Why wait to be outsourced when you can do it yourself?
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From the Article:
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.
From the Article:
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...
Bob is my hero! :cool:
My programming get away... The Blog... Taking over the world since 1371!
Bear in mind that Bob is no longer with the company, and that Bob's workmates have probably found their jobs outsourced to China as well...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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Stumbled on this article[^], apparently the guy outsourced his own work at a fraction of his pay...I wish I had thought of that! :laugh:
I've been surprised at how mildly everyone is viewing this. It's like folks think he's clever for gaming the system. If this guy had worked for me, there would be a black, glassy crater where his cubicle used to be. The lazy motherfucker defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract. Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency. Not only would I have terminated his employment, I would have filed a criminal complaint against him and sought civil penalties as well.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I've been surprised at how mildly everyone is viewing this. It's like folks think he's clever for gaming the system. If this guy had worked for me, there would be a black, glassy crater where his cubicle used to be. The lazy motherfucker defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract. Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency. Not only would I have terminated his employment, I would have filed a criminal complaint against him and sought civil penalties as well.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The lazy mother****** defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract.
I wouldn't say that. You give him money, he gets the work done. That's like saying someone defrauded you because they used some code from CP instead of writing it themselves.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency.
That, on the other hand, I can see as a problem.
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Since he had already built a productive relationship with the outsource "partners", they should have kept him on to manage outsourcing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
That's what I thought. He got better work done at a fraction of the cost, the guy should clearly be moved into management instead of development. Then again, since they had access to all the invoices, I guess they don't need him to hire the guys he was outsourcing to now...
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The lazy mother****** defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract.
I wouldn't say that. You give him money, he gets the work done. That's like saying someone defrauded you because they used some code from CP instead of writing it themselves.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency.
That, on the other hand, I can see as a problem.
lewax00 wrote:
You give him money, he gets the work done.
I hired him for the skills he advertised in his resume/CV and presented during his interview. Having another person/company do the work, without explicitly stating that up front, is misrepresentation and fraudulent.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
lewax00 wrote:
You give him money, he gets the work done.
I hired him for the skills he advertised in his resume/CV and presented during his interview. Having another person/company do the work, without explicitly stating that up front, is misrepresentation and fraudulent.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Having another person/company do the work, without explicitly stating that up front, is misrepresentation and fraudulent.
So I go back to my example, wouldn't getting code from somewhere like CP then also be fraud? (Unless I were to specifically state during the interview that I would do it at a later date?)
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Having another person/company do the work, without explicitly stating that up front, is misrepresentation and fraudulent.
So I go back to my example, wouldn't getting code from somewhere like CP then also be fraud? (Unless I were to specifically state during the interview that I would do it at a later date?)
I think there's a subtle difference here. The guy in this case isn't doing the work at all. His employer agreed to pay him for his skills and his time, not some third party of unproven capability. Presumably when you obtain code from CP to do your job, you're also assuming responsibility for that code meeting all the considerations involved. Somehow, I doubt this guy cared about that.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I think there's a subtle difference here. The guy in this case isn't doing the work at all. His employer agreed to pay him for his skills and his time, not some third party of unproven capability. Presumably when you obtain code from CP to do your job, you're also assuming responsibility for that code meeting all the considerations involved. Somehow, I doubt this guy cared about that.
Software Zen:
delete this;Fair enough, but then would you have a problem if the guy took the time to verify everything then? I just guess personally, I don't think I'd care as long as the work was getting done correctly and in a timely fashion for the amount of money I was willing to pay. Issues of security (opening the VPN to a third party) and IP (presumably he gave them complete access to the product's source code to do the work...especially in a country like China that tends to disregard foreign IP as it sees fit) would be concerning though.
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Fair enough, but then would you have a problem if the guy took the time to verify everything then? I just guess personally, I don't think I'd care as long as the work was getting done correctly and in a timely fashion for the amount of money I was willing to pay. Issues of security (opening the VPN to a third party) and IP (presumably he gave them complete access to the product's source code to do the work...especially in a country like China that tends to disregard foreign IP as it sees fit) would be concerning though.
Agreed, the contract is I pay you and this gets done to an acceptable quality. So long as that's being met it doesn't matter if you outsource or not. It's similar to a company outsourcing, then finding that the company they outsourced to uses contractors - not a problem so long as the inputs and outputs of the black box meet the requirements of the contract. The security argument is valid and probably goes against the company's guidelines so gives them a good case for fair dismissal. The guy losing his job isn't so bad; sounds like he's earnt enough to do OK for himself and he'll now probably set up a software development company of his own.
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Stumbled on this article[^], apparently the guy outsourced his own work at a fraction of his pay...I wish I had thought of that! :laugh:
Seems to me bob would have done well to clone the work to a private source tree, then after merging commits made by his outsourced workers, made the commits to the company repo himself. Or something along those line (would depend somewhat on how the employer's source control was set up). Does not address the NDA concerns, but overall, his mistake was allowing the network footprints to reveal his scheme.
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I've been surprised at how mildly everyone is viewing this. It's like folks think he's clever for gaming the system. If this guy had worked for me, there would be a black, glassy crater where his cubicle used to be. The lazy motherfucker defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract. Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency. Not only would I have terminated his employment, I would have filed a criminal complaint against him and sought civil penalties as well.
Software Zen:
delete this;You get this in all walks of employment. Hiring a construction company to do work will get you a contractor with some of his own workers and specialties, and several sub contractors he hires. Many times the people you hire never do any actual work, it's all subs.
If it moves, compile it
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Stumbled on this article[^], apparently the guy outsourced his own work at a fraction of his pay...I wish I had thought of that! :laugh:
The whole story sounds very fishy to me. Even with daily scrum meetings, face to face talks and discussions (in English), it's time consuming to manage complex projects. Some guy in some remote province of China, barely speaking engrish can do a perfect job?? I don't think so. Check the source of the aricle. It the bottom is probably some clever asian trying to make a case for outsourcing. http://www.engrish.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/freshness-you-can-taste.jpg[^]
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That's what I thought. He got better work done at a fraction of the cost, the guy should clearly be moved into management instead of development. Then again, since they had access to all the invoices, I guess they don't need him to hire the guys he was outsourcing to now...
LOL but wait, there's more... Apparently Bob was working on "critical applications" which clearly was intended to mean "classified applications." He could be in violation of the OSA or one of its derivatives; certainly having a resident of a foreign country, much less China with its general lack of respect for other people's technical secrets, working on anything that could be classified as "critical" without even the tacit consent of his management makes his termination from employment the LEAST of the consequences of this stupidity. I expect the security establishment will be very busy ruining his peace of mind for some time to come.
"Seize the day" - Horace "It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover
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Since he had already built a productive relationship with the outsource "partners", they should have kept him on to manage outsourcing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Only problem is that he was fundamentally lying to his company. He let unknown foreign hackers have his login credentials, even shipping them a hardware security token. It's not a surprise the company were miffed to find unknown people on their network, looking at their proprietary code (and who knows what else). C'mon, this was an outrageous breach of trust. This guy ought to go to jail. Even if you think Bob was a hero, if anything had gone wrong (foreign hackers being what they are) Bob would have been in some deep legal doo-doo.
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The lazy mother****** defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract.
I wouldn't say that. You give him money, he gets the work done. That's like saying someone defrauded you because they used some code from CP instead of writing it themselves.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency.
That, on the other hand, I can see as a problem.
It's a breach of trust. You hire a specific guy to work for you. You interview him. You get to look at him. You know how he dresses, what he drives. Maybe go out for drinks with him and his wife. you KNOW him. It's why you trust him. It's why you give him login credentials for your internal network. It's why you let him in the office where all that expensive computing gear is kept. It's why you tell him your secret business plans for world domination. You keep a lock on your office door because you don't want just anybody in there. You don't just put up a banner ad that says, "I've put a description of my business plans, my credit card database, and a subversion archive on this server. Come in and write code, but don't steal anything please." Even now, those companies have no idea how exposed they were. Maybe all they got was code. Maybe Chinese hackers downloaded their whole network and are even now preparing to offer the same service for less money. I am completely gobsmacked that people think this is ok.
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The whole story sounds very fishy to me. Even with daily scrum meetings, face to face talks and discussions (in English), it's time consuming to manage complex projects. Some guy in some remote province of China, barely speaking engrish can do a perfect job?? I don't think so. Check the source of the aricle. It the bottom is probably some clever asian trying to make a case for outsourcing. http://www.engrish.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/freshness-you-can-taste.jpg[^]
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I've been surprised at how mildly everyone is viewing this. It's like folks think he's clever for gaming the system. If this guy had worked for me, there would be a black, glassy crater where his cubicle used to be. The lazy motherfucker defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract. Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency. Not only would I have terminated his employment, I would have filed a criminal complaint against him and sought civil penalties as well.
Software Zen:
delete this;+5 I'm suprised I had to read this far into the comments to see this reality check. And what about the bigger picture? We're in the middle of a cyber esionage war with China right now. Any IP he had access to, that was of any interest to the Chinese military, can be assumed to be in their hands now. If it were my company, I'd be digging through every log I had to see what IP he gave to them.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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But would you consider one person's work a complex project? If one person can do one person's work, one person managing that same work doesn't sound difficult.
I assume mission critical projects of a national carrier is not a single man's job. There is a team, there is testing, integration with third party systems, there are deployments etc. etc. There are meetings, prototypes, architecture decisions etc etc. Whoever wrote that article probably has never seen a sofware project in his life.
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I assume mission critical projects of a national carrier is not a single man's job. There is a team, there is testing, integration with third party systems, there are deployments etc. etc. There are meetings, prototypes, architecture decisions etc etc. Whoever wrote that article probably has never seen a sofware project in his life.
Sitalkes wrote:
I assume mission critical projects of a national carrier is not a single man's job.
But he was only outsourcing his own work, not an entire team's worth (unless I missed something in the article). So he'd only have to manage the work he would have normally had to do. And that seems completely plausible to me.
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Sitalkes wrote:
I assume mission critical projects of a national carrier is not a single man's job.
But he was only outsourcing his own work, not an entire team's worth (unless I missed something in the article). So he'd only have to manage the work he would have normally had to do. And that seems completely plausible to me.
You cannot outsource "your" work unless it's a single man project. There is too much day to day interaction within the team members and the other parts of the company to do that. Unless they provide more details than the youtube url that he was visiting all day, Bob is a fictional character to me in a poorly written article, cleary targeted at us programmers. Edit: BTW the original article of Verizon is not credible at all as well. They clearly are trying to sell their secirity auditing services by scaring potential customers.
