Posted on 01/12/2022 10:58:25 PM PST by blueplum
Titled, "I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone," ....
...In their original post, the anonymous IT employee said that they handle all of the digital evidence their employer uses during trials and that when COVID arrived, they requested to work from home. Within a week of working from home, the Redditor said that they wrote, debugged, and perfected a simple script to perform all their entire job for them...
"I clock in every day, play video games or do whatever, and at the end of the day I look over the logs to make sure everything ran smoothly...then clock out," they wrote. "I'm only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day."...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
1) a) the script is work product and so belongs to the company whether it is disclosed or not, or, b) the script is unauthorized personal property running on employer computers
2) a) the employee is falsifying wage records by claiming a full weeks' work, or b) the employee is entitled to collect full wages as a reward for tricking his employer into paying him for leisure hours
That man is a genius that improved his work productivity and he can spend his time improving himself for the benefit of his employer! If he is filling his employer’s output quotas so he has done absolutely nothing wrong.
Let me put it to you this way with a rhetorical question. If a manufacturer found a way to create a valuable commodity product at 1/10 the cost of its competitors is that company then obligated to pass all the savings to its customers or reduce its price is just enough just enough to gain market share?
Congress. Supreme Court. Fed. Govt.
he may or may not be a genius, but he is using company computers to cheat his employer using a product he produced on company time, which, under intellectual property rights, belongs to the employer. Not clear in the article if he’s also using company time and computers to run his little video games but that’s no different than spending the day making personal phone calls.
Otoh, he could disclose his work product to the employer, and he could get a bonus or promotion for automating what appears to be a very menial job. Or he could get fired when the company does their annual IT forensic audit by independent sources, and make it onto the blacklist every FORTUNE 1000 HR dept has and kill any future career moves (and yes, you can bet your bippy they do keep lists). One can be sure that every law firm HR person that reads the article will now be on the hunt. Ripping off a law firm doesn’t seem a good risk reward scenario.
“1) a) the script is work product and so belongs to the company whether it is disclosed or not,”
Not if the company didn’t request it be written and they didn’t make him sign an agreement relinquishing rights to anything he creates, they don’t own it.
“or, b) the script is unauthorized personal property running on employer computers”
Not true either. Some companies have very loose policies on this. His may have a loose policy. My employer sure does, I write scripts all of the time, they know about it and are fine with it.
“2) a) the employee is falsifying wage records by claiming a full weeks’ work,”
Not true either. He is accomplishing the amount of work expected of him. More so if he’s salary. If you’re salaried, they pay you an agreed upon amount regardless of time put in.
If he’s hourly and is available for tasks during work hours, he not cheating them either.
“or b) the employee is entitled to collect full wages as a reward for tricking his employer into paying him for leisure hours”
See my response above.
I can tell by the way that you think that you’re a lawyer. We all know that lawyers bill by the hour even though only if it takes him two minutes to do something like fill a template legal form with a clients information.
If the law firm goes to town on this innovator, I’d like to see the legal process blow up in their faces, bite them in the ass and eventually cause them to go out of business.
“they didn’t make him sign an agreement relinquishing rights to anything he creates, they don’t own it.”
Are you reaching for the only scenario that makes his actions valid?
The law firm owns the computers, the committed to hours, the benefits, the vacation time, the sick leave time, and the job itself. And, the terms of employment and standards most likely says, along with the non=disclosure of company or case information forms, that anything created is intellectual property of the company.
Unless he’s a registered independent contractor, with a business license of his own, and hired as such, he’s just a worker - he owns nothing - not even the company pencil.
” I write scripts all of the time, they know about it and are fine with it.”
keywords: they know about it and it’s part of your job. It’s not part of his job description, ergo, the illegal uploading. If he uploads a unauthorized “simple” script to his employer’s computer, isn’t that a form of hacking? And you’d know better than most how easy it is hack a “simple” script. What if he goes further and starts selling the case information? or puts out leaks to influences cases? one crime leads so easily to another when financial gain is afoot.....
“He is accomplishing the amount of work expected of him”
Is he? Was he hired to write scripts? Or was what is expected of him is ‘eyes-on’ each entry by others into the system. And, one assumes, communication with the uploading party as to errors that should be corrected. But it’s not his eyes, is it? He thinks his script is good, but he’s only a year into it, with cases not due to come to court for another year or so. So how to validate ‘good’?
Exempt employees (salaried) are generally expected to pull in excess of real-time 60 hours a week and prove it with bottom line performance - including dropping everything on off-hours for an assigned task, traveling here and there, and maintaining a close managerial rein on his subordinates and their problems. Hourly white-collar grunts are expected to pull a 36-40-hour week - the duties of which are NEVER limited to just one function - the old ‘other duties as assigned’ clause in employment agreements - the team player stuff. (one of my personal ‘other duties’ involved coming down from the ivory tower to wrap customers’ purchased gifts for a week every Christmas to help out the hourly staff.).
50 minutes a week is not 40 hours. 50 minutes a week intentionally blocks availability for ‘other duties as assigned’ and violates his employment agreement. Especially if the remaining time is tying up company resources and computing time for ‘games’ and personal chatrooms that have nothing to do with the business and which may, by doing so, (and often does) compromise his employer’s computers and/or case integrity.
Essentially, he is very publically admitting to gross negligence of his fudiciary duty. 10 minutes of work a day assuming his script is working correctly without fail. Ten minutes is what he should be paid for and 10 minutes is what should be applied towards senority, vacation and sick leave accrual and not a minute more.
Rebuttal?
The employee is fulfilling all duties needed for the role.
There is no issue.
Macros in Excel are scripts. Has anyone been fired for those?
Lawyers often skip work and spend inordinate time doing all sorts of either non-billable work of claiming billable work when little actual work was done. How is either situation better then someone who is actually at work, getti g legitimate work done, and spending excess time sitting around looking at his phone? If the job is done, he’s allowed to look out a window or listen to the radio or play on his phone.
I don’t agree with your take on this. He is accomplishing what they want him to accomplish and they are satisfied with the work product. They have nothing to complain about.
Now I will say the firm would be better off buying his software so that they didn’t have to pay someone to do it anymore.....or better yet they would have been better off hiring a tech consultant to write software for them that they would then own. He wrote this on his computer at home without it being requested. Its not work product.
I’ve been working from home for about 2 years now since Covid started. Sometimes I have nothing to do so I just watch TV or surf the internet. Should I feel bad about that? Not a bit. I’m here ready, willing and able to do anything they ask of me as soon as they ask it. I wasn’t always busy when I went to the office either. Some jobs are just like that. As long as you get done what is asked of you in a timely fashion and the employer is satisfied with the quality of the work, they have nothing to complain about.
Hmmm, this is a bit of a sticky-wicket isn’t it.
An employee finds a way to get his job done 98% faster.
The moral and legal question becomes:
Who actually owns the process if said process was never disclosed to the employer? In this case can the employer coerce or force a NDA? Or, should the employee hold his/her peace and then sell said process for millions of dollars 6 months from now?
Or does the employer reward the employee in a manner commensurate with the future value added by handling all the legalese in bringing said process to market for the employee?
Termination or HR punishments in a case like this appear to be very counter-intuitive.
For the employee, automating yourself out of a job without a plan to exploit that skill beyond being able to spend 7.75hrs a day having a life outside the computer box, well that is a business/marketing failure on your part. But then no one says some geniuses aren’t fools too. Many die dirt poor and abused by the very systems they created.
I shared an office with a guy whose first assignment at our company was to do some calculations for a pretty famous senior scientist. The senior scientist gave him use of a company HP-41C calculator, a highly prized asset and the formula he wanted used to make the calculations. The new employee (an MIT graduate) realized he could do the calculations more quickly and easily by logging in to a mainframe on a teletype and writing a BASIC program. So he did. He knocked off the calculations in less than hour, went home, took a nap, and came back in time to hand in his completed assignment.
The signal start of a mediocre career. The good old 41C, RPN, anyone?
Working from home is a goldbrick’s dream.
I tend to agree with you.
A smart law firm would seek to obtain and support the employee bringing the product to market, not implementing punitive actions against the employee.
They could now possess a marketable product which every law firm would want from a cost savings standpoint.
I used to be a story analyst for a major motion picture company. I can see a smart IT person figuring out an AI program to do that job in the near future. Same with lawyering, etc. I’m guessing this will get rid of many, many jobs, eventually. That said, I think this fellow is smart, and if his programs can do the work, I really don’t blame him.
Have you seen the dude’s employment contract?
In the auto plants your maintenance employees - electricians, machine repairmen, millwrights, etc., - will typically sit in a "bull pen", reading or playing cards all day until a line supervisor with a problem will come over and get the tradesman to fix whatever the problem is.
nope, WMarshal, I’m seriously not a lawyer but I did stay at a Holiday Inn once and I have been accused more than once of being articulate - for a girl. I’ve lived a multifaceted and interesting life, from a barnyard to angels 30 and back to the barn. Climbing ladders, grabbing brass rings, running the show, shattering ceilings out of necessity or just for the sheer fun of it all, life experience teaches perspective. And possessing perspective is one of the greatest gifts of life.
A fair share of lawyers (like any other profession) have book sense but no horse sense. But when you get a good one, just like a good doctor, or mechanic, or boss, or vet, he or she is worth their weight in gold. Try to find a good one —and keep them on your Christmas card list. For me, it’s been worth that extra 14 minutes in billing. Every time.
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