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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago, was here an AskHN question. As far I remember, the guy worked from home, had just fill some excel sheets from other excel sheets. After a while he made some scripts and one week work was done in 20 minutes. He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work.

The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.

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I had something similar (but opposite) happen.

We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning.

We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing.

He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.

>He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.

He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D

Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)

There are a lot of humans.

> There are a lot of humans.

Unfortunately, each has to be trained separately.

That said, the fact that producing additional untrained neural networks is often done recreationally by unskilled labor has to be factored into the unit economics.

Same thing here, but not for lack of competence. I was working on a project for a data logging system. A customer requested a special daily report feature for one of their projects. The team lead took the feature and that was that. A year later he took some vacation that would take him away from cell service and he had to level with me. The feature was implemented by him logging in as close to 9 pm as possible and sending an email. There were a lot of tricky cases and he thought the project would only run a few months.

Or paying someone to do it?

Reminded me of this: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer

> He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work.

That is where the company could get him legally in most jurisdictions. Doing the work in 20 minutes is a grey area and depends on contract wording, but is probably fine in my legally in-expert opinion. Deliberately introducing errors to extract money from the company is a fairly clear cut case of fraud though.

A bit further back, there was the IT worker who secretly outsourced his own work: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945

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