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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

I contacted ODesk explaining what happened with all the evidence. By the next day the guy I had hired was contacting me saying that ODesk suspended his account indefinitely.

He continued contacting me for about a year saying that he could no longer feed his family after "what I did". It was kind of a nightmare, but I think ODesk had pretty swift judgement because that's the kind of press they don't want. I also talked to the company that was using my code. They explained that they had hired him on ODesk and had no idea. They wanted nothing to do with the stolen code, and were very apologetic for their accidental involvement.

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I'm not convinced the greater good was served in this case.

edit as I'm being downvoted rapidly. All I'm saying is that oDesk typically connect a westerner with a developer in somewhere like India who thinks that being paid $3/hour is fantastic, and who's other options for a job are basically hard manual labour.

Obviously I don't know the details of this situation which is why I just said I wasn't convinced.

It seems very plausible to me that the worker really was unable to feed his family after having his account terminated, and it seems like a bit more lenience on the part of oDesk would be more reasonable.

In the western world, if you steal code you expect to get fired. I totally understand that and that's why I just said it wasn't clear-cut to me that the right thing happened here. It might be, but I'm not sure. In the western world if you get fired you have a lot more options.

Maybe situations that involve basically exploiting workers in other countries need a bit more sensitivity. I don't know. Maybe not.

I'd appreciate a discussion instead of just downvoting.

These "workers" that are being "exploited" are just copying and pasting code, in this situation. In this case, the code doesn't even work properly, since it's calling someone else's analytics callback. No work has gone into this, just willingness to steal code.

That's called cheating the customer...fuck these guys. Even if they need the money.

I admire your certainty. Maybe it is as simple as that and I'm overthinking it.

I can't quite express the difficulty I'm having in a comment so I'll try to write it up some time.

I can't argue it yet, but my intuitive feeling is that it's socially irresponsible to create this economy for them and then pull the plug like this. The bigger picture, I think, is that OP got his code stolen which sucks, but the contractor (or one like him) may have to sell a kidney or go back to working 18 hour shifts in the factory with toxic fumes now. That doesn't seem proportionate.

Getting your car stolen sucks, but if you report it the thief may have to go to jail, and who's going to feed his family then?

Protecting wrong-doers because "we" have supposedly created a system that forces their hands makes no sense.

I watched a dilemma like this unfold first hand when my landlord had his bike stolen by an illegal immigrant. He didn't want a drunk stealing the bike off of his porch, but he didn't want him to get in so much trouble that he got deported either.

Then maybe the thief shouldn't have stolen it.

I believe the point is some of us have aspirations for a society that minimizes the number of people in terrible situations. The idea being that some of us feel many of these terrible choices are as much the result of circumstance as otherwise.

Particularly for someone like me who doesn't believe in immigration control at all, deportation (or even subjecting someone to the horrible abuses of ICE without actual deportation occurring) constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment for a crime that should be punished by a fine or a few days in jail.

If I knew a drunken bicycle thief-citizen would be imprisoned for years, I wouldn't report them, either.

The market your talking about (software-mediated freelance development) only works if the participants trust each other. If Odesk allowed the Indian programmer to steal IP, that creates a precedent, our at least a perception, that theft is OK. This perception discourages western customers from using the system.

This shrinks the market, reducing demand for programmers in India. Now MANY Indian programmers can't find work, even ones who were honest and efficient.

I think this effect is very important to keep in mind if you're concerned about the morality of the situation. The thief is hurting his fellow Indian programmers just as much as his western customer.

I was going to down vote but decided to reply instead. The problem is that although it's possible he couldn't feed his family after having his account terminated there is no way to know. I've worked with and for a lot of people on sites like oDesk and unfortunately discovered there are a lot of assholes in the world. I've had 'westerners' rip me off just as much as low paid workers. So although it's possible this guy was now broke it's also possible he was just an asshole.

>> Maybe situations that involve basically exploiting workers in other countries need a bit more sensitivity.

I disagree that he was being exploited. Yes, he was being paid a lot less than someone in the US but the cost of living where he is is probably much, much lower. And like you say he has a nice job as a computer programmer. He's obviously a smart guy. He can create another account, or use a different site.

Appreciate the reply.

>> I disagree that he was being exploited.

Yes, I think that might be what this whole thing hinges on.

I think everyone deserves a chance, and thanks to the internet this developer got the chance to work for a paying customer in a country with a higher pay rate and higher standard of living. Then he stole and got caught.

There are a lot of people living in poor conditions in the world, and a programmer in any country is near the middle-to-upper end of the spectrum. His situation is unfortunate, but he messed up.

On a similar note: my current lab-mate lives in a pretty bad apartment in Boston right now. It is habitable and up to code, but run down and occasionally the heat goes out... He provided me some prospective by telling me about the one-room, dirt-floor house he grew up in where his parents raised 11 children while working as subsistence farmers in Nepal. That makes luke-warm water and 5Mbps internet seem much fancier.

I pray that some day everyone can live the life of a poor to middle class American, but we are not there yet. I also don't think that being fired is an excessive punishment for fraud/theft at work. I would feel much differently if the story ended with hime being jailed or abused by the police, but the whole point of Odesk is to give everyone a chance and I feel that he got one.

>I disagree that he was being exploited.

LOL, keep telling yourself that. Having a 'lower cost of living' doesn't excuse paying a software developer a much lower rate than the rest of the world.

Why? It's like that with all jobs, it's how the market works. Not to mention the fact that he works online and can accept jobs all over the world - in other words he can charge what he wants.

At the higher wage you seem to want me to pay, I can hire a more qualified developer, so now I won't pay the original developer at all. Exploitation eliminated FTW!

>All I'm saying is that oDesk typically connect a westerner with a developer in somewhere like India who thinks that being paid $3/hour is fantastic, and who's other options for a job are basically hard manual labour.

While thier might be some anecdotal evidence where this is true it's mostly just you being prejudice.

The OP did not hire this developer who stole his work. The OP did not exploit this developer. The OP is not responsible for the personal situation of this developer.

The developer stole code without understanding it, happened to be in India, and then attempted to play for sympathy by saying he couldn't feed his family - there are a lot of tech jobs in India, and the vast majority are not on odesk, if he is any good, he could easily feed his family, and furthermore, the fault was his, the offence was his, and then he has the gall to complain to the person he stole code from, who did not even punish him or pursue him, but simply reported what he did. Workers in India with an education have a lot of options which are nothing to do with manual labour, it's a vast and increasingly rich society.

The person reporting a crime is neither responsible for the original crime, nor for the punishment decided on by a third party (odesk in this case), nor for the situation of the criminal, and the dev ejected from odesk should have thought about the consequences of breaching their terms.

He was bound to get caught when being so sloppy, it was just a question of time, and he could have fared far worse (been sued by a client for example). Hopefully this experience will make him question his methods and pursue his career but without carelessly copying work.

Hmm, you ever been to India? Alot of developers there are forced into development by their families and don't get paid much while taking care of not only their immediate family but their retired father and his family. Granted what he did was wrong, I do understand this developer's plight. 10K people per square mile is alot of competition where good work is.

Hmm, you ever been to India?

Yes I have. There are plenty of middle class people and most technically educated developers are among them. There are also a lot of tech companies hiring.

I apologize for implying you didn't understand the culture by asking if you have been there, I didn't mean that in any way.

In any case, alot of my family are middle class and can't find decent jobs. The competition is very high and programmers are a dime a dozen. Technically educated doesn't mean they enjoy it. Most consider it a job to get by. Some find it to be a passion. The ones who see it as a paycheck are far more likely to rip a site off and the culture is such that it doesn't seem wrong. "Someone else's problem."

I guess now it's his problem... ripping someone off and then complaining about being called on it is pretty silly in my opinion, regardless of what your motivations are for working, particularly in a competitive environment such as the one you describe.

>It seems very plausible to me that the worker really was unable to feed his family after having his account terminated

Why? Does ODesk have zero competition? He could switch over to one of them and probably already did. If it is somewhere like India then there is a thriving non virtual market for software developers. Why couldn't he get a job at one of the big body shops? It certainly isn't ODesk or the salt mines. If it really is ODesk or the salt mines, why take the risk?

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