Science & Tech

This person has written a code to do their job for them. But should they tell their boss?

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A tech worker has figured out how to get paid a full time salary for 1-2 hours work, now they're not sure if its entirely ethical.

Posting on The Workplace Forum in June, an anonymous individual revealed they'd created a bot that did their job for them.

They work on a 'legacy system' for a company. (No idea either).

It involves putting information into a spreadsheet, and the worker is able to do it remotely in order to spend time with their child.

But now they say there's been a development:

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past six 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 here's the conundrum, should the anonymous programmer tell their boss?

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tonnes of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it.

Imagine arriving to an interview for being an efficiency expert, and telling them your first move would be to fire to efficiency expert?

You wouldn't. But maybe the deception is the problem, and in the case of this worker, they're also faking human errors in the system to make it pass for something made by a living breathing person.

At the same time, it doesn't feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

Maybe they're already a machine, just trying to blend in with the rest of us.

Unless this article was written by a bot.

Think about it. Has any of you even seen Joe Vesey-Byrne in real life?

Unlike the Joe V-Bot, the worker says that all in all he only does 1-2 hours work per week and for this receives a full time salary.

More: Robots could soon have feelings and the end is nigh​

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