Clever Ass Outsources His Own Job to China

[Manager]

no a bad idea hor but if any of my staff do this, i will sack that bugger.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/developer_oursources_job_china/

Security audit finds dev OUTSOURCED his JOB to China to goof off at work

Cunning scheme netted him 'best in company' awards

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 16th January 2013 01:29 GMT

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.

The firm's telecommunications supplier Verizon was called in after the company set up a basic VPN system with two-factor authentication so staff could work at home. The VPN traffic logs showed a regular series of logins to the company's main server from Shenyang, China, using the credentials of the firm's top programmer, "Bob".

"The company's IT personnel were sure that the issue had to do with some kind of zero day malware that was able to initiate VPN connections from Bob's desktop workstation via external proxy and then route that VPN traffic to China, only to be routed back to their concentrator," said Verizon. "Yes, it is a bit of a convoluted theory, and like most convoluted theories, an incorrect one."

After getting permission to study Bob's computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time

2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management

5:00 p.m. – Go home

The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Further investigation found that the enterprising Bob had actually taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit as well as lots of time to hang around on internet messaging boards and checking for a new Detective Mittens video.

Bob is no longer employed by the firm. ®

 

[Ash007]

Hah, not surprised at all. There are a lot of talented programmers in CHina. The reason these companies prefers outsourcing to India is the perceived language barrier. In five years time when that perception is gone watch them transfer their outsourced IT dept from India to China.

 

[sinkiesnotdumb]

This "Bob" guy could be a Bob Chin, Bob, Chan, Bob Wong etc etc I think he is no ang-moh.

 

[Darth Sidious]

This "Bob" guy could be a Bob Chin, Bob, Chan, Bob Wong etc etc I think he is no ang-moh.

Or Bob Sim Kheng Hwee.

 

[Ash007]

Or Bob muthu, Bob Singh, Bob Curry.

This "Bob" guy could be a Bob Chin, Bob, Chan, Bob Wong etc etc I think he is no ang-moh.

 

[winnipegjets]

no a bad idea hor but if any of my staff do this, i will sack that bugger.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/developer_oursources_job_china/

Security audit finds dev OUTSOURCED his JOB to China to goof off at work

Cunning scheme netted him 'best in company' awards

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 16th January 2013 01:29 GMT

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.

The firm's telecommunications supplier Verizon was called in after the company set up a basic VPN system with two-factor authentication so staff could work at home. The VPN traffic logs showed a regular series of logins to the company's main server from Shenyang, China, using the credentials of the firm's top programmer, "Bob".

"The company's IT personnel were sure that the issue had to do with some kind of zero day malware that was able to initiate VPN connections from Bob's desktop workstation via external proxy and then route that VPN traffic to China, only to be routed back to their concentrator," said Verizon. "Yes, it is a bit of a convoluted theory, and like most convoluted theories, an incorrect one."

After getting permission to study Bob's computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time

2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management

5:00 p.m. – Go home

The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Further investigation found that the enterprising Bob had actually taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit as well as lots of time to hang around on internet messaging boards and checking for a new Detective Mittens video.

Bob is no longer employed by the firm. ®

He is a true blue American entrepreneur.

 

[lesMISERABLES]

Hah, not surprised at all. There are a lot of talented programmers in CHina. The reason these companies prefers outsourcing to India is the perceived language barrier. In five years time when that perception is gone watch them transfer their outsourced IT dept from India to China.

Not all IT work can be outsourced. Companies have to protect their IP rights, you know.


tempora meliora veniant

 

[Sinkie]

This type of fake story the register dare to publish? We're truly living in most corrupted times where honest reporting is lost forever.

 

[Ash007]

Indeed, not all, but try convincing the higher ups if that is true. They will try in the effort to gain more "profits" for the short-term.

Not all IT work can be outsourced. Companies have to protect their IP rights, you know.


tempora meliora veniant

 

[Clone]

 

[Narong Wongwan]

I used to outsource my duties out during army days.

 

[lesMISERABLES]

I used to outsource my duties out during army days.

Some of LEEgime's departments also outsource their work to other countries.



**********************************

tempora meliora veniant

 

[Bigfuck]

The most important department to fire is HR - useless. They were already idling on the job before outsourcing officially.

 

[Fujifilm]

In five years time when that perception is gone watch them transfer their outsourced IT dept from India to China.

Stupid ah nehs always skive and produce programs with no proper documentations.

 

[Shell]

You can also learn how to "Taichi" your duties to your colleagues, subordinates.

 

[Ash007]

Here is a nice perspective. They should have promoted this guy to management!

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/programmer-bob-was-a-model-modern-employee-20130118-2cx2x.html

Programmer Bob was a model modern employee
Date
January 18, 2013 - 9:58AM
355 reading nowComments 18 VoteRead later
Steven Poole
A star programmer fired for outsourcing his own job has learned a harsh lesson: exploitation is a job for employers, not staff.


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Opinion


Bob outsourced his job to a Chinese consulting firm and spent his office day flicking from eBay to Facebook to cat videos. Photo: Getty Images
Software developer 'Bob' outsources own job to China and whiles away shifts on cat videos
Downtrodden employees of the world, take heart: a rebel hero walks among us. A man in his mid-40s, identified in reports only as "Bob", was a star programmer earning a six-figure salary at an American infrastructure company. When the company commissioned a network-security audit, they belatedly discovered that "Bob" had outsourced his own job to a Chinese software company for a fifth of his pay. Relieved of his workload, Bob would spend his entire office day on the internet, flicking from eBay to Facebook to cat videos, before writing a progress-report email for his bosses and knocking off at 5pm. Sadly, upon finding out how resourcefully Bob had managed his own productivity, the firm sacked him rather than marvelling at his initiative and promoting him to senior management.

Bob's story shows that the line for an employee is drawn precisely where you begin exploiting the company rather than the company exploiting you.

Described as a "family man" and "quiet and inoffensive", Bob is a tech-wizard Bartleby for an age of "flexible" labour markets. Bartleby the scrivener, in Herman Melville's much-loved short story, is the patron saint of all employee resistance: he manages to hang on to his boring clerical job without ever doing anything. When someone suggests he perform a task, he just replies, gently: "I would prefer not to."

Bob has more get-up-and-go than Bartleby, though. He would prefer not to, but in order to achieve the ideal state of not doing, he constructed an impressive managerial system to cope with his subcontractors. Indeed Bob is clearly a kind of antic satirical genius, employing the ideas of what companies euphemise as "rationalisation" to his own benefit. Had he been hired as an expensive management consultant, and fired himself before outsourcing the same work in the same way, he probably would have been given a bonus.

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We are increasingly told, after all, that outsourcing even our personal errands and other irritating life-tasks — through websites with a local emphasis such as Task Rabbit, or through micro-payments to workers in India and other places via Amazon's Mechanical Turk system — is the modern route to happiness. (Many journalists already use such services for outsourcing the tedious work of transcribing interviews.) Getting other people to handle the mundane business of life for you — including earning a living — is explicitly the self-help idyll of life-and-business coaching manuals such as Timothy Ferris's The 4-Hour Workweek. But Bob's story shows that the line for an employee is drawn precisely where you begin exploiting the company rather than the company exploiting you. Cross it, and the boot will come down very quickly.

Importantly, Bob's employers never had any complaints about "his" work. On the contrary: he was regularly named the best coder in the building. Since Bob was, in exchange for his salary, providing the company with excellent work-product, it is arguably an onerous and even unfair demand to stipulate that he should have actually done the work himself. "Knowledge is of two kinds," Samuel Johnson said. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Bob had both kinds, and wasn't afraid to use them.

The better to fund his Bartleby-style not-doing, Bob had even taken simultaneous jobs at other companies and outsourced that work in similar fashion. In total he was earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for a fee of $US50k to his Chinese company. Bob is surely, then, the model worker of an age that tells everyone they must be prepared to have "portfolio careers" and exhorts us to admire executives who manage to cut their "cost base" by arbitraging global labour costs. The fact that Bob was sacked just shows that, in reality, the political rhetoric is not meant to be taken seriously, but is a euphemistic sticking plaster for the rapacity of corporate attitudes to "human resources".

Full disclosure: I outsourced the writing of this column to a trilingual Beijing University student, spent the whole time that she was composing it messing around on Twitter, and plan to spend the majority of my princely fee on vintage Veuve Clicquot and lobster.

Guardian News & Media



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/te...rn-employee-20130118-2cx2x.html#ixzz2IHXrSSRz