A programmer automated their data-entry job. Now: tell their employer?

Heavily discussed 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 (660 points, 506 comments)

This article is almost entirely direct quotes from a forum thread with little to no commentary or narrative on top of it.

When I automated the documentation of nightly job processes using Tivoli Maestro configuration files and Visio, my employer didn't know what to do with me so they promoted me. It never crossed my mind not to say something. I wasn't there to produce output. I was there to bring value to the organization.

At another employer, I worked alongside a customer service rep who automated much of the time consuming work he had to do. He wasn't a programmer by trade, but having a hacker mindset, he learned to do so after tiring of the same old work. Despite the annoyance of the security team and other developers who felt threatened by his work, he was promoted to IT and they locked down the workstations so it wouldn't happen again.

"Your replacement won't understand" I've heard that over and over. So I say "No boss I didn't use VBA or JavaScript to generate these reports" It would get me fired.

There's a story by Feynman where he automates some simple thing on his first job. It was some kind of telephone system, and he attached strings to the lines so he could see where the call was coming from in another room. And he got in trouble for it because his boss didn't understand it or appreciate it. The moral of the story was that people don't generally like innovation or change. Especially if it's just your time being saved and not theirs. If you can get away with it, don't tell your employer.

I remember a similar story about a developer that outsourced their work to a low cost offshore worker. Can't find it now...Google fu is off today.

A reblog vomit with a garbage bait headline composed of comments on hackernews? What a turd of an "article" and I assume it represents all of "qz.com" quality

I don't understand whole this ethics talk, should ethics be 2 sided ? do companies usually do their part ?