How to Outsource Your Own Job, and Spend the Day Watching Cat Videos

January 18, 2013

Did you hear the one about Developer Bob, the guy who outsourced his software development job to China, just so he could spend the whole day LOLing to cat videos on the internet? Well, there’s more: ABC News has an interview with Andrew Valentine, a principal at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the firm that was engaged to trace the “anomalous activity” in Developer Bob’s records. And in this interview, Valentine describes how he could have gotten away with it — if it weren’t for those pesky server logs.

That’s right: If you want to outsource your job for pennies on the dollar and update your Facebook status all day instead of processing TPS reports, all you have to do is set up a server in your house and have your subcontractor access your files from there. Then, according to Valentine, you can “proxy your traffic,” and make it look like you’re just working at home.

Of course, if you knew how to do this, you wouldn’t need our help to figure all this out. And then, of course, there’s the whole “cheaters never prosper” thing — even Developer Bob, whose clever ruse resulted in some of the best performance reviews in his department, eventually missed that a tiny detail and got caught. So maybe we’re all better off just doing the work ourselves.

Do You Know What You're Worth?

Valentine is keeping the company and the developer mostly anonymous for now, although he did release several tantalizing details. For instance, Bob paid the Chinese firm about $50,000 out his “several hundred thousand dollars a year” salary. Also, his daily schedule looked like this:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – EBay time.

2:00 – ish p.m. – Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

5:00 p.m. – Go home

Truly, it’s enough to make you consider a life of crime.

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