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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

I had a colleague doing this in 2006, and he wasn't remote. He would just sit playing games on his phone all day yet he would check in code. I could never figure it out, so I just asked him and he showed me the chat window to his friend back in the Czech Republic that he paid 25% of his wages to each month.

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I'm not sure I'm really against this! --IF-- the company is happy with the results and code being delivered, and the compensation they are paying for that code, what is the actual, meaningful business difference between whether your colleague wrote it or the Czech guy wrote it?

I'm not asking what the moral or ethical difference is. They're paying for engineering output, and if they are getting that output, why does it really matter whose fingers are typing it in?

I can think of a few reasons, most obviously that it's a security nightmare - you've got a non-employee accessing and modifying your company's code and possibly having access to customer data. Some shops might not care about this, but it's ridiculously irresponsible in principle.

What if, instead, the guy was 100% honest and up front about it, and offered to enroll the Czech guy in all security checks that any other contractor would get, and treat them legally as any contractor would be treated?

I wouldn't see anything wrong with this, but I would be willing to bet that 99% of companies would not go along with it--for reasons I'm not sure I understand.

If they were ok with doing the work to bring in the overseas person in the first place why should they hire their onshore cutout? To do it legally would be a whole mess of getting involved in business in a new country.

The main problem is at that point the US guy is operating outside the model of being a direct employee of the company. He's operating as a contracting vendor.

There's legal aspects to the employer-employee relationship that are different than the company-vendor relationship.

Even reporting the pay to the IRS as personal income would probably be legally problematic, because from a legal aspect a vendor is being paid for a service not an individual receiving income from an employer.

Typically, employers expect more in return for your salary than engineering output - they pay for employees to be engaged with the business, learn it, become subject matter experts, so that their value over time increases and they deliver more than just the engineering. When all your need is engineering output, you hire contractors.

At the same time, you are correct that it doesn't matter who is typing it. One of my favorite setups I've worked under is where throwing it over the fence is explicit - where a small team of employees each has their own small team of contractors. The management doesn't care who does what, as long as the work gets done, so we were free to parcel work out to our contractors as we saw fit, and that the institutional knowledge stayed baked into our heads.

Ironically if he told management that he's able to manage a remote team which provides the same amount of work for 25% cost there's a good chance they give him a raise and promotion to outsourcing manager /s

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