
US employee 'outsourced job to China' - anons2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
======
gruseom
This 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://...](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/)

~~~
silverbax88
That 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
If you only need to go into the office once a fortnight (common with
telecommuting jobs) you can have 10 on the go at once. Many telecommuting jobs
will be much less office time than that too, I've done several where I never
went I've never even been to an office.

~~~
jiggy2011
True, but can you handle managing 10 remote workers at once and still have
time to watch cat videos?

~~~
doktrin
This.

Managing multiple remote teams across multiple timezones on _disparate and
unrelated_ projects (and for multiple companies, no less) is hardly trivial.

This second-hand article is purporting that not only is it trivial, but it in
fact requires so little time that it doesn't even bear mention in the so-
called "daily schedule".

------
ef4
The 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
Agreed.

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.

~~~
martincmartin
Your employer is paying you to deliver things that make them money. They're
not paying you for your time.

~~~
jwdunne
It comes down to time. My employer pays me money with the understanding I will
dedicate a slot of time to working solely on the projects he needs me to work
on.

Yes, he's paying me to deliver. If he was paying for my time and I wasn't
delivering then there's a problem. If I deliver, however, I can't just get up
and walk out in the middle of the day.

~~~
moe
_If I deliver, however, I can't just get up and walk out in the middle of the
day._

Then you're working outside the IT-sector or in an old fashioned company.

In modern IT-companies (most startups that I know, including some with >150
people that barely qualify as startup anymore) the above is perfectly
acceptable and normal for programmers.

You are expected to meet your deadlines, to be present for appointed meetings,
and usually during a fixed set of "core working hours". Sometimes there are
Sprints or "crunches" during which everyone is expected to be a little more
present than usual.

In these companies nobody cares what you do with your remaining time as long
as you meet the above criteria. Quite a few of my co-workers I've never met in
person or only after already skyping with them for months. Others I'll see
every time I hit an office because they're more the 9-5 (or 11-22..) type of
guys. The line between "employee" and "consultant" is blurring rapidly.

~~~
pc86
If I had to pick one thing I dislike about HN, this is it.

Not everybody works for a startup, and not everybody works in San Francisco.
The _majority_ of programmers work in 9-5 office jobs where if you left every
day at 4 PM you'd be fired as soon as your supervisor(s) caught on. It doesn't
mean you're working outside of IT (although that's likely) and it sure as hell
doesn't mean you're working in an old fashioned company.

Do you think any bank, healthcare provider, or BigCo business lets the
programmers come in whenever they want and leave whenever their work is
"done?"

~~~
chris_mahan
They are very good about making sure there's always more work for you to do.

I work as a coder in a business unit at Bank of America. What you say is true,
to some extent.

If I need to take off for the day at 1 pm I just tell my boss I've got to go
take care of some personal stuff and he's completely ok with that, since he
knows I get my work done.

~~~
pc86
We're both lucky then in terms of programmers in BigCos. I'm a developer in a
non-IT Fortune 1k company and it's very much the same here (honestly I didn't
expect BOA would be that good to you). Truthfully, if I had to leave at 1 PM
I'd probably have to take a half day of vacation, but 3-4 PM? Hasn't been a
problem the few times I've asked.

3-4 PM every day? "Get out of my office."

~~~
chris_mahan
Well, I don't make a habit of it. Yesterday I remoted from home until 11 am,
then I took the wife and sick kid to doctor and that ate the afternoon.

It helps to have bosses with small kids.

------
DavidChouinard
Another version of this story got flagged, but some of the comments are
interesting (in particular, patio11's):
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586>

Also, the original Verizon report:
[http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-
stud...](http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-
active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/) (seems to be down, cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](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/))

------
lancer383
And once again, The Onion was way ahead of this one:
[http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-
outsourc...](http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-
own-jobs-oversea,14329/)

~~~
leephillips
Wow - it even has the guy watching funny animal videos on YouTube.

------
keithwarren
"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.

~~~
DennisP
My 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.

~~~
arethuza
I think it might have originally been the Prussian Field Marshall von Moltke:

[http://old-soldier-colonel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/field-mars...](http://old-
soldier-colonel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/field-marshal-moltkes-four-types-
of.html)

~~~
echion
parent is right - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord#cit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord#cite_note-8) and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord#cit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord#cite_note-9)

------
anovikov
The 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
Certainly. 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.

~~~
ThomW
I want to know the name of the company he was using!

------
clickonchris
The 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.

------
jrockway
_The employee spent a nine-to-five workday surfing the internet._

Unprecedented.

~~~
DannyBee
It is. Everyone knows that reddit often doesn't have good stuff until at least
10 or 11.

~~~
mitchellhislop
And it usually runs out sometime around 3

------
negamax
For 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
I 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.

------
alexfarran
Odd that the article keeps calling it a scam. He was their most productive
employee.

~~~
blindhippo
No... "he" wasn't.

The outsourced company was.

The company would be smart to fire the fraud and hire the outsourced company
though since they already have access and knowledge of their systems.

~~~
vincentkriek
Yeah, but who picked the outsourced company? I wouldn't have fired him, but
have him do the outsourcing, and see if he can make it work for the entire
department.

~~~
jkeel
Plus, just allowing access to code and having them deliver it isn't the end.
You need to be involved in Quality Management (code reviews, testing, etc.) to
make sure they are doing a job to your standards (or better!) That stuff takes
time and it looks like he was managing it well if he was getting good reviews.

------
happywolf
Some 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.

------
eyeareque
He 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....

~~~
kokey
Yup, especially not on a webcam page easily accessible from your phone so you
don't have to carry it around. I sometimes wonder if I advertise this as a
service how many people will mail me their tokens.

~~~
eyeareque
They do offer smart phone apps that do "soft tokens".

------
jcromartie
He's being punished because only the corporate executive class has the right
to do this.

~~~
doktrin
He gave access to company infrastructure to some anonymous party overseas.
That is a major security breach.

~~~
johnward
I'm so tired of "Security" getting in the way of being able to do your job.

------
jbail
Now that's what I call a straight shooter with upper management potential.

------
ryusage
I'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
Now 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.

------
amykhar
Isn't this one of the very things that Tim Feris suggests people do in his
Four Hour Workweek?

~~~
johnward
That was one of the first thoughts I had. This is the example of what that
book lays out.

------
jngreenlee
Would a private VPN from China to the original employee's home exchange
followed by a hop onto the corporate VPN have prevented detection?

------
at-fates-hands
Interesting. 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/> HN Post:
<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.

------
JimWillTri
This 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.

------
gesman
So why didn't he just arranged Remote Desktop access to VM at his house,
instead of giving direct access to corp VPN?

~~~
johnward
This is what he should have done. They wouldn't have had any reason to look
into that traffic.

------
bparsons
They 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.

------
johnmurch
It'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
Agree! Can't see why only large corporations should benefit from outsourcing.

------
ceworthington
Instead 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.

------
d0m
Meh, 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.

------
aespinoza
This 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."

~~~
flyinRyan
Actually 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
True. 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.

------
importednoob
Assuming 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.

------
berlinbrown
Can anyone verify the story?

~~~
dbuxton
Came 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.

------
ww520
This guy is an excellent manager who can manage outsource project with
success. Too bad they let good talent go.

------
benlower
I 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.

------
programminggeek
The 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.

------
stmfreak
This 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.

------
geori
Moral 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

------
desireco42
All 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.

------
mcantelon
Someone read "4 Hour Work Week":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-
Anywhere/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-
Anywhere/dp/0307353133/)

~~~
suyash
Haha..funny yet true..well all the guy needed was his manager's
permission..without official approval..this was a security breach!

------
Yuioup
_The 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?

~~~
parfe
Have you applied for openings which offer six figures?

~~~
Yuioup
I think that's the problem.

------
doktrin
It'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.

------
talmir
He 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.

------
mathattack
If he had done this above board, he would have a very profitable consulting
firm. It's the subterfuge that got him.

------
loahou04
i 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

------
fab13n
If the story is true, this guy ought to be promoted their chief outsourcing
officer right now.

------
Havoc
>He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China

Haha. This guy is my hero.

------
hmottestad
I wonder how much it would cost to have them finish my thesis for me?

------
johnnymonster
How is this a scam? The work was getting done... no harm done IMO.

------
wooptoo
This hoax originated on The Onion. It's now on BBC. Wow.

------
davestheraves
I'd get so bored just watching Youtube etc all day!

------
volkanvardar
This seems to be a win-win-win strategy :-)

------
adambenayoun
They fired him and hired him as the CEO.

------
petrel
And Americans say, they are unemployed.

------
misuisui
My God, the Chinese people will take away our jobs!

------
paulhauggis
I 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
On 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
To avoid that problem you could always hire a second contractor to supervise
the first contractor.

~~~
VLM
A 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
You'd probably want to go for a RAIC 1 setup, with a decent RAIC controller to
oversee everything.

------
mylittlepony
If only he used full disk encryption...

