US employee 'outsourced job to China'

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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="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/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a>

The moral of the story is: route your Chinese subcontractors through your own VPN first, so they appear to be coming from your house.<p>Also, use your freaking time to do something more interesting than surf Reddit and Facebook.

Another version of this story got flagged, but some of the comments are interesting (in particular, patio11's): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586</a><p>Also, the original Verizon report: <a href="http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/" rel="nofollow">http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-stud...</a> (seems to be down, cache: <a href="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/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a>)

And once again, The Onion was way ahead of this one: <a href="http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-own-jobs-oversea,14329/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...</a>

"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."<p>-Attribution unknown because the interwebz say several people said it.

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.

The BBC calls him a scammer. I call him an entrepreneur!<p>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).<p>Or - he could go into consulting to show companies how to effectively do outsourcing.

<i>The employee spent a nine-to-five workday surfing the internet.</i><p>Unprecedented.

For all the comments disagreeing with calling him a fraud, here's a broad difference.<p>You guys are clearly impressed by the act. But truthfully, it wasn't smart to send his 2KA to another country, that too China.<p>He was <i></i>trusted<i></i>. 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<p>1. Taken advantage of the trust<p>2. Exposed his employer/team/project to security breach<p>3. Missed the primary part i.e. use the extra time to enhance his skills.<p>Eight hours Internet browsing? Guy is a scumbag.

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

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.

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....

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

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

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?

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

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

Interesting. I feel like this is the same thing as the guy wrote a script to automate his data entry job:<p>Reddit: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/</a> HN Post: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3950595" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3950595</a><p>Interesting how similar I think the situations are - yet the responses seem to be quite different from HN posters.

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.

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

They should promote this guy and have him replicate the process across the entire organization.<p>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.

It's pretty amazing that he beat his company to the punch and outsourced his own job before their could.<p>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"

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.

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.

This is interesting as a hack, but it puts a really bad light on telecommuters. Because it basically proves two things to your employer:<p>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).<p>2) That you can't trust telecommuting employees.<p>It is stupid for so many reasons, but as a friend of mine would say: "It is stupid if you get caught."

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.

Can anyone verify the story?

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

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 &#38; his team (internal and/or outsourced) more challenging projects to see what they could do.

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?<p>Maybe he shouldn't have given his 2 factor auth key to the contractor, but still. Well done.

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.<p>This smells too good to be true.

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

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.

Someone read "4 Hour Work Week":<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Anywhere/dp/0307353133/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Anywhere/dp...</a>

<i>The employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages ... six-figure salary ...</i><p>Hey that's me in a nutshell. Why don't I earn a six-figure salary?

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.

He allowed an unauthorized company from another country full access with his credentials to the company code base. It is a massive security breach.<p>He deserved to go.

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

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

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

&#62;He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China<p>Haha. This guy is my hero.

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

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

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

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

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

They fired him and hired him as the CEO.

And Americans say, they are unemployed.

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

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.

If only he used full disk encryption...