Man Outsources Jobs, Watches Cat Videos

[wanamingo]

It's a worst-case scenario for most employees: There's someone in China who can do your job quickly, efficiently and for about one-fifth of your salary, and your boss absolutely loves his work.

But one U.S. software developer turned this nightmare on its head and actually benefited from outsourcing, a report says. That's because, unbeknownst to his bosses, he hired a Chinese developer to do his job, allowing him to take home impeccable performance reviews while actually spending the day watching cat videos and shopping on EBay.

According to Andrew Valentine, who works on the Verizon Risk Team investigating data breaches, the employee, who Valentine calls Bob, had pulled off the stunt for some time, allowing him to relax and earn a good salary while someone in China did his job for him.

Valentine was hired to investigate when the company, a Verizon client, saw that someone from Shenyang, China, was logging in to its computer network during every workday. The breach was traced to Bob's VPN network, but he had to be innocent, the victim of some kind of breach, the company figured. He was a quiet family man, "someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator," Valentine writes. And Bob was sitting there, working at his desk, every day. But when Valentine's staff looked more closely at Bob's computer, they ultimately found the smoking gun.

Bob had PDFs of hundreds of invoices from a third-party contractor in Shenyang for developer services. Bob had been paying the contractor $50,000 a year, while he himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While the developer was working 9-to-5, Bob surfed the Web. At 9, he'd roll in and surf Reddit, watching cat videos. At 11:30 he'd grab some lunch. After lunch it was time for EBay for about an hour, when Bob migrated to Facebook. At 4:30, he'd email management, telling them what he had "done" during the day, and at 5, he'd go home.

If I were Verizon I would find out who had been doing this guys work and fly them over. Or maybe even give Bob a raise, he is obviously a very good manager and creative problem solver.....

 

[riser]

Sounds like he was over paid for his job.

 

[johnsonma]

What cracks me up is they said that he was their most valued software developer.

Also, why would you keep the invoices on your work computer?

 

[wanamingo]

Yeah, you would think that a guy who works with computers would know that a private VPN would (Should) be flagged almost immediately. I know if we saw masked traffic the stuff would hit the fan until we figure out who was responsible.

Or even zipping and pw protecting his invoices, just sounds like the guy got too sloppy.