I think thst there is also a fundamental imbalance between people's general expectation of what's fair for a company to do, and what's fair for a person to do. After all, if a company had discovered a way to make, say, an expensive medication for almost nothing, would the company be expected to disclose their secret? Would a company be expected to announce to the world: "we can make this for almost nothing now, so were dropping the price to almost nothing!".

In the case of the OP, I think the company should have made it clear that employees wont be penelized for doing their job well. he would certainly deserve a bonus, and some extra vacation time, for directly contributing to making the company better. He shouldn't need to worry about loosing his job.

Honestly, if the employee expects to get screwed over by his bosses or the company, then I can see why he wouldn't disclose the programming and automation.

Maybe he can open up discussion by asking his manager what would happen if he could make his job, say, 10% faster or easier by automation. Just see where that goes and figure out the next step...

> I think thst there is also a fundamental imbalance between people's general expectation of what's fair for a company to do, and what's fair for a person to do. After all, if a company had discovered a way to make, say, an expensive medication for almost nothing, would the company be expected to disclose their secret? Would a company be expected to announce to the world: "we can make this for almost nothing now, so were dropping the price to almost nothing!".

I came here to say this. Corporations strive to maximize profits, are most often not transparent about how much it costs them to make what they sell, and often attempt to justify the high costs of their products with half-truths and/or outright lies. Why should employees be held (or hold themselves) to a higher standard?

If a customer (the company) purchases a service (employment in a certain role) from some entity (the employee) who provides that service, and said entity figures out a way to greatly increase their profits while the customer continues to pay the same price for the same service and is happy with the deal, what's the problem? That seems like a win-win to me.

>Would a company be expected to announce to the world: "we can make this for almost nothing now, so were dropping the price to almost nothing!".

There are many people all over reddit at least that think that yes, yes they should.

People don't need medication of their own free will, which is why >100% profit markups go from eye-rolling to genuinely upsetting.

True enough, and possibly that line of thinking is tentatively translated to automation by saying "well, you automated things, now you've got free time, stay in that chair and use it to automate more!" as if such automation were itself a manufactured good.

Obviously this is a false premise, as no software/automation/process is exactly the same as the previous one and you can't apply economies of scale to the end products, merely skill and experience, and with any luck reusability of some parts.

also, your market value just increased by a fairly large margin. So your wage in relation to your labour should be a lot more positive then doing manual labor.