Career

U.S. Software Engineer Outsourced His Job to China So He Can Surf The Internet

outsourcing it work

Outsourcing at its best.  Best way to illustrate 4 Hour Work Week strategy based on U.S Software Developer called Bob.

Typical Bob’s Work Day

  • 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

Bob’s Performance Review

For the last several years Bob received excellent remarks.  His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.

But. whats the catch?

Verizon helped to uncover a 4 Hour Work week kind of outsourcing implemented by this Bob – a Full Time Employee in a U.S. based IT company.

Here is a simple overview about 4-Hour Workweek, which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:

  • Define your objectives. Decide what’s important. Set goals. Ask yourself, “What do I really want?”
  • Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff that’s important and ignore the 80% that isn’t. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say “no”.
  • Outsource your life — hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot. (This is the weakest section of the book.)
  • Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.

Last 2 items in the checklist is Outsource your life and Design your job to increase mobility.

That’s what Bob did.

He hired a Chinese Developer to do his work, while he was browsing the internet.  After identifying a VPN connection from China, Verizon was asked to figure out what was going on.

As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average 9 to 5 work day.

Now, question to you.

What do you think that IT company will be doing now?

I think, Bob just set an example for the company to save money. Chinese Developer can write high quality code for a fraction of the cost of a U.S. Developer.

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8 Comments

  1. This is actually an offence because bob is sharing his company’s confidential information with a third party without anybody’s knowledge. I think looking into this as a serious offence company should fire bob now. Just imagine consequences of this – like third party can use company confidential information to probably sell technology, code, product idea to competitor or use that to do something of it’s own. Also outsourcing is a much known idea to American organizations. What bob did is a stupid thing because in reality I am pretty sure he would be fired. If company has to do outsourcing they know how to do it. Also bob is not doing good to his career growth and personal skill set development. If someone else would do all bob’s work, how will bob develop? and in the real scenario a developer has to attend meetings, give ideas, organize and co-ordinate so much, I think it would be very difficult for Bob to study someone else’s work and give his opinion on that. It is pretty obvious for bob to be caught one day.

  2. Bob is pretty smart! He has managed to teach the company some new tricks on how to save money. Even though this is a pretty smart move, in reality, this will cripple the economy from within and I suggest should be discouraged at best

  3. Wait, isn’t that what we Indians do at our IT companies ? Only thing hampering outsourcing IT jobs to China is their limited English knowledge and their crappy government policy that doesn’t allow outsiders to prosper – L&T recently shutdown a very big manufacturing plant after it became impossible to run business as usual activities there ! ( I have recently read so many articles, which talks about how the chinese government is actively working on solving this. There are even scholarships for students willing to do their undergrad outside China – Warning signs for India, i would say )
    Don’t let any of the IT bigshots read this post. They will go into a frenzy 😛 The markets are already on a negative trend !

      1. Raghuram Sukumar – Please correct your sentence (it is confusing) – did u meant – “I know jobs that used to go to India are NOW GOING to China.”

      2. +1

        I know atleast 3 VPs of start up companies (2 of them were born in India) who won’t out source to India ever again. They are really high on china.
        With people spending hours on cell phone, gossiping, coffee, lunch at work in India coupled with high salary expectations, I guess this was coming.

        1. btw, I actually heard that this guy had 5 jobs out of which 4 were telecommuting jobs and he made close to half a million dollars a year.

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