Hacker News Reader

> And at the end of the day, the company thinks they are paying the guy to do one thing, which they believe takes a significant chunk of time, but that's not the case. If he wasn't remote, and had to come into the office every day, his deception would probably be quickly found out, so in essence he's abusing his remote-work arrangement.

Good litmus test to know if there is abuse is to reverse the role. Is it wrong for a company to charge market rate if they can produce order of magnitude cheaper than their competitors ?

Sure the employee-employer relationship is not the same as B2B and we don't know exactly the contract he signed, ... but if you, like me, are down that line of though you have already implicitly admitted that although it is clear the company is right but somehow it feels wrong for the employee ? Well in that case, the employee is right not to say anything. And to align with your advice, like the company above, use the opportunity to use the time to the most profitable fashion.

Good answer. If the employer is paying the employee to do a role, and that employee is doing nothing but fulfilling the role, the contract of employment has been met. There is an inherent imbalance of power in almost all employer-employee relationships, so chastising the employee for only doing the requirements of the job is unfair.

Since it's already on the onus of the employer to judge the performance of the employee, if they are unable to recognize that the employee is a high performer and has worked himself or herself out of the current role, that responsibility lies on the employer and the employer alone

Under the OP's current situation, if he/she is doing nothing but meeting the requirements of employment, he/she should expect nothing in the way of extra compensation but cost of living adjustments. In the same way, if that's the only requirements the employer sets, there should be no expectation to deliver anything further than what they have asked.

In a pure capitalist perspective, employment is nothing but an agreement between the employee and employer. If the employee meets those agreements, they are satisfying the market. Expecting anything more from the employee is not being a pure capitalist. You cannot have your cake and eat it too as an employer. You either subscribe to the idea of the market dictating supply and demand or you don't. If you find that the employee is gaming the system just like you are, there shouldn't be any judgement or hard feelings.

> I mean, we wouldn't be having the same discussion here if the company had instead hired someone (perhaps even the OP) on contract specifically to automate the job, and that was it.

A small fallacy to this idea: An automation contractor would have been paid differently (i.e. more, maybe even dramatically more) for the job, so it's not directly equivalent. The rates for semi-skilled data input labor vs creating a tool that will yield ongoing, long-term value are completely different, which is the real source of conflict here.

I would also add, I think it's relevant the employer never actually asked him to look into automating the process - And it's not even clear they would have wanted him to do it or to continue using it if they found out he is doing it.

He quite literally just did the work of an automation contractor at the rate of a data-entry person (Or even possibly for free if he did it after hours) without every being asked to do so, so in some ways I have a hard time 'feeling bad' for him in this respect. Before ever writing the program/scripts/etc. he could have told his manager he thought he could automate the process and propose being paid differently (And/or moving into another position or taking on other work once it is done). If they are/were actually interested in automating, they would have likely taken him up on the offer and paid him more or given him a different position, considering it still would have cost less to have him do it then to fire him and hire someone else. And if they didn't want it, then he doesn't do the work in the first place.

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 license) as they please.

If the company owned the software, they could keep OP for occasional maintenance work, even as the other analysts pack up their desk clutter. Since they don't, if they let OP go, OP can just license the software directly to all their analysts without further fear of being fired.

They can all play golf or racquetball or bowling or whatever during the 4.5 days of free time each week that OP can sell to them.

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.

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 no reason at all, and frequently have been. The one and only consequence we might face for not transferring rights to software that was not written at the behest of our employers is loss of employment. But we could face the same penalty for wearing cargo shorts or a tank top to the office one day.

If you write something worth more than your current job, go for it, buddy. The worst they can do is fire you. I have never seen even one of those accessory agreements that might meet the legal standard for a contract. I sign them because my employer tells me to sign them, and I don't want to be fired for insubordination.

I'd actually be fine doing janitorial work, if I still got the same pay. Because then I could delegate my assigned work to an actual janitor, earning janitor pay, and I could spend my free time looking for another job.

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.

>Most of the time, outside the utopian heaven that is Silicon Valley, tech pros are employed "at will"

The contract I signed is one of at-will employment. I don't consider the terms mutually exclusive. I don't work in Silicon Valley (neither technically or conceptually) but even there I expect approximately everybody is at-will employed.

>unilaterally signed

IANAL but generally the employer needs your signature on the employment agreement/contract, otherwise IP assignment clauses and anything else in the document are not going to stand up in court.

>The worst they can do is fire you

Your employer can do considerably worse that just fire you. [1] [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Malyshev

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

Don't be silly. Work both jobs.

It's his tool, why give it away for free?

Well, I mean, generally, any tools you create on company time, with company resources, are assigned to the company, if you're an employee.

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 don't know what the correct morality is here, but I know that a basic principle of morality is to use the same yardstick for everybody.

Companies, specially big consulting companies do something similar to their clients all the time when inflating projects and time, but, somehow, that just sound like business as usual.

Or are they just including indirect costs? The secretary doesn't work on the project, but she has to be paid. The consulting company also must allow for time/cost overruns. All these costs have to come out of the estimated costs, so including them is not only ethical, it is necessary to remain a viable business.

Practically speaking, how is he going to turn it around and sell it if he has no legal right to do so?

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.

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.

That's not true in the US either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

Software is specifically exempted from that.

The default rule for what happens w/o a contract is different for each state. But many states say that a work, created during employment, that is within the scope of your work and on company time is company property. Note, this doesn't apply to contractors.

I can't think of a state where a program you create to automate your job, that you wrote on company time, wouldn't be the companies property. Of course an employment contract can easily modify the general rule.

For contractors the rule is the opposite. They retain IP by default.

OK, but if you have a job as a software developer you almost certainly signed such an agreement.

If you are hired as a software engineer, yes, the systems you develop as part of your job belong to the company.

If someone hires you to cut the grass, and you create a machine that does it (the "Yardba"(tm)), there's no reason that machine would belong to the employer - creating it was not a part of your job.

No, this depends entirely on your employment contract. (Though I do agree that presumably a groundskeeper would not have intellectual property clauses in their employment contract) I've worked for two companies and they had different clauses; one said something to the effect that they owned any IP in their business interest (regardless of whether it was created on company time or company equipment); the other was narrower and said that they owned IP created outside of work only if it was dependent on company confidential information.

because the ip belongs to the company because presumably he developed it during working hours using the company's resources.

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 include things like this issue. It also includes not competing with your employer.

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.

Linking to google wasn't meant to be dickish. Wikipedia's article on the topic is sorely lacking and rather than pick some random law firm's blog I thought it was best to just link to google so people could easily read several different people's perspective on the topic.

here's one for California 2016

http://blogs.orrick.com/trade-secrets-watch/2016/01/19/the-d...

How is this his tool if he made it at work, on his employer's dime?

maybe he made it during his recreational / non working time ..