing where to mark chalk "X": $999.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/1999/vestspeech

[2] http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

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

#482

Post by richpimp »

Does it really matter if it's ethical or not? I mean, we're not talking about the ethics of, say, killing a tyrannical despot or allowing a terminal sufferer to commit assisted suicide. If it were me, I'd keep on collecting that paycheck while picking up a second job and double my pay. Again, is it ethical? No. But who cares? This person's mom is right, he has a free lottery ticket. Keep cashing it in. You can keep your ethics while I laugh my way to the bank. Just don't get caught :)

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

#483

Post by rubidium »

mattm wrote: post #359
rubidium wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say I thing about your browsing, but I would give you more work :)

What's the difference between jail and work? In jail you're rewarded with time off for good behaviour. At work you're rewarded with more work.

And more money if its a good employer/boss.

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

#484

Post by davidw »

arthurjj wrote: post #125
slantyyz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No. He is working remotely and the employer is paying for getting the job done. To me, the test of whether he is being paid for results or time is whether he is paid more if the work required more than the 40 hours.

Agreed. Assuming he's salaried and not hourly there's no argument in my mind that he should feel required to tell them. If he's hourly I'd say it might be a gray area.

> If he's hourly I'd say it might be a gray area

If you're on contract to work X hours and you're doing 20% of that, it's a "gray area"?

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

#485

Post by wst_ »

observation wrote: post #470
Natsu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm blue collar. I program computers. I read books. I clean toilets, clean windows and presently am organizing myself to construct a house, everything from framing to finishing. While at university I realized two things that caused me to drop out after three years of computers science. 1. I was never going to be paid very much (in the UK) for knowing what I did about computation, despite it being very difficult for a…

Why do you think you couldn't get good salary as a developer in UK. Is IT market so low paid in there? I know at least one person who seems to be fine in there.

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

#486

Post by s73ver »

greggman wrote: post #401
s73ver wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if the contract says so. Since it wasn't a development job, there's a chance that clause isn't there.

This is not my understanding at all. In the USA employers own the work of their employees if that work is related to the employer's business which this clearly is. No clause or contract is required for this to be the case. It's the default state. It might be different in other countries but I doubt it. Employees have a "duty of loyalty". https://www.google.com/search?q=employee+duty+of+loyalty That would seem to incl…

If that were the case, they wouldn't need those clauses inserted into contracts.

The idea of any kind of "duty of loyalty" is absolutely laughable in this day and age. Employers have long since rejected any sense of having loyalty to their employees.

Also, if you're going to link to something, at least link to the Wikipedia article on it. Linking to a Google search is pretty dickish.

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

#487

Post by logfromblammo »

jason_s wrote: post #479
logfromblammo wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm laughing to myself right now. Employment contracts?! Most of the time, outside the utopian heaven that is Silicon Valley, tech pros are employed "at will", with no contract whatsoever, with several unilaterally signed "agreements", designed to intimidate the employee with legalisms and implied threat of lawsuits. Nobody I know in the industry has a contract. We can all be fired at any time for any reason, or for…

OK, that's splitting hairs; they are employment agreements, not employment contracts. Still a legal document, and they generally cover IP created by the employee and specify how IP created outside of company time is handled.

If you signed an agreement with an inventions clause, you invent something, and do not assign the patent to your employer, your employer has two options: fire you, or not fire you. They can't take your agreement to a judge and get an order assigning the patent to them.

That's because your lawyer would be able to point out all the ways in which the agreement was not a contract.

As we recently saw with the Zillow letter to McMansion Hell, a cease and desist letter is a legal document, but that does not necessarily mean that it has any inherent merit or correctness.

In order for a judge to be able to grant relief in case of a breach, the document has to meet all the criteria for a legally binding contract. If there's no contract, neither party has to do jack squat for the other.

There are exactly zero contracts existing between me and my current employer. We have an informal, unenforceable-in-a-court-of-law agreement that says I will do X and not do Y, and then the employer will pay me Z every two weeks. Any day of the week, I could show up to hear, "Our deal's off. Go away, and never come back." I'm not ecstatic about the arrangement, because there is a sizeable power imbalance between me and my employer, but I can't do anything to change that individually. But I do work and get paid for it.

All those agreements do is let me know that I shouldn't bother doing certain things, unless they would allow me to quit my job.

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

#488

Post by sloppycee »

renlo wrote: post #59

I graduated in the recession without any real skills or an applicable / usable degree (lib arts in a language I could barely speak). The first job I got after college was for data entry where I was expected to go to an email inbox which received some automated messages with some strings in them and to copy these strings and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet. I was expected to do this for ~6 hours a day every day.…

> It would be great if there was a means for people to sell technology like this to their employers.

There is, you can quit and offer to build/sell/license the solution to your previous employer. Of course this would mean incurring (potentially) substantial risk, that you might lose your salary, they might not be interested, they might sue you, etc.

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

#489

Post by sloppycee »

twmahna wrote: post #26

This may be going against the grain, but I think the real question the OP needs to ask is whether he really cares whether what he's doing is ethical or not. Evaluating decisions like this really comes down to understanding your values and owning them. Values are the measuring sticks by which people quantify success in life. Whether or not we realize it, we constantly measure our actions against our values, and how we…

You raise a good point, i.e. "do you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?"

> Do I value integrity? Do I value my family? If I value both, which do I value more?

To make that choice you need to quantify exactly how 'bad' something is though, otherwise you can't determine which you value more.

It's like comparing stealing a loaf of bread vs. killing a man and stealing his money for your family; you'd need to quantify how "bad" each is, to determine that for ex. killing is worse than letting my family starve.

So how 'bad' is automating your job, is it even 'bad' at all?

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

#490

Post by mmmpop »

Natsu wrote: post #365
coldtea wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're right, it's most certainly not! I wish someone could tell us how it is "elitist" to point out that some people are "smart" and some aren't. Well, for one it's a sign of a stupid person (who's also not paying attention) to believe that people working at lowly jobs aren't (or worse can't) be intelligent or follow intellectual pursuits.

I wouldn't put anything into absolutes. I know one guy who left the factory floor to become a pharmacist and another who left for IT. But on average, the people I knew had been in some minor trouble and needed something to put food on the table. And a factory job paid just barely enough more than average that they could support their family even though the work really sucked. And boy did it suck. I honestly worry abo…

> I know one guy who left the factory floor to become a pharmacist and another who left for IT.

I spent the better part of my post-dropout early 20s doing work as "lowly" as shoveling literal horseshit as a general contractor's assistant while I spent my evenings learning the software business. Fast forward to 30 and I'm sitting here in my swanky coworking space in one of the most desirable parts of one of the most desirable cities in America, while working toward a director role at a very successful company in arguably the hottest industry in America. And what, I was some kind of stoner shit shoveler?

Ambitious hardworking people are still what drive innovation, so my advise to anyone looking to network is to keep those types close and not to get hung up so much on pedigree or what not.

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