Curious story of software outsourcing
Have you heard the story of the person who outsourced his work for US$ 50,000 and which was just one fifth of what he was earning!
His complete work was done by somebody in China (not India) while he spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay. He was also considered one of the best software developers in the company!
Here is the blog post from Verizon Business Security which gives detail of what happened and how it was discovered.
Investigators had the opportunity to read through his performance reviews while working alongside HR. For the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks. His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.
Was the employee smart … or … was the employer dumb?
Assuming that this story is not a hoax, it raises an interesting question.
Was it smart of the employee to outsource the work at a cheaper cost and keep the difference?
…or…
Was it dumb for the employer not to outsource the work and reduce cost?
How readers reacted to this story?
Fake story:
“…it is logically inconsistent. We are told the person worked at his desk all day using social networks, etc. He was *present* at his job. They also say that he worked at this one company for “several years”. But then they also say he did this same scam at “multiple companies” and earned “several hundred thousand dollars a year.” How could he be working at multiple companies, while also at his desk most of the day at one company doing nothing much…”
Espionage angle:
“…the reason the Chinese guy could do the work at a quarter the cost might be because he was selling the secrets he obtained on the side…”
He was brilliant:
“…needed to find out a company who’s good on doing this coding job, then negotiate a biz contract with a foreign company, did a perfect project management job remotely, and he had to know how to do the QA job… considering about the barriers of language, timezone, cultural difference… wow he’s more capable on a higher position…”
“…surely that guy has to be promoted to manage a division that outsources sw dev to China. It’s the thing he is obviously very good at…”
He was wise but not smart:
“…was wise enough to outsource himself, but not smart enough to figure out someone would eventually figure out a VPN connection from China was unusual. There were plenty of ways of avoiding this, but ultimately what he did would have been PERFECTLY legal had he been a sub-contractor himself. Then he could have kept his sub-sub-contracting hidden from the client…”
When companies do it it is fine … when employee does it …
“…let me get this straight. When companies outsource employees, that’s just good management, but when employees outsource their companies, that’s bad…”
[…Ishak ke naam pe karte sabhi ab raas leela hai – Main karoon toh saala Character Dheela hai…]
Moral of the story…
Almost any work can be offshored!
You may like it or you may hate it … but that is the reality.
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- US Software Developer Caught Outsourcing His Job to China
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- Software developer busted for outsourcing own job to China
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Couldn’t agree more. Adding one thing: need to do trial mode before enter official contract with your software outsourcing company.
That’s true!
Doing software development outsourcing needs a lot of research and knowledge.
Thanks for a great article.
This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you. You definitely put a new spin on a topic that’s been written about for years.
Smart to recognize the opportunity, but profoundly stupid to implement it in such a dishonest way.
I find it disheartening that there are those who cannot comprehend the difference between the company outsourcing the job and the employee outsourcing the job. Would they consider it equally clever to hear of a babysitter who used their good reputation to get jobs and then outsourced the work to unknowns?
There’s enough irrational distrust of outsourcing already (e.g. the espionage angle). This individual’s actions really don’t help.
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[…Ishak ke naam pe karte sabhi ab raas leela hai – Main karoon toh saala Character Dheela hai…]
too good….
hahaha…that was a good one! 🙂