Dystopia? I think of it as a great comedy! We could be only months away from the first-ever hire where both the applicant and the company have automated the entire process and may not even realize there's been an accepted offer.
Remote work opens up a big old gray area between slacking off and fraud. A judge would be deciding to take this from labour domain to another one.
Also, there's the prevelant lie that companies know what their employees do, how well and how muchnof it they do. CEOs have executives assure them of this. Executives have managers assure them of this. Boards require it, and legalistic systems also assume everyone has this.
That said, "he tricked us by using ai" will probably be easier to make than "he tricked us by being really lazy."
If we want to talk about fraud, we need to talk about employers demanding exclusivity over a human's emotions and intellect in addition to the time they pay for. Its a maniacal notion that one should have such exclusive power and influence over another human being. Its fraudulent to pretend any moral superiority over the slaver or the thief.
Fraud as defined in criminal code with respect to directly material damages. If the work is indeed getting done, there is no rational way to justify that damage took place. Conversely, if a employer hires your sibling to work 35 hours a week but lies to them about their ability to work outside of those hours, that IS fraud with the damages able to be substantiated by the loss of income. In reality, Off-Duty Work is the subject of ongoing legislation, fierce debate, and conflicting information. Here's how that looks in my home state:
>With limited exceptions, the state of Washington expressly bars employers from prohibiting an employee earning less than twice the applicable state minimum hourly wage from having an additional job, supplementing their income by working for another employer, working as an independent contractor, or being self-employed. The prohibition doesn’t apply if it would: - Raise issues of safety or interfere with the reasonable and normal scheduling expectations of the employer. - Interfere with the employee’s obligations to an employer under existing law, including the common law duty of loyalty and laws preventing conflicts of interest and any corresponding policies addressing such obligations.
This is a hot issue for me personally, as I've seen employers actively, even vigorously deceive their employees solely to enrich themselves and exercise power. They target young, indigent, and disabled workers, all of whom are not with means to understand their rights or use given channels to assert them. Its a visceral injustice that hurts the most vulnerable of us the hardest.
Plenty of times there were jobs to be done that had nothing at all to do with the work but with the people doing the work. Almost always, unless the higher leadership got involved, this was the punishment for whatever stupid thing someone got caught doing. Technically not extra duty (which was a formal punishment) but just some random shit job like polishing a trash can to a sparkly sheen.
The NCOs took great pride in their creativity in coming up with these non-punishments.
All that said, and while I see its importance, I was saying 'important' work to refer to things that wouldn't be if the person didn't do it themselves. Like if I'm being trained to write, it wouldn't have much value at all unless I was the one doing the writing. At the end of the day, it never mattered where the logs were.
I'm coming from a place where it really doesn't matter to me or my team as to what tools, techniques, or languages are used, so long as it solves we're all okay with owning the results of that approach. It is absolutely unimportant to bash your head against the wall to solve some concurrency lock issue, not when you haven't shipped, not when your infra is already built for parallelism. But let's say that you need a lock for business logic to work, synchronous transactions aren't viable. When something (such as concurrency) does matter, the business still doesn't care how its implemented. It is important that it implements the business logic correctly, consistently, and can evolve with the business' priorities in a way that future engineers are able to implement them safely, even promptly. Assuming all stands of Quality are met or exceeded, it is irrational for me and unfair for the business to reject it. IDGAFF if it came from a CoPilot/ChatGPT response, offshore salary triage, or some other 'crime against society' that I haven't heard of. If an engineer isn't handing in quality work, then we need to dig into why that's happening. Its usually not because of a tool.