Comment by m00n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m00n | Hacker News Reader

A question for the people that have a positive attitude towards keeping time savings for yourself instead of passing them on to your employer.

Would you be also okay with the following situation: You have someone remodell your garden. He comes up with an estimate of 1 week worth of full-time work for two people. Based on your experience this seems reasonable and you agree on a fixed price of 10000$.

Two scenarios of what happens next: 1) He shows up the next day with a gardening robot you never knew existed and he never told you he would use. The work is done in 30 minutes. He goes home to spend time with his kids. (Or maybe contract more "2 week projects"?)

2) Two gardening people show up every morning to greet you when you drive to work. They leave when you come back and make steady progress every day. On the last day you come home early and witness that actually the daily work is done by a gardening robot in 5 minutes and the two people actually drive home during the day to spend time with their kids.

Would you contract this guy again?

Humans have a bias to root out and punish 'cheaters.'

Some cognitive tasks become magically easier if we reframe them in terms of cheating. We seem to be hard wired for this.[1]

It's not a question of logic at all, but of human nature.

This is why it seems unfair to us when people 'use robots' to do their work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task#Policing_...

One important distinction that you omit is the robot gardener costs exactly the same as other people doing the work manually. If I had to choose between two options that cost the same, but one is ultra fast and has consistently high quality, it's a no-brainer for me.

Why would the robot cost the same? If it costs the same, then there is no incentive to introduce robots in the first place. I think the wide-spread automation is a testament to the much lower price of robots compared to human labour, no?

I mean the guy using robot gardener takes the same pay for the services, not the robot, sorry for confusion.

I would be sad that it seems they didn't feel they could trust me, but if they did the job well and for a good price why wouldn't I hire them again?

Also, they're not my employee. I contracted them for a one time job. Totally different working relationship.

You say you would feel "sad". To be honest, I would feel cheated. And to set up this smokescreen with pseudo-gardening people (or prerecorded data entry screencaptures to stay with the article) is outright fraught, IMHO.

Strange. It might be a cultural difference.

I value outputs.

To worry about how work is done if it is done well is micro-management.

Some people do want to pay money to have employees that look busy. I knew someone (in America it has to be said) who lived on a road where one person would constantly be getting gardening done just to show that they could afford it. It was constant re-work and pointless, which just showed off how much money they had. Maybe there is an element of that at work.

Security guards and secretaries are a similar phenomenon. They're not really needed, so god forbid they were to study for evening class while at work.

Maybe it really is a cultural difference. I think there is a continuum of valuations at work here:

If a contractor gets his materials cheaper or does have cheaper labor available, I don't see any obligation or market process to pass these savings onto clients, when the work is of the same quality.

On the other hand, when you delegate work to an expert, and he doesn't tell you about the 99% savings you could employ with existing technologies, I feel this is bad conduct, regardless of output. It just amounts to a 9900% markup on his value. I don't think this kind of markup is ethical, but probably the market will catch up to this expert and revalue him.

- Commissioning a script to automate something is expensive, plus you need to find the talent who can automate it and do a reasonable good job of it. It's sometimes a risky investment.

- If ready-made robots (and scripts) were available on the market, the employer would definitely use that instead

Yes, to make the analogy better, say the gardener invented the robot while on your "gardening time".

Edit: Writing a script might be expensive, but is the market price of this script really a lifetime of data-entry salary? Seems unlikely, or we would not see as much automation.

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