A story about a man who outsourced his own job | Hacker News Reader

A story about a man who outsourced his own job

nowiknow.com

30 pointsmkr-hn41 comments

The story is old but I have to say that anyone who manages to outsource his job to China for a quarter of his paycheck and get top-notch quality (he was considered a rockstar programmer until they found out), has my respect.

You don't fire such a person, you appoint him CEO.

Or at least head of outsourcing

Lol. We do not live in a meritocracy, you do not become a CEO with mere talent.

(I realize you were being sarcastic, but misinterpreting you enabled me to make my point elegantly)

It does rather depend on how you define "meritocracy":

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Well, I am sure that he is a CEO in the hearts of the Chinese programmers he hired. :)

> he was considered a rockstar programmer until they found out

I assume his work was being done by a whole team of engineers, though; is it really all that difficult to get a team of five people to contribute more than you're expected to do by yourself? A recent graduate from a top Chinese university can be happy to make less than USD 2K / month. I know a few making 5000 yuan / month (USD $800) plus housing in a company-provided communal apartment.

If you're looking to outsource something to some young but highly intelligent chinese programmers, do let me know ;)

Getting stuff built to spec and with intelligible comments from outsourced overseas developers is impressive.

Outsourcing is "hard" (and usually fails) because usually, the process is performed by a middle manager who (a) is trying to optimize for cost, which hurts quality and is expensive in the long run, and (b) doesn't have the technical talent and therefore can't recognize it. In any country, the bottom of the barrel is going to be bad. But if you don't have the ability to pick talented people and others in the market do, you end up getting hurt by adverse selection. Then, outsourcing becomes really expensive.

Painting Bob as a slacker doesn't tell the whole story. He had to set up his own business. At least while he was ramping up, he had to hire, fire, train, and check the work. At the same time, he had to deal with inconveniences caused by time zones, and cover his tracks. Maybe he slacked once it was established and he could coast, but it's not easy to set up a business like that.

To win at the outsourcing game, you need to (a) pay well, so that people care, and (b) pick great people, because paying incompetent people well doesn't do anything. Going overseas might make (a) easier, but it doesn't make (b) less hard.

I don't intend to paint him as a slacker at all. I respect that what he did took a lot of effort to establish, but I doubt he did a lot of hiring and firing himself -- the article I read on this guy said he employed an existing chinese consulting company. What I'm assuming is that he paid that company enough to engage several engineers at once, which means I'm not surprised that "his" output was considered especially impressive.

I think the greatest obstacle to retaining chinese engineers is actually (c) communication across the language barrier.

I suspect at the start he would have done code reviews because otherwise he couldn't know if the other party [the consulting firm] was a competent entity.

I'm sure once he figured out their level of competence and how far he could trust their agency [e.g. How much direction they needed to succeed], I suspect that is really when the slacking started.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the second or third consulting company he had tried.

Honestly, I doubt that process took more than 3-6 months.

Do you find most Chinese programmers don't know written English?

All (recent) chinese people are supposed to know English (it's a mandatory subject at all levels of schooling), but fluency levels vary widely. It's generally not a big focus for engineers. At the startup I worked at last year, the founders had decent english and the employees knew almost nothing. The college students I know can communicate at an acceptable level, but (a) they are still highly prone to misunderstandings unless I make the effort to use simple phrasing and (b) there's a huge selection bias in which people I'm on speaking terms with.

I do find that for almost all the chinese people I know, it's more effective for me to communicate with them in written chinese (but, sadly, spoken english, as my spoken chinese is appalling).

So summing up... there might be a decent population of chinese programmers who can communicate in written english, but there's a much, much larger population that can't.

Fair enough. :)

I guess the much, much larger population is going to make less money if they do outsourced/consulting time work since they have to deal with a middleman because of it [who will take a cut and do project management/sales].

Also, this may sound weird, but jobs speaking english can pay better than programming jobs, which will cut down on the number of english-speaking programmers.

That sounds very weird but different job markets I suppose.

Why do you think that is?

Jobs speaking english involve serving english-speaking foreigners, who have money.

As others said, outsourcing in countries with cheap workforce is challenging quality wised. If I recall correctly from the original article, not only he delivered his work in time, but his code was considered to set the standard for both quality and documentation. When his colleagues had trouble, whatever language they were using, they send him their code and he returned it fixed with proper explanation for their mistakes.

Thanks for the offer. :)

This smacks of urban legend more than anything else, though I have worked with people who ran tech staffing businesses on company time while fully employed.

Does anyone know which consulting firm in China he was outsourcing his work to?

Asking for a friend...

Can you let me know when you find out? My friend also wants to know.

So does my friend. ;)

Hi! This is from my email newsletter of interesting facts, Now I Know. If you want to give it a try, http://nowiknow.com is the signup page.

It's free, I don't give out email addresses, etc., and have 100,000 subscribers so it can't be all bad.

It's also WordPress-based, so tacking /feed/ on the URL will give you an RSS feed.

Bonus fact: Bob had to ship this RSA SecurID token to his developer in China to that they could submit their code, defeating his corporate strong authentication policy.

I can't help but notice how much whining there is about outsourcing (including from me), but when it's in the benefit of a single employee skipping his work then it's a "great trick", worth of respect, etc.

Assuming the company needed that level of work that was being delivered by this guy's shadow team and he could not deliver that alone... then they would hire better people and/or more people. In this specific case they HAD to because it was US-govt work.

This is no different then a CEO outsourcing a whole department to India or China (in that it doesn't take into account the ripple effects of that decision -- including the local economy, the quality of the work, the added communication issues, etc.)

If you think this story is just great, please remember it when your or your friends' jobs get outsourced to cheap labor overseas based on cost alone (if it's based on quality and expertise, then it's a whole different argument -- a much rare one btw).

I can't help but notice how much whining there is about outsourcing (including from me)

As an American programmer, let me say that I don't think that many of us consider "outsourcing" to be the enemy. There's no moral reason whatsoever why people in one patch of land deserve jobs and people in some other patch don't.

The enemy is the commoditization of programming talent (and on adverse terms; I'd be happy to be commoditized at a rate near what I'm actually worth) and the attitude that we're just cost centers to be squeezed and trimmed, and the fact that when this approach backfires (the cheapest programmers, anywhere in the world, produce shitty code) it's not management but engineers who have to clean up the mess. Management gets promotions, engineers get legacy code. That's the evil. It doesn't matter, morally speaking, if it's a shitty outsourcing shop in India or California. Likewise, if it profits you (and the programmer) to hire top talent in California or in India, you should do so.

The technical term for this is labor arbitrage. When a company spots a true labor arbitrage (a chance to profit by outsourcing work to a cheaper country) it has the right to use it. I don't think anyone disputes that. As Omar Little says, it's all in the game.

But if it's a legitimate move for a company, it's also a legitimate move for an employee. This person spotted a labor arbitrage and took the spread for himself. Unless he compromised classified information (then I feel differently about the whole matter) good for him. If his employer spotted a labor arbitrage (i.e. that his job could be outsourced) they would take the profit all for themselves, and he'd be out of a job. He spotted it first, and he got the profit.

I did not say outsourcing was the enemy (see my comment about skills and expertise). He surely compromised US-govt information (I don't think the US govt would agree to have their source code available to China). Outsourcing is a legitimate move for a company, sometimes.

Your arguments are very valid in a dog eat dog world like ours. My comment was in an opposite direction.

Two things:

1- This urban legend has been recycled numerous times, b/c we've all thought of it at one point or another. I've seen it on Hacker News at least once before. If you have the ability to actually do this, you can start a successful consulting firm, so unless you're thick in the head, why take the punishment of having to show up at work everyday & not just start an outsourcing firm?

2- The unfortunate truth is, there are plenty of folks that have that work schedule. The difference is that they don't have the productivity part, b/c their organization is hopelessly broken. To me it felt like prison, but other HNers have posted that eventually they got used to it.

I got the hell out of the second situation and went the startup route and am waaaaay happier. I can sit at home all day if I don't feel like working, and that's on me.

I personally employ other developers for side projects and they get paid significantly below what i get paid at my 9-5. If i was dishonest i could pretty easily pull off this scam. Not as extreme as doing 0 but i could have 80% of my work done and just review and commit..

Repost of the classic story from a couple years ago. Still makes me chuckle and envious though. Not something I'd do myself though; I like to write code, dislike managing people, and sitting in the office for 8 hours a day watching cat videos would kill my brain.

I love this story. I do love to outsource my pet projects. After a long day at work, I come home and find myself too drained to write code. I have so many ideas and no motivation code. This article just gave me an idea that perhaps I should outsource my personal pet projects. Is there anyone here reading who has ever outsourced their pet project? I'm not talking about via odesk/elancer, but through another medium where you can get really competent developers like Bob did.

> Take, for example, the story of a former software developer identified by the press only as Bob.

This is an old story, and despite all this time it feels as ephemeral and weird as when it first surfaced. Is it, in fact, true?

Several stories cite the Verizon security blog, without actually providing a direct link to the entry in question. Can anyone remember having read the original blog, or heard additional corroborating details?

I wrote the article linked to above, and in it, I link to the archive.org saved version of the Verizon security blog. It's all there.

From Wiki: "Leadership has been described as "a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task"."

I don't see how this isn't exactly what every single manager does, everyday. They get paid twice what I get paid, just for giving me work to do. Whether I'm in the office or in China, what difference does it make?

For anyone interested, the author of this post does a daily "Now I Know" email. There is the occasional dud or re-post, but, on the whole, they're pretty entertaining little blurbs that pop into your inbox a few days a week.

EDIT: My bad, just saw below.

Copy and paste of original Verizon blog article:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ba.internet/34erJO7jqP...

The Onion's take on this kind of stuff

http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...

So how did verizon determine all of this information? To include revenue numbers.

"according to hundreds of PDF invoices also discovered on his work computer" - http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-...

This story came out a while ago, and was a bit light on details back then too. Entertaining, nonetheless.

Ahh. That link suggest that Verizon was actually the company he worked at, not just the ISP.

I wonder if "Bob" is actually Timothy Ferriss?

http://fourhourworkweek.com/

Looks like we finally found that guy who knows 'One Weird Trick'.

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