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US employee 'outsourced job to China'
- wooptoo 14y agoThis hoax originated on The Onion. It's now on BBC. Wow.
- weisk 14y agoWow, exactamente lo mismo que hacen las consultoras en España, pero con miles de programadores trabajando en cliente..
- gesman 14y agoSo why didn't he just arranged Remote Desktop access to VM at his house, instead of giving direct access to corp VPN?
- johnward 14y agoThis is what he should have done. They wouldn't have had any reason to look into that traffic.
- davestheraves 14y agoI'd get so bored just watching Youtube etc all day!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- keithwarren 14y ago"Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it." -Attribution unknown because the interwebz say several people said it.
- woodchuck64 14y agoLazy people cut corners, and then lie about cutting corners. After you've spent time and money discovering the missing corner cases, lazy people admit that that they made a mistake, but you're assured that they'll do better next time. Begin paragraph again.
- DennisP 14y agoLazy/honest people. As Larry Wall says, laziness is one of the great virtues of a programmer. "I was so lazy I invented Perl." His definition: "The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it." http://threevirtues.com/ http://threevirtues.com/
- stcredzero 14y agoOne of my professors called this "active lazy."
- maxerickson 14y agoI'm pretty lazy, but I'm not irresponsible in regards to my obligations to others. Really, what I'm saying here is that you are just insisting that your definition of lazy is the only correct one.
- yen223 14y agoLaziness in itself is not a virtue. When programmers say we want 'lazy' people, what we really want are 'efficient' people. People who can get more stuff done with less effort, not people who aren't even willing to put in that effort. Some would argue that lazy people will find ways to do more for less; I would argue that a smart, hardworking person will do the same. In that sense, lazy people are like what woodchuck64 describes.
- maxerickson 14y agoYou are doing the same thing as woodchuck64. The meaning in keithwarren's comment is clear enough, right up until the point you over-parse it and quibble over the exact definition of lazy.
- DennisP 14y agoMy brother's an officer in the Navy, and just told me about a book he's reading about a German general, I think from WWII. He classified his staff into four categories, and treated them accordingly: Stupid/Lazy: harmless. Keep around doing whatever you can get them to do. Stupid/Energetic: fire immediately before they do damage. Smart/Energetic: useful, give them lots of middle-management work. Smart/Lazy: put in high-ranking positions, they'll find efficiencies that will trickle down to everyone. I'll ask him the source and post it later.
- znt 14y agoI think this general may be Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox.
- deckchain 14y agoMaking war and making software are very different.
- c0nfused 14y agoSome of us are either making software about war or warring about making software. So, it all works out in the end.
- DennisP 14y agoAs far as these categories are concerned I think they're exactly the same. Only difference is that in a commercial environment you don't want to waste much money on dumb/lazy people, unless you've got enough menial work that you can't automate.
- arethuza 14y agoI think it might have originally been the Prussian Field Marshall von Moltke: http://old-soldier-colonel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/field-marshal-moltkes-four-types-of.html http://old-soldier-colonel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/field-mars...
- DennisP 14y ago
- MertsA 14y agoI've always heard that was from Bill Gates.
- dandrews 14y agoThis sounds like Heinlein's "man who was too lazy to fail".
- kamjam 14y ago“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” - Robert A. Heinlein
- lancer383 14y agoAnd once again, The Onion was way ahead of this one: http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-own-jobs-oversea,14329/ http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...
- leephillips 14y agoWow - it even has the guy watching funny animal videos on YouTube.
- cfesta9 14y agoGood Call! Every time I watch that video I die laughing.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoMaybe the guy was inspired by the video?
- kels 14y agoI was going to post this if no one else did.
- mongol 14y agoMore, please!
- alexfarran 14y agoOdd that the article keeps calling it a scam. He was their most productive employee.
- axusgrad 14y agoMaybe they let him go and retained the foreign employee. They just... cut out the middleman.
- jimbokun 14y agoI thought it was pretty clear they were upset about the security breach and unauthorized access to the corporation's intellectual property.
- andrewkkirk 14y agoIt was wrong to subvert security protocols, but this employee was genius if he could spend 1/5 of salary to outsource his job with no one noticing any change in the level of the code being delivered. There are literally hundreds of companies that should hire this individual to manage an entire team of outsourced developers.
- sanderjd 14y agoI read it differently. I don't see any proof that he has any particular talent for managing entire teams of outsourced developers, but rather that he was being paid 4/5 too much for work easy and unimportant enough that he seemingly never had to communicate about it much with anybody besides his employee.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- flyinRyan 14y agoSo managing an outsourced team is worth nothing? The China group probably wasn't working during his 9-to-5.
- blindhippo 14y ago
- johnmurch 14y agoIt's pretty amazing that he beat his company to the punch and outsourced his own job before their could. I think this should be something MORE people look into both companies/people as a team of people could do more especially if the job is "not challenging"
- runarb 14y agoAgree! Can't see why only large corporations should benefit from outsourcing.
- paulhauggis 14y agoI thought about doing this. The problem would be finding someone that is not only good enough, but can get things in a timely fashion.
- hosay123 14y agoOn a contract in 2011 while expressing frustration at a p.o.s. assignment I told the requesting manager "this stuff is such bullshit I've even considered outsourcing it". His response was one of praise, and suggesting that if I'd done so he'd consider hiring me in future. The problem with doing this are of course the risks you mention, in addition to one more: so you've found some cheap-assed Asian contractor to do the work for you, only they decide to stop committing for 3 weeks, and then on the Monday of week 4 you arrive to an e-mail announcing they couldn't give a shit any more, committed the past 20 man-days of unreviewed mess and have disappeared for good. And here is where you got what you paid for: the original work, in addition to a big chunk of crap you have to read and understand since you can't throw it away because it partially/completely implements some features your customer has already signed off.
- drited 14y agoTo avoid that problem you could always hire a second contractor to supervise the first contractor.
- VLM 14y agoA redundant array of inexpensive contractors. At 1/5 takehome pay for each you could at least afford RAID, err, RAIC-1 mirroring. RAIC-5 contractor array is the traditional "I'd like nine women to successfully cooperate to produce a fullgrown baby in one money"
- anu_gupta 14y agoYou'd probably want to go for a RAIC 1 setup, with a decent RAIC controller to oversee everything.
- jngreenlee 14y agoWould a private VPN from China to the original employee's home exchange followed by a hop onto the corporate VPN have prevented detection?
- DavidChouinard 14y agoAnother version of this story got flagged, but some of the comments are interesting (in particular, patio11's): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586 Also, the original Verizon report: http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/ http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-stud... (seems to be down, cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...)
- ef4 14y agoThe moral of the story is: route your Chinese subcontractors through your own VPN first, so they appear to be coming from your house. Also, use your freaking time to do something more interesting than surf Reddit and Facebook.
- jwdunne 14y agoAgreed. If I did this, I think that, given my employer is paying me for my time, I should still focus on stuff for the company whether my work has been outsourced or not. Rather than use it as a way to slack of, I could do way more, meaning pay rises, bonuses and additional opportunities. It would make doing that more worthwhile, in my opinion. If I run out of work to do, awesome, I'll ask for more, making my productivity gains clear as day.
- jiggy2011 14y agoInteresting business model. Outsource as much of your work as possible but take on more responsibilities in the extra time it frees up. Make yourself look superhuman, get a pay rise/promotion and spend some of that extra income outsourcing even more stuff. Repeat until the whole house of cards falls down.
- jwdunne 14y agoI didn't envision it working like that. I probably wouldn't keep my personal outsourcing a secret. If my employer was dead set against it, I wouldn't do it. Since I work for a small company and have a good working relationship with the owner of the company, I will either receive an approval or a refusal, with a good explanation. The way I see it is that if I can increase my productivity in a big way by doing that, I can't see a problem with it. That's especially since I have the ability/authority to hire a contractor on company funds if I need one. Some say it's very shady but this could work well if you're completely honest and if you have good delegation skills (after all, anyone can delegate but effective delegation can be much harder to do). It depends on your employer I guess.
- 14y ago
- clickonchris 14y agoThe BBC calls him a scammer. I call him an entrepreneur! Corporate life doesn't agree with this fellow. Assuming he's not facing any lawsuits it sounds like a great time to launch his own software firm (where he outsources the work of course). Or - he could go into consulting to show companies how to effectively do outsourcing.
- JimWillTri 14y agoThis happens all the time with devs I hire whether in the US or outsourced (the outsourcers outsource too). We started requiring web cams and IP log ins.
- amykhar 14y agoIsn't this one of the very things that Tim Feris suggests people do in his Four Hour Workweek?
- thoughtcriminal 14y agoAJ Jacobs did it first in an Esquire article if I'm not mistaken. Tim got the idea from him.
- johnward 14y agoThat was one of the first thoughts I had. This is the example of what that book lays out.
- mylittlepony 14y agoIf only he used full disk encryption...
- jbail 14y agoNow that's what I call a straight shooter with upper management potential.
- ryusage 14y agoI'd be really interested to find out how prevalent this is. I personally know one person who claims to pay someone in India about 10% of his own salary to do his job for him. Anyone else know someone that does this?
- jiggy2011 14y agoNow this article has been released I see it becoming more prevalent , not less. It already happens a lot at big companies in a way, though not usually externally. Middle managers pick the parts of their job that they don't want to do and find some reason to get assigned budget to hire an extra person to do them.
- talmir 14y agoHe allowed an unauthorized company from another country full access with his credentials to the company code base. It is a massive security breach. He deserved to go.
- jrockway 14y agoThe employee spent a nine-to-five workday surfing the internet. Unprecedented.
- DannyBee 14y agoIt is. Everyone knows that reddit often doesn't have good stuff until at least 10 or 11.
- mitchellhislop 14y agoAnd it usually runs out sometime around 3
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- prawks 14y agoAs others have pointed out: He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. This is probably the worst security violation a standard employee can commit.
- d0m 14y agoMeh, the problem with this is mostly lying to your organisation and giving confidential access to external workers. If that wasn't the case, that would be a whole different story.
- jcromartie 14y agoHe's being punished because only the corporate executive class has the right to do this.
- Cowen 14y agoNo, he's being punished for lying. An employee that can't be trusted won't be an employee for very long.
- doktrin 14y agoHe gave access to company infrastructure to some anonymous party overseas. That is a major security breach.
- johnward 14y agoI'm so tired of "Security" getting in the way of being able to do your job.
- volkanvardar 14y agoThis seems to be a win-win-win strategy :-)
- ww520 14y agoThis guy is an excellent manager who can manage outsource project with success. Too bad they let good talent go.
- programminggeek 14y agoThe upshot of this is that the guy who outsourced his job successfully figured out a way to manage outsourcers well. He deserves to get paid well to do that right? Maybe he shouldn't have given his 2 factor auth key to the contractor, but still. Well done.
- misuisui 14y agoMy God, the Chinese people will take away our jobs!
- Yuioup 14y agoThe employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages ... six-figure salary ... Hey that's me in a nutshell. Why don't I earn a six-figure salary?
- benlower 14y agoI hope Verizon promoted this guy to dev lead/manager. He showed that he could get the highest quality (at least by VZ's standards) work done for a fraction of the cost. I'd promote the guy and give him & his team (internal and/or outsourced) more challenging projects to see what they could do.
- negamax 14y agoFor all the comments disagreeing with calling him a fraud, here's a broad difference. You guys are clearly impressed by the act. But truthfully, it wasn't smart to send his 2KA to another country, that too China. He was trusted. That's the keyword here to work remotely. Idea being that telecommuting may leave him with more hours and thereby increase his productivity. What he has done is 1. Taken advantage of the trust 2. Exposed his employer/team/project to security breach 3. Missed the primary part i.e. use the extra time to enhance his skills. Eight hours Internet browsing? Guy is a scumbag.
- travisp 14y agoI have to agree. If the company had wanted to outsource this job to people in China, it would have done so. Obviously, it felt it had a reason not to, and that reason may have had to do with more than just the quality of the work.
- eyeareque 14y agoHe should have setup a US workstation with a webcamera for the Chinese developer to log into. The webcam could show a live feed for the RSA token. So now he can still use his RSA token, while giving his outsourced worker access to it as well. Not that I would do this....
- anovikov 14y agoThe guy must be a really talented manager if he really managed to pretend to do the work and yet the work was actually done well enough to look like it was done by the guy in the same room (which is EXTREMELY hard to achieve with remote people). So whatever salary he had, he wasted his time. He must run his own consultancy and make millions. If he discloses his name openly he will become hugely successful.
- kokey 14y agoCertainly. I was thinking two things, this man is having more success than most companies at outsourcing, and this company he was outsourcing to seems really good.
- doktrin 14y agoIt's a sign of good times that the community here is largely supportive of what this gentleman did. I certainly hope the economic situation will not change any time soon.
- petrel 14y agoAnd Americans say, they are unemployed.
- berlinbrown 14y agoCan anyone verify the story?
- dbuxton 14y agoCame here to post this. I call bs. It's a "case study" in the way that consultancies make them up out of whole cloth - "We analysed the P&L figures from FooCorp's regional affiliates and succeeded in raising revenues by 300%". Really astonished that the BBC is posting this without any attempt, it seems, to conduct independent verification.
- desireco42 14y agoAll this because he didn't knew better to route vpn through local box... ccc.... I am sorry for the guy, but the way some corporations were, I thought I could easily get away with same.
- johnnymonster 14y agoHow is this a scam? The work was getting done... no harm done IMO.
- aespinoza 14y agoThis is interesting as a hack, but it puts a really bad light on telecommuters. Because it basically proves two things to your employer: 1) That your job can be done cheaper if outsourced to another country, in this case china, and just as good. (Just in case there was any doubt this was possible, now the doubt it is gone). 2) That you can't trust telecommuting employees. It is stupid for so many reasons, but as a friend of mine would say: "It is stupid if you get caught."
- riazrizvi 14y agoExcept it is unclear what value-add Bob provided. He may have been pivotal to the Chinese contractors being able to do the work, who knows?
- flyinRyan 14y agoActually 1) is wrong. The issue is, in software development how good of code you write usually doesn't matter at all. Just deliver a solution that does what management wants and you win. Unless other people work on the code base, literally no one cares how well it's written. This guy was just doing arbitrage on that.
- aespinoza 14y agoTrue. Not everybody cares about the quality of the code. But getting what management wants takes a bit of a quality. If the code doesn't work then you are not really giving what management wants.
- mathattack 14y agoIf he had done this above board, he would have a very profitable consulting firm. It's the subterfuge that got him.
- gruseom 14y agoThis story doesn't ring true to me. Particularly the part about how his day consisted of cat videos, Reddit, and eBay — that's a caricature, designed to fit the popular conception of "wasting time at the office". The whole story, in fact, has this quality. The way that it touches on fears of being outsourced to China is another example. And the saucy peasant outwitting his masters is a common trope in folk tales. The original report, which seems to be gone but is cached at [1], reads more like a chain letter than anything a corporate risk manager would write. It's weirdly unprofessional and internally inconsistent (the salary numbers change along the way). It even shows signs of a liar getting carried away with his own tall tale: by the end of the story, Bob has "the same scam going across multiple companies in the area". How did he arrive at all of them at 9 am in order to watch his cat videos? This story should be considered guilty – of being an urban legend – until proven innocent. The fact that it has been posted to HN a good ten times under different guises shows what a demand there is to believe it. [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- tolos 14y agoare you snopes
- silverbax88 14y agoThat part about 'multiple companies' was a kicker for me, too. That's the part where I thought, 'hmm, really, now?' That would mean that 'Bob' would have to have multiple identical working situations with several companies, including trust, tenure, workload, bosses (some are more micromanaging than others) and willing to let him work 100% remote over VPN. I mean, if 'Bob' was smart enough to set up what amounts to an outsourcing business, why wouldn't he just take a higher contractor's rate and go legit with his outsourcing? Why bother with getting hired at multiple companies when he could make so much more as a contracting outsourcing group, while not running into even a smattering of trouble? Well, because Bob isn't real, that's why.
- alexkus 14y ago
- at-fates-hands 14y agoInteresting. I feel like this is the same thing as the guy wrote a script to automate his data entry job: Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/ HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3950595 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3950595 Interesting how similar I think the situations are - yet the responses seem to be quite different from HN posters.
- happywolf 14y agoSome people here said US$50000 is very low and therefore the Chinese firm has ulterior motive. I have worked extensively with vendors in China, especially in Shanghai. First of all, Shenyang is a small city compared to Shanghai, with way lower living expenses. Second, this contract comes at RMB311K, which by no means cheap. For bench mark, hiring a decent engineer (I only aware of the iOS and PHP group) in Shanghai with 3 years of experience would be around RMB200K. For Shenyang, I guess RMB150K would be feasible, therefore this amount can cover two full-time engineers for the whole year. On top of that, outsourcing companies will and do interleave projects and will not put senior people in projects for too long, therefore this figure is entirely feasible. Just to conclude, I would think this looks like a regular outsourced project as done by thousands of outsourcing companies in China, Philippines, and India. All those conspiracy theories are a bit too much.
- bparsons 14y agoThey should promote this guy and have him replicate the process across the entire organization. Cutting up your job into tasks and instructing others to do it is actually quite difficult. If this guy got away with it for so long, it probably means he is an excellent manager.
- mcantelon 14y agoSomeone read "4 Hour Work Week": http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Anywhere/dp/0307353133/ http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Anywhere/dp...
- suyash 14y agoHaha..funny yet true..well all the guy needed was his manager's permission..without official approval..this was a security breach!
- adambenayoun 14y agoThey fired him and hired him as the CEO.
- hmottestad 14y agoI wonder how much it would cost to have them finish my thesis for me?
- fab13n 14y agoIf the story is true, this guy ought to be promoted their chief outsourcing officer right now.
- xxiao 14y agoMaybe that's his low-cost start-up big plan, by outsourcing whatever that he can to free up his time to expand the business, I strongly believe he is an active reader here and probably learnt that trick here as well.
- geori 14y agoMoral of the story: You aren't getting 10x out of your average joe programmer. Instead of finding a 10xer for an average corporate job find a 1xer in China that will work for 1/5th the pay
- importednoob 14y agoAssuming this is real (which it doesn't appear to be) this man should be promoted and paid double. Somebody that is able to successfully coordinate, manage and off-load work to a Chinese consulting firm is a very very valuable asset especially for firms that are looking for 24/7 development and services but unable to find quality employees in the US who are willing to work graveyard-shift development jobs.
- ceworthington 14y agoInstead of firing this gentleman, a smarter company would have put him in charge of finding which other corporate tasks could be effectively outsourced for 20% of their current cost.
- Havoc 14y ago>He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China Haha. This guy is my hero.
- stmfreak 14y agoThis must be the most effective and efficient example of outsourcing I've ever heard. Normally it costs 60-80% of salary to get an equivalently productive team and you still need to hire a full time PM to manage them. This smells too good to be true.
- loahou04 14y agoi couldnt imagine this being true. Any developer will have to answer questions about specific items he was working on and integrate it with other teams. As soon as they asked him any questions i'm sure he would have been completely stumped and everyone would have known immediately he wasnt doing the work