Is it ethical to get paid for 40 hours a week when only working two?
Such was the dilemma faced by a programmer who was able to automate his remote job six months ago, with his employer being none the wiser and pleased with the results. This situation, as first posted on The Workplace Q&A message board, brings forth difficult issues of transparency, what modern employees should be paid for (results-versus-time), and whether we are all automatable in the near future.
This comes on the heels of a situation last year where a programmer allegedly automated his work with a well-known tech company for six years, collecting upwards of $95,000 a year until he was finally fired. So, what about the current situation of remote worker (posted on The Workplace) who was able to automate his job?
“I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program…Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me.”-The Workplace message board
“The quick answer is, No, I don’t think he’s doing anything unethical,” says John C. Havens, mentioning that employers tend not to go through the same tortured ethical qualms when eliminating workers through automation. The employee, in this specific situation, is doing what he has been contracted to do.
Havens is the Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in…
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