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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?

#151

Post by ThrustVectoring »

pbh101 wrote: post #130
logfromblammo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the company didn't make the right decision. They hired a programmer to do the work of a data-entry person. If they hired that programmer to do the work of a programmer, the automation software would be work-for-hire, and would belong to the company. Since they hired the programmer to do different work, in the absence of an explicit agreement saying otherwise, the automation software belongs to OP, to use (and lic…

Most of the time, employers are savvy enough to write employment contracts which cover this eventuality and lay broad claim to all work products and require the employee to do any sort of work. My guess is that most programmers are employed under contracts that give them no additional recourse if, for an extreme example, their employer decided that they should now spend their time on janitorial duties.

>My guess is that most programmers are employed under contracts that give them no additional recourse if, for an extreme example, their employer decided that they should now spend their time on janitorial duties.

That's a textbook case of constructive dismissal.

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

#152

Post by icebraining »

hsod wrote: post #124

Ethical behavior generally requires honesty and forthrightness. If you are only concerned about your own ethical behavior, you should tell them. Keeping it a secret is effectively lying. If you want to do some ethical calculus, you can probably quite easily determine that your employer (or the general economic system) is less ethical than you keeping this a secret, which may give you some "ethical leeway" when dealin…

Ethical behavior generally requires honesty and forthrightness. If you are only concerned about your own ethical behavior, you should tell them. Keeping it a secret is effectively lying.

Why? Virtually all companies keep secrets both from their employees as well as their clients. In fact, these are even protected by force of law. Why is it dishonest for the employee to act towards the company in the same way? Isn't that a double standard?

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

#153

Post by undersuit »

gerbilly wrote: post #99
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…

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?

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

#154

Post by austenallred »

jerrylives wrote: post #147
austenallred wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the greater question is, "What is the employer paying for?" Economic theory suggests an employer pays for value created. After all, if an employee is generating less economic value than they're consuming, it makes sense to fire that person. But that's only true in a fantasy world where you can perfectly measure and compensate that kind of performance, like performing physics equations without air resistance…

Closest, or easiest?

Fair point; it's likely some combination of the two. Unsurprisingly we tend to measure by things that are easy to measure.

There are examples of roles where outcomes are easier to measure, and those roles generally tend to be more directly connected to compensation.

As PG put it in http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html:

> To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

> Measurement alone is not enough. An example of a job with measurement but not leverage is doing piecework in a sweatshop. Your performance is measured and you get paid accordingly, but you have no scope for decisions. The only decision you get to make is how fast you work, and that can probably only increase your earnings by a factor of two or three.

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

#155

Post by kefka »

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…

What you learned, is if you develop the automation, do NOT tell others that you did. And in your case, you should have implemented a time-delay from page-generation to page-creation, to make it look like you did it.

Ive automated a portion of my job. It does require me having to type my OTP token, but I can build more and more with my private stack. It also means I can do less and still do more.

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

#156

Post by devopsproject »

afandian wrote: post #67
kelnos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what. You learned that, despite the fact that you negotiated to be paid by output rather than time, the pay that the company was comfortable with was actually based on their impression of the time it would take to build each page. If they had known you could automate it, they likely would have expected you to agree to a lower per-page fee. I don't think you did anyt…

True, I saw an efficiency and exploited it, so in a way I 'won'. And I was taking a bet myself, as I didn't know the precise details of the job before taking it and just how much I could automate it. But they didn't logically 'lose' anything, business-wise, they got exactly what they asked for. I suppose what I learned is that it's humans who run a business, and humans aren't always logical and act based on feelings.

You learned about "value"

They had a difficult problem (from their perspective) and they saw you easily solve it. This changed the "value" of your work in their minds.

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

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

#157

Post by ue_ »

austenallred wrote: post #144
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…

It seems the greater question is, "What is the employer paying for?" Economic theory suggests an employer pays for value created. After all, if an employee is generating less economic value than they're consuming, it makes sense to fire that person. But that's only true in a fantasy world where you can perfectly measure and compensate that kind of performance, like performing physics equations without air resistance…

>The reality is calculating "value created" is extraordinarily difficult, so we use "hours-of-butt-in-seat" because it's the closest proxy.

Some would disagree on this, the Marxian school posits that the employer really is paying for "hours-of-butt-in-seat", technically, labour-time (note, this is not the same as labour, or the value created by the labour). As such, value of the products doesn't come into it at all, but rather only the minimum value required to keep the worker. What is this value equal to? The amount required to sustain the worker - i.e to cater to his survival, to ensure the continued flow of labour (viz. supporting the worker's family), to keep the employee coming to his job, and most importantly the reproduction of his labour-time commodity.

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

#158

Post by timthelion »

chirau wrote: post #140
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…

*piece work

Fixed, thanks

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

#159

Post by hsod »

icebraining wrote: post #152
hsod wrote: post #124

Ethical behavior generally requires honesty and forthrightness. If you are only concerned about your own ethical behavior, you should tell them. Keeping it a secret is effectively lying. If you want to do some ethical calculus, you can probably quite easily determine that your employer (or the general economic system) is less ethical than you keeping this a secret, which may give you some "ethical leeway" when dealin…

Ethical behavior generally requires honesty and forthrightness. If you are only concerned about your own ethical behavior, you should tell them. Keeping it a secret is effectively lying. Why? Virtually all companies keep secrets both from their employees as well as their clients. In fact, these are even protected by force of law. Why is it dishonest for the employee to act towards the company in the same way? Isn't t…

I addressed this pretty directly in my second paragraph. Some people are interested in behaving ethically even in the face of unethical behavior. It is absolutely a double standard, but one that a person willingly applies to themselves.

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

#160

Post by carlisle_ »

OP asks "is it unethical?" in his question and proceeds to ignore the ethical issues raised by commenters. Sounds like he was just looking for validation to keep doing what he's doing. I would concur with the person that labeled it more humblebrag than question.
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