Developer Sacked for Outsourcing

The truly lazy are often the most creative. Like this developer, who was caught outsourcing his entire job to China so that he could spend his time at work... not working. The ruse—highlighted in a Verizon case study—was carried out by an employee called "Bob" who worked at an anonymous "critical infrastructure company". The trick was only spotted when someone noticed suspicious activity on the company's VPN log. The report explains: "We...

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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...

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More Jobs Overseas Than At Home

With the nation’s unemployment rate still above eight percent, millions of Americans are looking for work, and the country’s biggest corporations are hiring. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, however, many of those corporations are adding jobs overseas at a faster pace than they are at home. Even worse, others are cutting their domestic workforces while adding jobs in other countries at a rapid pace: Those companies, which...

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Surf Reddit

At any given time, we have all probably wished that we could outsource our work to someone in China and spend our days browsing the Web. One software developer, however, did just that - spending his days watching cat videos and perusing Reddit. But he failed to realize that daily VPN log-ins from Shenyang, China might arouse suspicion. The employee's exploits were detailed in a Jan. 13 blog post from J. Andrew Valentine, a principal and team...

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Take this job and ship it

THE hive mind behind the Modeled Behavior twitter feed has been trying to goad economic types into defending outsourcing, now the subject of intense political debate thanks to Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital. The direct provocation of MB's ire is, I think, a series of posts from Paul Krugman. In one, he writes: [R]ecently the Washington Post added a further piece of information: Bain invested in companies that specialized in helping other companies get rid of employees, either in the United States or overall, by outsourcing work to outside...

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Spent Hours Surfing The Web

Developer Outsourced Entire Job To China, Spent Hours Surfing The Web A crafty developer reportedly figured how to get paid to sit and watch cat videos for a good chunk of the day. It's a story almost too good to be true -- and one which has an almost uncanny resemblance to this fake news story run by The Onion. But according to Verizon's Security Blog, a U.S. developer actually did find a way to fool everyone at his company into thinking he...

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Facebook's 'New Look'

Facebook's 'New Look' May Include Multiple News Feeds Facebook is planning to make its first major change to the news feed since it launched in 2006, and according to reports, we could see multiple news feeds based on categories, such as Instagram photos and music your friends are listening to and artist updates. Ahead of the big press event the social network is holding on Thursday, TechCrunch is reporting that, in addition to several news feeds, we'll be seeing larger photos and image-based ads. Mashable reached out to Facebook for confirmation:...

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