Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

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 of a job, it sounds like it won't be a matter of 'great work, here's a cut of all the money you saved us and some more interesting work.' It'll likely be a matter of 'thanks, here's your contractually required severance.'

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.

It seems like there should be a fairness principle in this situation when making a decision about things such as this that treats the employer and the employee as equals in a contractual obligation.

Yeah I spend half my day browsing Reddit on salary, but my work gets done and no one has ever said anything to me about it. And if they did, I'd probably just quit and get a job for a sane company.

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...

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.

We already have a lot of very comprehensive understandings of what work is. It's labor that produces capital. The workers doing so should be owning that capital.

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.

Ideally, a manager will see that you worked more efficiently and give you a raise in return for giving you more work.

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 employment market:

1) Reduce their efficiency to median company levels and only use their efficiency "secretly." Congratulations, you've broken their spirit!

2) Find another job because they're an above average employee.

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

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)

I would see it this way: I would offer to give that person more responsibility and more and perhaps more complex work. He could decide to perform as before and keep browsing reddit but if they choose to take more work that's likely the best path upward in the organization. Eventually the one who chooses no. 2 gets a promotion and gets paid more.

I hear this argument often but I wonder in which percentage of cases the extra work actually translates into a net benefit for the employee. Promotions are linked to how you are perceived, and this is turn linked to factors that do not necessarily include the amount of work you put in.

I think extra work and productivity translating into reward is one of the best indicators that you are in a good company.

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.

> 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.

This hits it on the head for me. If the company came across as open to improvement and would see the value of paying this person more to look at other processes and see what could be automated, then I'd consider that as an option, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.

> 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.

I agree wholeheartedly. Modern corporate ethics are a travesty.

It wouldn't be that everyone should do this. It is that everyone engaging in business with a sociopathic entity is required to. Otherwise the sociopathic entity gains a snowballing economic incentive by exploiting the social norms of the non sociopaths.

Per example, you'll note, in a realistic situation there is no scenario where this person gives up his script and is compensated for even 20% of the value that has been created for the company.

I will note that I am a hypocrite, that is I'm not good at playing the profit maximizing machine role; few normal people are. I also don't believe it is particularly healthy to do so.

So the guy is acting ethically because tit for tat? Fuck no

I guess the question is: Why is the ethicalness of this action a consideration at all? It's an economic transaction.

If enter into an exclusive deal to sell the number of widgets I make in a month for a flat rate and then I make a widget machine that creates widgets is that unethical? I think most of us would agree it's just a business arrangement.

We might say that it is unethical to lie about them being hand-made or to introduce defects for the appearance that they are hand-made. I think that's the most compelling argument for his lack of ethics. But I think that's kind of tangential to the business concerns.

Thinking about it, if 'guy' were a company with a board of directors and shareholders he would be under a fiduciary responsibility to maximize his profits. He would be required because of his responsibility to his shareholders to undertake such actions.

What are the ethics of the people who he'd leave without employment? Not just him, but also the QA team. Presumably the impact of downsizing would be more than just this one gentleman now that he's given away the golden goose, so to speak...

The question is whether the business would respond ethically by paying fair compensation for the program the employee created. The answer is almost surely no, so it is ethical (in my book) to extract the compensation by force.

Probably not legal though.

It's not personal, it's just business. Your moral disgust has no purchase here.

Nature doesn't give a s* about ethics. You either eat, or be eaten. Ethics are human-invented hacks on nature, ones which (often times) are inefficient compared to letting nature run.

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