6 ms·

There are two ethical lines the poster may have crossed. > I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human. As a f

There are two ethical lines the poster may have crossed. > I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human. As a few others in the original post pointed out, this seems to be the biggest issue. He is intentionally misleading his employer as to the nature of the work he is doing. The automation itself isn't immediately unethical, but the intentional misdirection could be. The second issue depends on whether he is paid for his time or to fulfill his job duties. In the case he is being paid to fulfill his job duties, he is doing the job he was hired to do adequately, he is meeting the deadlines expected of him by his employer, at the price he negotiated when he was hired. However, if he is being paid for time, it seems clearly unethical to bill the company for 38 more hours than he worked.

posixplz 9y ago
Furthermore, because there is significant financial gain in the deception, the actions taken would almost certainly meet the legal requirement for fraud in a modern jurisdiction.
- camiller 9y ago
  Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud. That said, just because it might be legal doesn't mean it is ethical. Personally I'd tell the boss "I've gotten this task down to where I have some spare time, what else could I do" and try to get some more work to do.
  - untog 9y ago
    > Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud. I'm not sure I've ever had a job that outlined my specific duties in the contract. It usually says that I am to work X hours a week.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      Yup; and the company is making a bet that you produce more than you cost. Sometimes employees generate a lot more value than they cost; the company usually keeps most of the winnings there, and only gives you enough to stop you going somewhere else. That is, the competitive pressure on employee wages is much higher than the competitive forces within most companies that control whether they get to keep the windfalls from particularly efficient employees.
- rayiner 9y ago
  I don't think it's ethical, but it's not legally fraud. Fraud requires, among other things, a misstatement (or an omission of some fact the party is bound to disclose) that is material, and that the other party actually relied on and which reliance proximately caused the other party harm. He's not under any legal duty to disclose to his employer how he does the work. The original post suggests that he might have misstated when he completed each batch of work (though, even there, he could have phrased it in a way that simply omitted that information). And the incorrect entries might count as misstatements. But neither of those facts is likely material. And even if they are, there's no harm to the employer arising out of those misstatements. The harm has to be traceable in some more or less direct fashion to the material misstatement. Any misstatement about when the author did the work, or the errors the author introduced did not cause the employer any harm. Any harm that occurred to the employer--say, paying the author for a job that was automated--arose from the employer not knowing about the automation, not from a false statement the author made. Finally, even if the author flat out said "I'm doing this by hand, not using a script," it's not clear any causation would be sufficiently direct. The scenario in which the company saves money by firing the author is a speculative outcome, not a certain one.
- s73ver 9y ago
  I can't really call it "significant financial gain" considering the likely outcome of telling their employer is that they get fired. Keeping your existing job doesn't fall under "significant financial gain" to me.
jkern 9y ago
When he was doing the same work by hand he was producing data with errors in it. All he's done is achieve the same error rate he had before. I don't see why the fact he could trivially reduce the errors to 0 is relevant when from the employer's point of view the exact same result is being produced.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It seems hard to claim making a mistake and deliberate sabotage are the same.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    The product being bought and sold is the same, by objective measure; and that's what counts in a business transaction, rather than a personal relationship.
    - zimmund 9y ago
      So if -for example- you knew the details of fabrication of your car: you consider that you'd still buy a car with a chassis that was deliberately weakened by an employee, instead of just buying a car with an -unknowingly- faulty chassis? Why would you accept something that, if not tampered, would be better than the alternative? When there's bad intentions or tampering, you'll have a result that is broken to some degree for sure. If everyone does their jobs as good as they can, you'll only face a chance of something being broken. You can always improve over mistakes, not so much over bad intentions.
      - pferde 9y ago
        Your car example is flawed. If I knew that a given car has a defect, I simply wouldn't buy it, period, regardless of how and why the defect was introduced.
      - navane 9y ago
        Isn't this close to how computer proccessors are sold? I never checked this, but I always thought that slower CPUs are just CPUs with some 'production faults' in it. Basically, the manufacturer always tried to make 300mhz CPUs, but sometimes they didn't reach that speed so they sold them as 233mhz, 166mhz. Now I was under the impression that most people didn't know this, so most people were buying CPUs which were just designed to be slow, but in fact they were accidentally slower. This is exactly your car example, and there is nothing unethical about it -- either way.
WalterBright 9y ago
Yes, that's the crux of the matter. Is his arrangement for time, or for the results?

posixplz 9y ago

Furthermore, because there is significant financial gain in the deception, the actions taken would almost certainly meet the legal requirement for fraud in a modern jurisdiction.

camiller 9y ago
Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud. That said, just because it might be legal doesn't mean it is ethical. Personally I'd tell the boss "I've gotten this task down to where I have some spare time, what else could I do" and try to get some more work to do.
- untog 9y ago
  > Assuming they are salaried not paid hourly, they seem to being doing the job asked at the agreed upon rate, not sure how it is fraud. I'm not sure I've ever had a job that outlined my specific duties in the contract. It usually says that I am to work X hours a week.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Yup; and the company is making a bet that you produce more than you cost. Sometimes employees generate a lot more value than they cost; the company usually keeps most of the winnings there, and only gives you enough to stop you going somewhere else. That is, the competitive pressure on employee wages is much higher than the competitive forces within most companies that control whether they get to keep the windfalls from particularly efficient employees.
rayiner 9y ago
I don't think it's ethical, but it's not legally fraud. Fraud requires, among other things, a misstatement (or an omission of some fact the party is bound to disclose) that is material, and that the other party actually relied on and which reliance proximately caused the other party harm. He's not under any legal duty to disclose to his employer how he does the work. The original post suggests that he might have misstated when he completed each batch of work (though, even there, he could have phrased it in a way that simply omitted that information). And the incorrect entries might count as misstatements. But neither of those facts is likely material. And even if they are, there's no harm to the employer arising out of those misstatements. The harm has to be traceable in some more or less direct fashion to the material misstatement. Any misstatement about when the author did the work, or the errors the author introduced did not cause the employer any harm. Any harm that occurred to the employer--say, paying the author for a job that was automated--arose from the employer not knowing about the automation, not from a false statement the author made. Finally, even if the author flat out said "I'm doing this by hand, not using a script," it's not clear any causation would be sufficiently direct. The scenario in which the company saves money by firing the author is a speculative outcome, not a certain one.
s73ver 9y ago
I can't really call it "significant financial gain" considering the likely outcome of telling their employer is that they get fired. Keeping your existing job doesn't fall under "significant financial gain" to me.

jkern 9y ago

When he was doing the same work by hand he was producing data with errors in it. All he's done is achieve the same error rate he had before. I don't see why the fact he could trivially reduce the errors to 0 is relevant when from the employer's point of view the exact same result is being produced.

emodendroket 9y ago
It seems hard to claim making a mistake and deliberate sabotage are the same.
- barrkel 9y ago
  The product being bought and sold is the same, by objective measure; and that's what counts in a business transaction, rather than a personal relationship.
  - zimmund 9y ago
    So if -for example- you knew the details of fabrication of your car: you consider that you'd still buy a car with a chassis that was deliberately weakened by an employee, instead of just buying a car with an -unknowingly- faulty chassis? Why would you accept something that, if not tampered, would be better than the alternative? When there's bad intentions or tampering, you'll have a result that is broken to some degree for sure. If everyone does their jobs as good as they can, you'll only face a chance of something being broken. You can always improve over mistakes, not so much over bad intentions.
    - pferde 9y ago
      Your car example is flawed. If I knew that a given car has a defect, I simply wouldn't buy it, period, regardless of how and why the defect was introduced.
    - navane 9y ago
      Isn't this close to how computer proccessors are sold? I never checked this, but I always thought that slower CPUs are just CPUs with some 'production faults' in it. Basically, the manufacturer always tried to make 300mhz CPUs, but sometimes they didn't reach that speed so they sold them as 233mhz, 166mhz. Now I was under the impression that most people didn't know this, so most people were buying CPUs which were just designed to be slow, but in fact they were accidentally slower. This is exactly your car example, and there is nothing unethical about it -- either way.

WalterBright 9y ago

Yes, that's the crux of the matter. Is his arrangement for time, or for the results?