outsourcing your own job

Can the story of the man who was caught outsourcing his own job to China be true?

Of course it can. Ever since “cheaper” overtook the word “better” as the favoured adjective for “product” in the West, most of us — including the paranoiacs, which is, again, most of us — have wondered if someone in Asia, or even Youngstown, Ohio, could do our job for less money and no benefits.

The employee investigated by the Verizon Risk Team got away with it for years because he was so boring, a mid-40s software developer with “relatively long tenure, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator.” So they called him “Bob.” They were hardly going to call him “Sebastian.”

Bob was betrayed by his own technology. As the risk people put it in a report in an admirable effort to make their jobs sound too difficult to outsource, “as illustrated within our DBR statistics, continual and pro-active log review (at the VPN concentrator) happens basically never.”

In the end, it wasn’t “zero-day malware initiating VPN connections via external proxy” — we’re thoroughly baffled now, guys, so let it go. Bob simply couriered his RSA token to China and let a Chinese firm do the work. Bob was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his excellent programming and his temps in China earned 50 grand.

To this point, the scam is pure Office Space, a Mike Judge movie I urge you to see if you hate your job.
What fascinated me about this story was how far outsourcing could be taken. Industrially speaking, some American states have degraded working conditions to such an extent that outsourced jobs are returning from foreign countries because wages are similar and you don’t have those Chinese transportation costs. This is known as “re-sourcing.”