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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

"For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there's no harm done. I'm doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life. Win win for everyone involved. "

Not a win for the COO/GM/CFO/FP&A/whatever who is tasked with finding efficiencies in the business and doing optimization. By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business.

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Are you really saying that the poster should tell them about his script, which they will then take and use, removing the need for OP? So OP who as far as anyone at the firm is concerned is doing a terrific job should sacrifice his position and take a financial hit so that the COO/GM can get a nice bonus? That makes no sense at all.

Actually he should have discussed it with others in the company as he went, given that chance has passed... Sans your hyperbole, that is indeed what I am saying. OP most certainly should discuss how he is executing his job with his employer, if they say it's fine, cool... but that should be their choice, business does not happen in a vacuum, it's a team of people working together. He's taking it upon himself to decide what work needs to be done for the business, that's unfair to the rest of the team.

how is he taking it on himself to decide what work needs to be done? He was hired to perform a set of tasks, and has written a script to accomplish them. You could argue he has taken it upon himself to decide how the required work is done and then one could say "so what?". If the business is happy with his output then everyone is a winner. To think its an employees job to suicide their employment is not the actions a rational actor takes. If that is the case, OP would be incentivized to destroy his script and return the prior method of manually processing files which he specified was not keeping pace with business needs. Society has reached a strange place when bottom of the food chain employees are expected to suffer financial hardship for the good of the company execs.

Employees are resources to the business, as the work changes, the resources change, it's not his job to decide how he should be resourced in the business. It's literally why HR is called HR.

If an employee is a resource, what exactly do they owe them? Why should a "resource" have any sort of respect at all. It's fundamentally adversarial - the resource must maximise their gain from their position and the company most maximise their gain from their "resource". You're just sour that the resource is winning for once.

Friend what you are suggesting is a very slippery slope and leads to employees not making any suggestions at all to improve business processes as its not part of their job description. You are essentially saying that OP would be better off just never attempting to automate the process at all and to just continue the existing process that was not working after all its the role of whoever is in charge of efficiency to come up with better solutions. The business would still experience delays but OP would not be "stealing". Your position actually incentivizes employees to work as slowly as possible as long as they meet the letter of their employment contract.

"Hey folks, I'm going to implement this script, I'm concerned in doing so, you will just fire me and keep the script, I enjoy my job and working with you all, is there a way we can find additional tasks for me to do in the business" is a fine conversation to have with your manager, sure.. you don't have to, but in my humble opinion, then pretending you're not stealing from the company knowing what you know, is questionable at best.

ok, lets go with that. What happens when the manager says "yes, implement the script and then we are going to fire you". What if Op refuses to implement the script then and just quits? A logical employee with rational self interest would never have that conversation because they know it likely ends with their termination. So in reality your proposal actually leads to the employee never implementing or recommending the script for fear of losing their job and the employer continuing to suffer as the prior manual process leads to missed deadlines. Your suggestion can only end with a lose / lose scenario. This is a prisoners dilemma where OP is incentivized not to discuss his solution with the employer and is really his only rational option.

Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script and explain it, and then get an intern to run it once a week. If the script isn't written, I now know I can hire a consultant to write the script once. Sounds like a win for me.

Except that's not how it would play out in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution, if they're not excited about ANY other work in my business at all, I'm not sure they are a good fit for my business. As big boy buffet said. Price is what you pay, but value is what you get, the terms of that deal should be pretty clear imo.

I've read through this thread and you're doing a pretty poor job of convincing me the employee should speak up.

The employee has two choices:

1. Say nothing and keep collecting a paycheck.

2. Speak up about the script and start a conversation that has the possibility of leading towards termination.

It's a pretty big no-brainer for what they should do.

The employee can do as they please, in fact I'm not even saying I disagree with the employee. I'm saying to call it win-win is patently false if it's being kept a secret, they cannot know it's win-win while also lie about it. Everyone else is using my comment as a way to make a dig a capitalism, fine, no problem... but as the system is structure, what the redditor said is not true, it is not necessary win win.

"Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script" This is exactly why the employee is incentivized not to tell his employer. whether he voluntarily discloses how the script works or not there is a pretty good chance he loses his job as soon as he reveals its existence even if management is thrilled about it and tells him what a great job he has done.

"in one of my orgs, I'd chat with the employee and find a solution" Its a law firm, what is OP going to do abandon tech and become a paralegal?

Your arguments are all very much ignoring the point of how every facet of this situation incentivizes OP not to tell management and that the most likely outcome of telling them is that they lose their job while the company benefits from OP's work and slashes a 90k salary. You are ignoring that OP as a rational actor can only take 1 of 3 actions. 1. Create the script and don't tell management. This is a win / win. Company gets its documents processed on time and OP keeps his job. 2. Don't create the script. Lose / Don't Win. Documents continue to be processed behind schedule but OP keeps his job but does hours of slow manual labor. 3. OP voluntarily gives company his script. Win / Lose. Company gets their documents processed on time, and saves 90k in salary. OP loses his job.

Option 1 is the only option where both parties win.

I understand the situation. I take real issue with them poster taking it upon themselves to make the decision it's win win, you don't, that's fine. :)

I don't not see your perspective, I do, I just don't agree they can say it's win win given the facts. Had they posted the whole thing and ended with "so I told the company and they laughed and now I get paid to do nothing, win win" I'd never have commented. I see why they can say it's a win all around, I just don't agree it truly is, in my opinion further negotiation should happen to test it, however for the reasons discussed exhaustively, that isn't advantageous so won't happen, so I don't think we can truly say it's a win-win, they are working on asymmetric information! :)

re: give up and become a paralegal, no: there may very well be other scripts to be written.

I'm going for a bike ride now.

Fair enough, I hope you have a good ride. Appreciated the conversation. All the best.

> Fire the employee and hire someone off fiver to look at the script and ...

1) Ah, so your step 1 was "fire the employee". (As predicted.) And you still don't get why no rational employee would start down that path?

2) Look at what script? Step zero, you will recall -- before writing the script -- was to open the discussion with the employer.

If employees are just "resources", then they can obviously only have the same responsibility towards the employer to make themselves redundant as any other resource has.

So please drop this line for now, and get back to us the next time a brick, a hammer, or a forklift truck takes such an initiative.

> that's unfair to the rest of the team.

What team? Where did you get a "team" from?!?

Shouldn't whoever is tasked with finding such inefficiencies realize that a simple script could be written to replace the process of manually transferring files to and from cloud storage?

That is not how teams work. I recommend this book to learn more on how teams work: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Teams-Creating-High-Performanc...

I have this book and haven't read it yet... but will start it! thanks for the reminder.

Extremely boring, but I recommend persisting to the end.

People are unable to realize a script can be written because that's "not how teams work"? I'm very confused at what you're trying to say.

Imperfect analogies so please read between the lines....: Take a finance team, you have a group of specialists who don't really know what each other do, FP&A vs BM&A or Investor relations. However, they don't need to know what each other do because they can trust the person next to them to say, hey.. payroll is now automated, I have extra time now, what should I work on to improve things, is it fair to take advantage of that in a team simply because one person isn't an expert? If you know someones job is to do something, say.. buy servers, but you know they don't know anything about servers, only how to finance them, should you exploit that for your self gain? If there is a person who's job it is to optimize, but the system is obfuscated, is that fair to the team? OP said it's win win, that is intellectually dishonest, it is not win win. that's my real point.

And when a company makes surplus profit from its employees' labour and doesn't compensate them for it accordingly, is that also considered theft?

No. That is in fact not how the law works at all.

"By staying silent he is denying the business the ability to optimize it's cogs, and therefore effectively stealing for the business."

That's not how the law works either. If employee A, B and C all have different processes to do the same task and employee A is faster than the other 2, employee A is not stealing and neither are the other 2.

I don't know what jurisdiction you're referring to, here in Canada what he did would likely be illegal, and the other instance would not. I don't know of a locality where what typon said is illegal. It's not difficult to get creative when pursuing theft of company time, and here I doubt you'd even need to get that creative. I'm an EIR at a law firm so I will ask and report back.

It's illegal to fulfil your job obligations creatively?

It can be, yes.

Are you talking law here, or ethics? Your talk about how employees are "resources" with a "duty" to "care" about the business sounds a lot more morality play and less legalistic than you're suddenly switching too now that the shoe is on the other foot.

Oh no, won't someone think of the businesses?

Depends on if you care about other people I suppose. The West subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move society forward, so yes, till that changes, do think of the business imo.

The business does not care about you. The business is fundamentally a sociopathic entity. Only a fool would care about that, unless you have a personal connection to the shareholders.

You’re conflating different things. The business doesn’t really care about the person. The west as a whole subscribing to capitalism does not then lead to the things you are saying “if you care about other people”. There is no logic there.

There is a stock market, people invest in business. People use those investments to put their kids through schools. Profits are distributed to employees in coops, those funds are used to buy things from other people, etc etc etc etc etc, this moves society forward per the capitalistic philosophy. One individual not being forthcoming with the truth in a system like that, creates inefficiencies in the system, and has ripple effects across the whole system. Butterfly effect.

Business is just an implementation of a philosophy, it doesn't care about you, but the idea of business is to care for all, that is the theory and why we use the system. Sadly, it's gotten extremely fucked up over the last 100 years, and we end up with people on reddit doing stuff like this. Capitalism is broken, absolutely, but the redditer is still being intellectually dishonest about the win-win situation.

> Depends on if you care about other people I suppose.

Oh no! Will someone PLEASE think about the multi-millionaire CEOs?

> The West subscribes to capitalism as the modality to move society forward

People might claim this, but it's a bullshit bad-faith claim.

Capitalism exists for one sole purpose: Create profit. Capitalists will happily destroy the planet if it makes their ticker symbol go up.

Is that not a failure of whoever is tasked with finding efficiencies? Seems like the employee should be given their job :).

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 - read this and then see if you still care at all about business efficiency

And what exactly does he owe them? The company exists to enrich the owners by extracting wealth from his work.

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