US employee outsourced job to China

[yakherder]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

My first thought was "lol he spent his workday watching cat videos." But the more I think about it the more hypocritical it seems. When a single person outsources one job, his, he is criticized and ultimately loses that job, but when a company does it on a massive scale it is okay?

I'm not even gonna comment on my stance on outsourcing, because that isn't the point. I'm saying simply that we have quite a double standard. Manipulating the law of supply and demand is tricky business I guess.

Spoiler

A security check on a US company has reportedly revealed one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China.
The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.
He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.
Operator Verizon says the scam came to light after the US firm asked it for an audit, suspecting a security breach.
According to Andrew Valentine, of Verizon, the infrastructure company requested the operator's risk team last year to investigate some anomalous activity on its virtual private network (VPN) logs.
"This organisation had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they'd set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call," he was quoted as saying on an internet security website.
The company had discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang to the employee's workstation that went back months, Mr Valentine said.
And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.
"Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.
Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.
The employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages, "spent less than one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him", Mr Valentine said.
"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added.
"Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 (£31,270) annually."
The employee no longer worked at the firm, Mr Valentine said.

 

[Freesia]

A lazy git.

 

[Calliegirl]

That was definitely clever, but he didn't have the right to do it.

If a company want to outsource work, that's one thing, but he didn't have the right to outsource for them without their knowledge or approval. He didn't own the work he was doing for them and he gave people access to property that he didn't own.

He was collecting money for work he was hired to do, which he didn't, plus he was passing off someone else's work as his own. He'll be lucky if he doesn't get charged with fraud.

As for outsourcing in general. I hate it. I try to avoid companies that do it when I can. It's one reason I avoid HP and Apple products. There was a bill that would have penalized companies who sent their call centers overseas, but of course, the Republicans shot it down.

 

[RabbitLuvr]

That was definitely clever, but he didn't have the right to do it.

If a company want to outsource work, that's one thing, but he didn't have the right to outsource for them without their knowledge or approval. He didn't own the work he was doing for them and he gave people access to property that he didn't own.

He was collecting money for work he was hired to do, which he didn't, plus he was passing off someone else's work as his own. He'll be lucky if he doesn't get charged with fraud.

As for outsourcing in general. I hate it. I try to avoid companies that do it when I can. It's one reason I avoid HP and Apple products. There was a bill that would have penalized companies who sent their call centers overseas, but of course, the Republicans shot it down.

All of this.

Except for the Apple products part.

 

[ledboots]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

My first thought was "lol he spent his workday watching cat videos." But the more I think about it the more hypocritical it seems. When a single person outsources one job, his, he is criticized and ultimately loses that job, but when a company does it on a massive scale it is okay?

I'm not even gonna comment on my stance on outsourcing, because that isn't the point. I'm saying simply that we have quite a double standard. Manipulating the law of supply and demand is tricky business I guess.

I agree! Why is it illegal for him to hire someone?

 

[Calliegirl]

I agree! Why is it illegal for him to hire someone?

Say you hire someone to clean your house and/or babysit your kids. You've done interviews to find just the right person and done a background check to make sure it would be safe to have them in your house with access to your property, since you're giving them a key to your home.
Your house is being cleaned and your kids are being cared for, but you find out it isn't being done by the person you hired. They've outsourced the work to someone off the street who agreed to do it for less and gave them a key to your house. Are you fine with this person having had access to your property and children without your knowledge, since the work was done.

 

[yakherder]

I suppose the security concern is definitely a valid point. But I still have trouble rationalizing the difference between him exporting his job and a company exporting it's entire operation. They asked him to provide something, he provided it. Hypothetically speaking, if he could accomplish that without compromising the company's security by giving out his own personal log in credentials, would that make it different?

If we accept that a company has the legal right to produce something cheap by exporting the labor, sell it to you based on American supply and demand, and keep the difference as profit, then what is the rational difference when an individual produces a service/product for cheap by exporting it, sells it to their employer based on American supply and demand, and keeps the difference as profit?

 

[das_nut]

Hypothetically speaking, if he could accomplish that without compromising the company's security by giving out his own personal log in credentials, would that make it different?

But in this case, he did compromise the company's security.

 

[mlp]

I agree with Calliegirl.

Much a I abhor outsourcing and think this guy was clever, the two situations aren't comparable.

 

[yakherder]

Valid points, I suppose I must agree That said, now that I think about it, large scale production outsourcing regularly compromises our security as well. I'm gonna stay out of the larger outsourcing debate though, because for that I blame the greedy consumers just as much as, if not more than, the greedy corporations. Regardless of whether or not we find the practice ethical, we cast our vote for its practice based on where we spend our dollars.

 

[mlp]

I agree that consumers are complicit in outsourcing and other shoddy business practices.

 

[yakherder]

And regarding Apple products, I remember reading something fairly recently about them saying they were planning on bringing back some of the production of their 2013 computers. I wonder if that is to gain support, or because the state of the economy makes it easier to find cheap labor in the U.S. now lol.

I remember when I very briefly worked in retail sales at the Canal Shops in Las Vegas, customers from Europe and Japan were always fairly easy to sell to because they considered one of the perks to traveling in America to be that they could buy cheap stuff while they were here. That always amused me for some reason. Smart sales people on commission always focused on the foreigners (except from China).

 

[Envy]

Yeah, stuff seems to be cheaper in the US, but that's pretty normal since your wages are lower in general as well.

I'm always amazed to see the prices of your fast food for example.

 

[Freesia]

I think it is an insult to all the people who would love a job but cant find one. He earned $000,000s of dollars looking at the reddit board and videos of cats.

 

[ledboots]

I think it is an insult to all the people who would love a job but cant find one. He earned $000,000s of dollars looking at the reddit board and videos of cats.

But he did hire that one guy and give him a good job. I hadn't thought about the company's security before, but if that wasn't an issue, I guess I still don't see what was so unethical about it. The work he was hired for got done, another guy in China got a good job, and Reddit got lots of views.

 

[ledboots]

Yeah, stuff seems to be cheaper in the US, but that's pretty normal since your wages are lower in general as well.

I'm always amazed to see the prices of your fast food for example.

A lot of that is because of government subsidizing meat and dairy products. And the horrendous quality of the "food."

 

[Lord Snot]

Isn't most of it because employers don't have to pay their wait staff a living wage, and have somehow convinced the paying public that it is their duty and not the employer's?

 

[ledboots]

Isn't most of it because employers don't have to pay their wait staff a living wage, and have somehow convinced the paying public that it is their duty and not the employer's?

In fast food, there aren't servers, so they are paid regular hourly wages, no tips.