Outsourced job=Cat Videos

So, there’s this developer getting paid big bucks. (Several hundred thousand dollars per year. How do I get this job?) Only, he’s not doing the work himself. He personally outsourced his job to China. Paid the Chinese workers $50,000 a year and watched cat videos, and played on Reddit.

So, there’s an idea for you…

Here’s the article (not written by me, but by golly I wish it was): Developer outsourced job to China to watch cat videos.

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10 thoughts on “Outsourced job=Cat Videos

  1. Holy wow. It didn’t say, but I assume he got fired.

    Doesn’t he know that if you’re going to watch cat videos and go on Reddit all day, you do it on your smartphone so you don’t get caught? 😉

    1. I know. If you’re going to be a cheating loser, at least be a smart one.

      Of course, he really got busted because of the secure ID that was being used in China.

      I kind of hope they fired him and kept the Chinese workers onboard.

      1. Of course, he didn’t save the company any money.

        I’m sure he was fired! There really isn’t any other logical thing to do with him.

        1. No, not that he actually saved the company money, that he was working on a plan to do so in the future through outsourcing.

  2. This is the first time I’ve heard of outsourcing that works. The original story over at http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-study-pro-active-log-review-might-be-a-good-idea/ shows that he was being held up as a model employee in performance reviews. It would appear that he was attending the meetings, collecting the requirements and then delegating the work and managing the quality of the resulting code. If only it hadn’t been US critical infrastructure, this would actually be a success story…

  3. I work in IT and something about this story just rubs me the wrong way. The story went viral, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to this (or less) than was reported.

    He supposedly found outsourcing partners and delegated work to them that they handled at a level that conforms with a model employee. Anyone who ever tried outsourcing something on this ‘one-person / small-team’ scale must have been confronted by massive quality maintenance issues. Finding an outsourcing partner who provides work at this caliber on a consistent basis, would take quite the effort. Reportedly he did not only do that, but repeated the process for other companies as well, raking in an even better pay-off.

    He would appear to have quite the management talent and an income that would make him pretty much non-dependent on this job.

    The other part is the obvious slant towards ‘watching cat pictures on reddit’. Sounds like a honey trap for viral promotions if I ever saw one. The hyper-active community of Reddit loves to read and spread this kind of meta-article.

    Even though it was covered by reputed media, I can’t shake the feeling that some parts of this were made up.

    1. This is an excellent point. He obviously was doing some work because managing outsourced employees is also complex.

      I’m sure there is more than what got reported.

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