11 April 2013

A man who outsourced his own job

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet...

After getting permission to study Bob's computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time
2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management
5:00 p.m. – Go home
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.
Story from The Register.

2 comments:

  1. Kind of brilliant in a twisted, backwards sort of way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The one thing I wanted to know from this story was, how long did this go on?

    ReplyDelete