Thursday, January 17, 2013

Outsourcing your own job?


I was amused to read that an IT worker succeeded in outsourcing his own job, possibly making a great deal of money in the process!  The Telegraph reports:

A US computer programmer has been allegedly caught spending thousands of dollars to outsource his own job to a company in China.

The software developer, who is in his 40s, is said to have paid a Chinese firm a fifth of his six-figure salary to do his job for him while he spent his working days surfing the internet.

The tale emerged via a blog by an computer forensic investigator at Verizon Business, a US-based communications firm.

. . .

According to Mr Valentine it became apparent upon investigation that one of the company's employees had outsourced his own job, paying a Chinese firm approximately $50,000 (£31,000) from his salary to write computer programmes on his behalf.

The employee, whom Mr Valentine describes as "inoffensive and quiet someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator", would then spend his day browsing the internet, looking at sites such as YouTube, Reddit, eBay and Facebook before sending his superiors a daily status report and going home.

Mr Valentine continued: "Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could login under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day."

He added: "Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually."

There's more at the link.  The (more detailed) Verizon report may be found here.

Enterprising of him, to be sure!

Peter

4 comments:

Noons said...

That man deserves a statue!
Stick it up to the outsourcers - YEAH!

Anonymous said...

He compromised the security of his employers. And he got fired.

HerrBGone said...

Next step would be to start his own consulting company and outsourse the work from there. He could make even more money doing that. clearly he has the skils to manage an outsourse business. He just needs to be a bit more above board about it.

HerrBGone said...

Come to think of it, running his own company through a properly structured business entity would allow the $50k he's paying his outsourcers to be paid from pre-tax revenue instead of after tax wages. His take home would go up as a result and he wouldn’t need to be in the office pretending to work all day!

For a how-to on the subject check out the book The 4-Hour Workweek. ;-)