Why wait to be outsourced when you can do it yourself?
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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.
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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
Yes, but that's understood in that kind of relationship. It's part of the contract. In this case, an employment contract, the assumption is that the individual being employed will do the work.
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;I disagree. If the employer paid him to come to work and get busy and spend eight hours a day in the treadmill, the employer is stupid. If the employer paid him just to get the work done, the employer is reasonable. And that's exactly what Bob did - getting the job done. I too think the only issues to consider are those of IP/confidentiality/security. If Bob wasn't working on security-sensitive code, I'd say there wasn't anything he did wrong. And also, even if I'm making a living writing code myself, I consider most code not to be worth not opening (although my employer thinks otherwise). The the companies I write code for don't actually derive value from the code I write for them by selling it, the code is just a tool allowing them to provide a service for which they get paid. The tool is most often so specialized that other companies wouldn't be in a good position to use it anyway. If it's a tool I build, without somebody using it it's worthless. If I find a way to provide my customer with a better tool at a lower cost, should he be angry at me?
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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:
That guy was smart enough to understand the benefits of outsourcing; and his employer was not efficient enough to outsource the he proved that could be done easily. :)
Regards, Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji http://jwalantsoneji.com[^]
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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.
http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/4476241/Re-Why-wait-to-be-outsourced-when-you-can-do-it-yo.aspx[^]
Regards, Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji http://jwalantsoneji.com[^]
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That guy was smart enough to understand the benefits of outsourcing; and his employer was not efficient enough to outsource the he proved that could be done easily. :)
Regards, Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji http://jwalantsoneji.com[^]
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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.
I think if Bob were smarter this could be entirely avoided. All Bob needed to do was allow them to login to his computer, which had access to his work and would have prevented the logs from showing access from China. They would not need his security token that way as well. It's pretty amazing that he even kept the transactions on his work email as well.
