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Comment by seferphier | Hacker News Reader

132 pointsseferphier78 comments

I've outsourced a lot of programming work to various countries such as India, Philippines, UK, Croatia, Romania and to be honest the best coders I found were in China.

I've been recently been using a team of 2 guys who write beautiful Python code and also know Objective-C back to front, plus they have access to pretty much every generation of iOS device to top it off. The best thing though is they are charging less then $10 per hour, speak perfect English and are extremely reliable.

Though finding a good programmer to outsource to is still a bit of a mission.

How did you come to know them? what websites to you recommend to hire thru such coders?

Really? We have quite opposite experiences; extremely bad code and a lot of scamming (outsourcing it to some junior after you come to trust them). We moved all to the EU and never looked back; very good quality, prices being a bit (not that much even) higher but no more sleepless nights are broken deadlines.

I've been looking for good chinese devs - any chance of forwarding me their details? Thanks!

Take mine. telecomdeveloper at gmail dot com

Ditto ;)

contact me ;)

Do they have some connections to some programmers they now who are of equal talent?

Ahaha, I laugh when I think that I'm paying my devs less than a barista makes at the local Starbucks!

It's too bad that the original article got flagged to death. Yes, the Register article deserves it, but several of the comments were worth reading. In particular, this one by patio11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5065400

patio11 mentions that if you try and prohibit contractors from doing this sort of thing, that contractor may be deemed an "employee" rather than a "contractor".

So rather than a prohibition in the contract, make an assertive clause. Ask your lawyer to add a "Key Personnel" clause to the contract. Also ensure that you have the right to remove any specific individual.

This also somewhat applies in the UK. We have a (stupid) law called IR35 that attempts to determine the difference between an actual contractor, and a (disguised) employee. One of the tests (but not the only one) is "right of substitution" - i.e. can you swap someone else in that can do the role.

As a contractor in the UK who works with these clauses, the key seems to be that the substitution clause has the proviso that the substitute subcontractor (or consultancy provider employee) is acceptable to all parties, so there would have to be a proposal-review process at the very least.

It still seems unclear. There is some allowance for their approval, but they can't unreasonably deny the substitution (which sounds very vague)

"Right of Substitution is fairly clear cut: can you send someone else to do the work. Employees can't do that, so if you can, you are not an employee. However, the client has to have some say in the matter. The usual formula is along the lines of "you may send a substitute subject to the approval of the client, such approval not to be unreasonably withheld"." http://www.freelancesupermarket.com/featured-articles/the-po...

Depends on what "sort of thing" you mean. Subcontracting your work out? Sure, that's acceptable, although I'm not sure it's OK to do it without telling them. Giving people access to the company's VPN without the company's permission? Definitely not OK.

Why the duck would you care how a contractor does what he does?

As long as he delivers what you paid for (and doesn't disclose information you deemed confidential), it should be OK for you.

> "(and doesn't disclose information you deemed confidential)"

Is not some minor detail. You can have a certain level of confidence that your contractor won't release confidential information because they would be subject to civil (maybe criminal) legal action.

When your contractor turns around and subs out that work to someone in another country, that threat of legal action loses quite a bit of its' bite. Sure, you could maybe still prosecute/sue your direct contractor, but you still have no real control over the outsource subcontractor.

In either scenario, the purpose of the legal action isn't for you to recoup your losses -- you probably won't. The threat of legal action is what's supposed to stop these losses from happening in the first place.

Because you're paying a premium for a smart person to come and sit in your office so you can throw things at them when something goes wrong.

If he's subcontracted his work out to someone in another time zone everyone may get in to a spot of bother if something breaks and the person who actually did the work isn't immediately available to fix it.

What happens when the other guy is off sick? Did this guy also have to take time off sick, cos he was unable to do the work himself...?

The other guy was probably subcontracting.

> and doesn't disclose information you deemed confidential

That pretty much kills most subcontracting of this type.

For a moment here, I thought I was reading The Onion :) Anyone knows who is this outsourcing company? They seem to be doing a decent enough job.

Actually, The Onion predicted this in 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ

And obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-08-03/

(both via http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=ae0b37b2)

you get any work just need to pay 650 USD per 30 days. We assured you at least 200 Hours per 30 days..

We are a start up in India, seriously looking for work.

for 650 USD We will hire a full time employee .

He will assist you in programming (We hire experienced 3+ years of programmer who can code in C/C++ or JAVA Or Perl/Python/Scripts or Device-drivers etc..)

Please feel free to contact us. We have 10+ years experienced guys who will assist our 3+ years guys when they face challenges and will not delay your work.

Daily updates are given. If any delay in work you will reduce 20 USD /day.

Thanks Harsha you can reach me -> telecomdeveloper{at}gmail{dot}com

It's a lovely tale but it stinks of fiction, it's a little too good to be true.

A company I worked for gave me a similar story when I asked about telecommuting...a programmer who used to work on site moved out of state (Oregon) but continued to work remotely. Then his hours got strange, and he couldn't be reached by phone except late at night. Then they noticed logins from India, and that's when they realized he had moved to India instead of Oregon.

yep, i think that too. funny story but is it true? edit: the source http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-stud...

Balls of steel. To be fair, his actual programming skills probably suffered quite a bit though, so it might be difficult to get hired as developer now... but he should start his own business, clearly, or at least get hired as a manager.

It won't do any good to the argument that US developers are "inherently superior" though.

This reminds me of a scheme that happened at a job I worked at years ago. A guy had two full time jobs in buildings downtown that were adjacent to each other. He would show up, look busy, walk over to the other building, do the same. He managed to pull this off for six months before getting found out.

Looks like the star programmer took advices from "The 4-Hour Workweek" one step too far.

Brain fart: AJ Jacobs was the first to do the whole outsource your life thing. If I recall correctly, his experiment was published in Esquire magazine. Tim openly gave Jacobs credit for the idea.

The guy should obviously start a software consulting company, as he seems to have some serious hiring skills :)

Indeed, i'm actually doing some part-time programming on the side and trying to build my business out to be more consultancy-driven. It's so scary to hand out clients work and trust it in the hands of someone on the other side of the world. Especially if you have bad experiences in that regard. This guy actually found a reliable contractor, from China! And they can even be trusted with a secure token to the network which obviously has security at heart with physical tokens. Amazed :)

> they can even be trusted with a secure token to a government network

Well, you don't know that. For all we know, the Chinese government might have duplicated every bit of code that "developer" outsourced.

Not sure if they should fire this guy for being dishonest about calling other people work his own or promote him since he clearly seems to be able to get work done through overseas consultancy and get ROI from the money from his salary for the company.

He should not only be fired, a criminal investigation needs to happen. He let random strangers work on 'critical infrastructure' using his credentials. Yes, it worked out. Yes, the consulting company had well intentions. But what if it didn't? For all we know there is a logic bomb ready to blow some electrical substation. It's about the violation of trust. Is this something a non citizen is even allowed to work on?

It would have been a great idea if he just presented himself has a consulting agency using foreign contractors, but what he ended up doing was immoral and most likely illegal.

Criminal? This is the kind of warped thinking that lead to Aaron Swartz's death. Please chill out.

The moral of Aaron's death is not that everything should be legal. As snarfy pointed out, he granted access to systems of a "critical infrastructure" company without any idea who would gain access. This is and should be criminal, as widespread economic and human damage could possibly result if these critical systems went down.

I say this as someone who recently had to spend two weeks without electricity and running water in New York City.

Poor thing, and was your latte not warm enough this morning?

Please get off the soapbox, this guy is not a criminal and no one is suggesting that "everything should be legal".

Disparaging comments aren't really constructive. You have no idea whether the guy's a criminal or not - that depends entirely on the circumstances surrounding the case.

Surely it's in the best interest of society to ensure that allowing unvetted foreigners access to critical computer systems is illegal? Obviously the facts surrounding this case (which none of us know) determine whether this particular person is a criminal or not.

You're being rude. Anyway:

http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/tracking_tropics/210089292...

>I say this as someone who recently had to spend two weeks without electricity and running water in New York City.

Oh, the humanity!

Two weeks without electricity in the winter. People die like that.

You realize there are large swaths of humanity that have no electricity. And that in the past and even today humans survive winters in much colder places than NYC without electricity.

Thousands of people have no electricity, running water OR HOME in New York all year round -- not just as a temporary inconvenience because of a storm.

And hundreds of millions, nay billions, have no access to electricity or running water in the third world. Most of them have no access to food or doctors either.

Potentially yes. It completely depends on the level of access he gave. If the systems that he gave uncontrolled and unmonitored access to are in any way critical (and if he didn't properly review the code produced by the contractors) then he could have created a huge security issue. If he was truly working on critical infrastructure then there's all sorts of criminal liability issues there.

The issue with Aaron Swartz's case is that the prosecuters decided to throw the book at him for crimes which caused very little damage. The two cases have pretty much nothing in common beyond "computers".

>If he was truly working on critical infrastructure then there's all sorts of criminal liability issues there.

Really? Under what laws?

Chill out dude. He was doing something at an individual level (successfully I might add) that corporations do readily without even the faintest idea of the how, why, or what.

Criminal? Please, how most corporations operate is what is criminal.

Not to mention infract security by handing out credentials to the network of a 'US critical infrastructure company l' to a China based company. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of federal law covering this. (Patriot act maybe?) In any case he would be pretty lucky if he only got fired for this. I would have to pay a 10.000 Euro fine at least for disclosing company secrets. (Netherlands)

I wrote most of the Wikipedia article on the Patriot Act a few years ago. I can't think of anything in it that would apply to this.

I'm sure it's violating some part of the U.S. Code, but the Patriot Act ain't it.

He was found out in a security audit.

I imagine that allowing access to the company's systems is something that requires extensive vetting beforehand, given it's described as "critical infrastructure".

What's with the all caps in the title? seferphier, welcome to HN, but we don't editorialize or emphasize titles like that here.

El Reg has been doing that capitalization for the last few years. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be intentionally over-the-top sensationalism like most of their headlines, but they've kind of taken the mock tabloid thing a bit too far lately. It used to be solid tech news everywhere except Bootnotes, which was awesome in it's own right. Now I can't even find the new BOFH articles.

It sounds like I'm old at 21. Damn it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ you're welcome

BOFH is now under data centre in the menu. Sadly no Christmas party story has been posted yet.

my bad. I should have edited the title to un-cap the title. will not do that again.

edit: is there a way to edit the title?

The Register is the one doing the editorializing or emphasizing, not seferphier.

While I have not done this personally, I dont know that I see a problem with this, other than fed ex'ing his VPN token to China to allow them to log in. It definitely seems short sighted, and if he allowed them to view sensitive corporate data that is also a problem, but the task of offloading some work doesnt really seem wrong to me.

Agree on some levels - BUT - you've provided a 3rd party direct access to a critical system (telecommunications no less) in a foreign country.

You probably have limited means to do a thorough background check on the 3rd party and you submit the work as your own.

If he were able to setup a local dev environment and only provide access to that (and from there he'd move over code changes himself) then I'd be more sympathetic.

To me, this comment reads as, "Aside from the horrible thing he did wrong, I don't see a problem with this."

Well my comment is more directed at the thread title. "Star developer outsourced his job to China". That isnt the bad part. I would be more apt to think something was foul if it read- "Careless employee fed-exed credentials to corporate critical systems while he surfed Reddit".

That is wrong. Outsourcing work that can be done by anyone cheaply is just savvy...

Outsourcing your job: it might be amoral, but the work gets done.

Giving your VPN login to random people in another country: instant sacking.

I would say the amoral part would depend on the situation...like the whole contractor vs. employee conversation a few comments up.

But the VPN part, totally agree...you'd think that would be common sense.

I must admit I've even considered outsourcing some small design/prototyping tasks to contractors. (I'm talking in the context of my day job at a big organization.)

Not with the objective of wasting my time at work instead, but to be able to do some prototyping on ideas I'd like to test, but for which I don't have the time. Higher-priority activities won't let me focus on these prototypes easily. In my view, it'd clearly be a win for my organization (and for me too, since I really want to push forward some of these things), but I do understand it'd probably be considered reprehensible.

After reading the article I wondered: Is that actually illegal?

Giving his credential and two factor auth token to someone is clearly an abuse of policies but what about the actual "outsourcing your own job part"?

Probably not illegal, depending on how he declared his income to tax authorities, but quite clearly unethical -- not because of the outsourcing per se, but because he didn't disclose it to his employer.

This guy needs a new job as an outsourcing manager. That job is hard!

Ha ... I knew an intern at a research lab who I thought might be pulling this stunt. He was always goofing off and on the phone. Yet he produced a prodigious amount of code. Heh heh.

Is this the same article that was deleted?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064586

it seems like it. i did not across that link before. if this article is not true then i should delete this link.

i cannot find the same case study they cited on Verizon.

I know somebody who did something similar for a while.

He had some decent family connections so was working as a freelancer on some quite big money contracts.

All of work was (unbeknownst to the clients) outsourced to India for $6 an hour whilst billing $60 an hour.

It actually worked well until the Indian guy figured he could cut out the middle man.

I would take on subcontractors when contracting. Saved me some time but not a huge amount. Primary reason being you need to check someone else's work in detail because they have no real allegiance to you

Verizon outsources much of its programming to India anyway, this way they got more diversification. Dumbest place I ever interviewed at.

If true it's totally unethical but kinda cool at the same time. He should set up an agency and become a professional outsourcer.

A fantastic (if perhaps "too fantastic") example of why it can sometimes be difficult to get a telecommuting position...

Should be called "How the 4 hour work week can backfire"

What backfiring? Getting fired? You can get fired even for being there and doing good work. You can get fired even if working overtime (plenty of people have). For most companies you are nothing, a mere "human resource".

At least the guy had lots of fun and free time doing his thing for while it latest. I don't see any backfiring.

"What backfiring? Getting fired?... I don't see any backfiring."

Yes, being fired was the "backfiring" here, as in a-direct-consequence-of-actions.

Sure, you can lose your job for no fault of your own, too, but you seem to be conflating the inherent unpredictability of life to the level of cause-and-effect.

My hero.

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