
A story about a man who outsourced his own job - mkr-hn
http://nowiknow.com/what-about-bob/
======
andmarios
The story is old but I have to say that anyone who manages to outsource his
job to China for a quarter of his paycheck and get top-notch quality (he was
considered a rockstar programmer until they found out), has my respect.

You don't fire such a person, you appoint him CEO.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> he was considered a rockstar programmer until they found out

I assume his work was being done by a whole team of engineers, though; is it
really all that difficult to get a team of five people to contribute more than
you're expected to do by yourself? A recent graduate from a top Chinese
university can be happy to make less than USD 2K / month. I know a few making
5000 yuan / month (USD $800) plus housing in a company-provided communal
apartment.

If you're looking to outsource something to some young but highly intelligent
chinese programmers, do let me know ;)

~~~
michaelochurch
Outsourcing is "hard" (and usually fails) because usually, the process is
performed by a middle manager who (a) is trying to optimize for cost, which
hurts quality and is expensive in the long run, and (b) doesn't have the
technical talent and therefore can't recognize it. In any country, the bottom
of the barrel is going to be bad. But if you don't have the ability to pick
talented people and others in the market do, you end up getting hurt by
adverse selection. Then, outsourcing becomes really expensive.

Painting Bob as a slacker doesn't tell the whole story. He had to set up his
own business. At least while he was ramping up, he had to hire, fire, train,
and check the work. At the same time, he had to deal with inconveniences
caused by time zones, and cover his tracks. Maybe he slacked once it was
established and he could coast, but it's not _easy_ to set up a business like
that.

To win at the outsourcing game, you need to (a) pay well, so that people care,
and (b) pick great people, because paying incompetent people well doesn't do
anything. Going overseas might make (a) easier, but it doesn't make (b) less
hard.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I don't intend to paint him as a slacker at all. I respect that what he did
took a lot of effort to establish, but I doubt he did a lot of hiring and
firing himself -- the article I read on this guy said he employed an existing
chinese consulting company. What I'm assuming is that he paid that company
enough to engage several engineers at once, which means I'm not surprised that
"his" output was considered especially impressive.

I think the greatest obstacle to retaining chinese engineers is actually (c)
communication across the language barrier.

~~~
opendais
I suspect at the start he would have done code reviews because otherwise he
couldn't know if the other party [the consulting firm] was a competent entity.

I'm sure once he figured out their level of competence and how far he could
trust their agency [e.g. How much direction they needed to succeed], I suspect
that is really when the slacking started.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the second or third consulting company he
had tried.

Honestly, I doubt that process took more than 3-6 months.

Do you find most Chinese programmers don't know written English?

~~~
thaumasiotes
All (recent) chinese people are supposed to know English (it's a mandatory
subject at all levels of schooling), but fluency levels vary widely. It's
generally not a big focus for engineers. At the startup I worked at last year,
the founders had decent english and the employees knew almost nothing. The
college students I know can communicate at an acceptable level, but (a) they
are still highly prone to misunderstandings unless I make the effort to use
simple phrasing and (b) there's a huge selection bias in which people I'm on
speaking terms with.

I do find that for almost all the chinese people I know, it's more effective
for me to communicate with them in written chinese (but, sadly, spoken
english, as my spoken chinese is appalling).

So summing up... there might be a decent population of chinese programmers who
can communicate in written english, but there's a much, much larger population
that can't.

~~~
opendais
Fair enough. :)

I guess the much, much larger population is going to make less money if they
do outsourced/consulting time work since they have to deal with a middleman
because of it [who will take a cut and do project management/sales].

~~~
thaumasiotes
Also, this may sound weird, but jobs speaking english can pay better than
programming jobs, which will cut down on the number of english-speaking
programmers.

~~~
opendais
That sounds very weird but different job markets I suppose.

Why do you think that is?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Jobs speaking english involve serving english-speaking foreigners, who have
money.

------
jackgavigan
Does anyone know which consulting firm in China he was outsourcing his work
to?

Asking for a friend...

~~~
yitchelle
Can you let me know when you find out? My friend also wants to know.

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DanLivesHere
Hi! This is from my email newsletter of interesting facts, Now I Know. If you
want to give it a try, [http://nowiknow.com](http://nowiknow.com) is the
signup page.

It's free, I don't give out email addresses, etc., and have 100,000
subscribers so it can't be all bad.

~~~
mkr-hn
It's also WordPress-based, so tacking /feed/ on the URL will give you an RSS
feed.

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matthiasb
Bonus fact: Bob had to ship this RSA SecurID token to his developer in China
to that they could submit their code, defeating his corporate strong
authentication policy.

------
gtirloni
I can't help but notice how much whining there is about outsourcing (including
from me), but when it's in the benefit of a single employee skipping his work
then it's a "great trick", worth of respect, etc.

Assuming the company needed that level of work that was being delivered by
this guy's shadow team and he could not deliver that alone... then they would
hire better people and/or more people. In this specific case they HAD to
because it was US-govt work.

This is no different then a CEO outsourcing a whole department to India or
China (in that it doesn't take into account the ripple effects of that
decision -- including the local economy, the quality of the work, the added
communication issues, etc.)

If you think this story is _just_ great, please remember it when your or your
friends' jobs get outsourced to cheap labor overseas based on cost alone (if
it's based on quality and expertise, then it's a whole different argument -- a
much rare one btw).

~~~
michaelochurch
_I can 't help but notice how much whining there is about outsourcing
(including from me)_

As an American programmer, let me say that I don't think that many of us
consider "outsourcing" to be the enemy. There's no moral reason whatsoever why
people in one patch of land deserve jobs and people in some other patch don't.

The enemy is the commoditization of programming talent (and on adverse terms;
I'd be happy to be commoditized at a rate near what I'm actually worth) and
the attitude that we're just cost centers to be squeezed and trimmed, and the
fact that when this approach backfires (the cheapest programmers, anywhere in
the world, produce shitty code) it's not management but engineers who have to
clean up the mess. Management gets promotions, engineers get legacy code.
That's the evil. It doesn't matter, morally speaking, if it's a shitty
outsourcing shop in India or California. Likewise, if it profits you (and the
programmer) to hire top talent in California or in India, you should do so.

The technical term for this is _labor arbitrage_. When a company spots a true
labor arbitrage (a chance to profit by outsourcing work to a cheaper country)
it has the right to use it. I don't think anyone disputes that. As Omar Little
says, it's all in the game.

But if it's a legitimate move for a company, it's also a legitimate move for
an employee. This person spotted a labor arbitrage and took the spread for
himself. Unless he compromised classified information (then I feel differently
about the whole matter) good for him. If his employer spotted a labor
arbitrage (i.e. that his job could be outsourced) they would take the profit
all for themselves, and he'd be out of a job. He spotted it first, and he got
the profit.

~~~
gtirloni
I did not say outsourcing was the enemy (see my comment about skills and
expertise). He surely compromised US-govt information (I don't think the US
govt would agree to have their source code available to China). Outsourcing is
a legitimate move for a company, sometimes.

Your arguments are very valid in a dog eat dog world like ours. My comment was
in an opposite direction.

------
Killah911
Two things:

1- This urban legend has been recycled numerous times, b/c we've all thought
of it at one point or another. I've seen it on Hacker News at least once
before. If you have the ability to actually do this, you can start a
successful consulting firm, so unless you're thick in the head, why take the
punishment of having to show up at work everyday & not just start an
outsourcing firm?

2- The unfortunate truth is, there are plenty of folks that have that work
schedule. The difference is that they don't have the productivity part, b/c
their organization is hopelessly broken. To me it felt like prison, but other
HNers have posted that eventually they got used to it.

I got the hell out of the second situation and went the startup route and am
waaaaay happier. I can sit at home all day if I don't feel like working, and
that's on me.

~~~
gman129
I personally employ other developers for side projects and they get paid
significantly below what i get paid at my 9-5. If i was dishonest i could
pretty easily pull off this scam. Not as extreme as doing 0 but i could have
80% of my work done and just review and commit..

------
Cthulhu_
Repost of the classic story from a couple years ago. Still makes me chuckle
and envious though. Not something I'd do myself though; I like to write code,
dislike managing people, and sitting in the office for 8 hours a day watching
cat videos would kill my brain.

------
segmondy
I love this story. I do love to outsource my pet projects. After a long day at
work, I come home and find myself too drained to write code. I have so many
ideas and no motivation code. This article just gave me an idea that perhaps I
should outsource my personal pet projects. Is there anyone here reading who
has ever outsourced their pet project? I'm not talking about via
odesk/elancer, but through another medium where you can get really competent
developers like Bob did.

------
doktrin
> _Take, for example, the story of a former software developer identified by
> the press only as Bob._

This is an old story, and despite all this time it feels as ephemeral and
weird as when it first surfaced. Is it, in fact, true?

Several stories cite the Verizon security blog, without actually providing a
direct link to the entry in question. Can anyone remember having read the
original blog, or heard additional corroborating details?

~~~
DanLivesHere
I wrote the article linked to above, and in it, I link to the archive.org
saved version of the Verizon security blog. It's all there.

------
drcube
From Wiki: "Leadership has been described as "a process of social influence in
which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the
accomplishment of a common task"."

I don't see how this isn't exactly what every single manager does, everyday.
They get paid twice what I get paid, just for giving me work to do. Whether
I'm in the office or in China, what difference does it make?

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mck9235
For anyone interested, the author of this post does a daily "Now I Know"
email. There is the occasional dud or re-post, but, on the whole, they're
pretty entertaining little blurbs that pop into your inbox a few days a week.

EDIT: My bad, just saw below.

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tim333
Copy and paste of original Verizon blog article:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ba.internet/34erJO7jqP...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ba.internet/34erJO7jqP0/EPMIw_sj6UwJ)

------
tim333
The Onion's take on this kind of stuff

[http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-
outsourc...](http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-
own-jobs-oversea,14329/)

------
frankydp
So how did verizon determine all of this information? To include revenue
numbers.

~~~
bshimmin
"according to hundreds of PDF invoices also discovered on his work computer"
\- [http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-
job-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/)

This story came out a while ago, and was a bit light on details back then too.
Entertaining, nonetheless.

~~~
frankydp
Ahh. That link suggest that Verizon was actually the company he worked at, not
just the ISP.

------
bigtunacan
I wonder if "Bob" is actually Timothy Ferriss?

[http://fourhourworkweek.com/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/)

------
roberjo
Looks like we finally found that guy who knows 'One Weird Trick'.

