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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U.S. Employee Outsourced

U.S. Employee Outsourced His Job to China, Nowadays, sneaking in a personal call or quick browse through Facebook during work is typical on-the-job behavior. But what if you abandoned work completely and outsourced your job to, say, China? That's precisely what one U.S. developer got away with last year, paying a Chinese consulting firm 20% of his six-figure salary to do his job. Referred to as "Bob" in a case study outlined by Verizon's security...

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Businessman outsources

Businessman outsources daughter's homework 27 Feb 2013 Man outsources his own job to US Mr Valentine continued: "Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could login under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day." He added: "Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies...

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Computer programmer

The software developer, who is in his 40s, is said to have paid a Chinese firm a fifth of his six-figure salary to do his job for him while he spent his working days surfing the internet. The tale emerged via a blog by an computer forensic investigator at Verizon Business, a US-based communications firm. Andrew Valentine claimed that his company had been contacted by another US-based firm, whom he does not name, who feared their systems were...

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Man secretly outsources own job

The American workforce has been hammered by companies shipping jobs overseas to save money. One man turned that trend on its head, however, by finding someone in China to do his job secretly on the side. A software developer, reportedly in his 40s, sent his work assignments to China and spent his days goofing off on the Web. Outsourcing was well worth his time. He continued receiving his six-figure salary and paid only a fifth of that to a...

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