U.S. programmer outsources own job to Chinese people so he can surf cat videos

Naas_Human

Less of a "this issue bothers me" and more "I thought this was worth sharing but am unsure what to think of this".

After a U.S.-based "critical infrastructure" company discovered in 2012 its computer systems were being accessed from China, its security personnel caught the culprit ultimately responsible: Not a hacker from the Middle Kingdom but one of the company's own employees sitting right at his desk in the United States.

The software developer is simply referred to as "Bob," according to a case study by the U.S. telecommunications firm Verizon Business.

(...)

Investigators then discovered Bob had "physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday," wrote Andrew Valentine, a senior forensic investigator for Verizon.

Bob had hired a programming firm in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang to do his work. His helpers half a world away worked overnight on a schedule imitating an average 9-to-5 workday in the United States. He paid them one-fifth of his six-figure salary, according to Verizon.

And over the past several years, Bob received excellent performance reviews of his "clean, well written" coding. He had even been noted as "the best developer in the building."

A forensic image of Bob's workstation revealed his true work habits and typical day:

9:00 a.m. -- Get to work, surf Reddit, watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. -- Lunch

1:00 p.m. -- Ebay

2:00 p.m or so -- Facebook and LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. -- Send end-of-day e-mail update to management

5:00 p.m. -- Go home

I feel sorry for the Chinese people, since apparently they were doing pretty much all of his job while getting only a small portion of the pay.

InsanityAddict

I applaud the audacity of the act, as long as the Chinese bro was paid more than he would earn on average over there.

Bee

I don't, because it encourages the company to downsize their entire department and outsource even more of its labor to China for a fifth of the cost.  Programming jobs are enough of a bitch to get into at the moment, thank you very much.

Naas_Human

It might be even harder for the Chinese guy(s), since they had to take a job that requires working all night to coincide with 9 am to 5 pm in "Bob's" timezone.