Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kneecaps07 | Hacker News Reader

This is unethical, but outsource yourself. Get contractor jobs and then hire cheap overseas workers to do the work and pocket the difference. If you can get a few of these gigs going and can manage your calendar you can probably cut yourself down to 20 hours a week.

Just be better at hiding it than the guy we hired who got busted doing this literally within the first hour of his first day. Don't let your boss take over your computer while your contractor is controlling your computer via WebEx!

View on HN

This isn’t unethical. There are entire companies that do exactly this. If done well, this is actually an extremely valuable service. It would be unethical if you are hired as an employee and outsourced your work, but as a contractor this is fair game.

What? A contractor usually will sign a contract and intellectual property agreements to their name, it's obviously not their right to share company information with a third party.

Subcontracting is not against the rules unless the contract specifically says so. Your job as the prime contractor is to manage the subcontractors so that means IP and privacy concerns etc... Houses are built by subs for example. Defense software is built by subs.

> It would be unethical if you are hired as an employee and outsourced your work

Haha oh god that is next level officesspace movie stuff

This is still an issue even if you're a contractor! The company should know who has access to their internal resources and codebase. If you are upfront about it, then of course it is fine. Make sure it's in the contract.

What if you're an LLC or S-Corp or something? You'll be signing corporation to corporation.

We had to fire someone doing this as well, he was caught because his "subcontractor" was calling into meetings and had a totally different accent!

Please don't do this... Not only is it unethical, there are security, intellectual property, and liability concerns as well. A company should be aware of who has access to it's internal resources.

> We had to fire someone doing this as well, he was caught because his "subcontractor" was calling into meetings and had a totally different accent!

This is hysterical. Can you say more about how it happened and the aftermath? How long did it take for suspicions to arise? Did the company confirm the suspicions with data (access logs or anything) or did they just ask him? Did the company treat it as a data breach or just fire the guy and move on?

I doubt it happened but it seems like an opportunity for the company to cut out the middle man and hire the subcontractor directly...

The contractor who we were paying was known by other employees, so when someone else called into a status report sounding different they contacted my group (IT/Security). He was a devops engineer so we had to comb through all the access logs to ensure he (or his subcontractor with his credentials) did not access patient data (of course this was a medical project with HIPAA). Luckily he was just working on our QA environment so there was no risk of data exposure, but it could have been worse.

We were all shocked at how bold that move was!

Yep, rules for thee and not for me.

Companies subcontract all day long. And they rely on cheap labor to do this. And the company benefits.

Yet when the person (not a fake person like a company) does this, it's a "firable offense".

I've also seen similar parallels about whom should get the fruits of automation: If I automate a harder process from 10h to 10m...

If the company knows, then I will be expected to keep automating and get 9h 50m more work.

If the company doesn't know, then Im able to retain the 9h50m to myself for my purposes (learning, entertainment).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com