I think everyone deserves a chance, and thanks to the internet this developer got the chance to work for a paying customer in a country with a higher pay rate a

I think everyone deserves a chance, and thanks to the internet this developer got the chance to work for a paying customer in a country with a higher pay rate and higher standard of living. Then he stole and got caught. There are a lot of people living in poor conditions in the world, and a programmer in any country is near the middle-to-upper end of the spectrum. His situation is unfortunate, but he messed up. On a similar note: my current lab-mate lives in a pretty bad apartment in Boston right now. It is habitable and up to code, but run down and occasionally the heat goes out... He provided me some prospective by telling me about the one-room, dirt-floor house he grew up in where his parents raised 11 children while working as subsistence farmers in Nepal. That makes luke-warm water and 5Mbps internet seem much fancier. I pray that some day everyone can live the life of a poor to middle class American, but we are not there yet. I also don't think that being fired is an excessive punishment for fraud/theft at work. I would feel much differently if the story ended with hime being jailed or abused by the police, but the whole point of Odesk is to give everyone a chance and I feel that he got one.