EVERYONE’S IN FAVOR EXCEPT FOR THE POLITICAL CLASS. I WONDER WHY? Landslide: 80% support photo ID for voting, including 62% of Democrats and overwhelming share of minorities.
Taking Delegating a Bit Too Far |
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In 2006, a report published in Inc.com concluded — ridiculously — that productivity losses cost U.S. employers more than half a trillion dollars — $544,000,000,000, to be a little more precise. The report found that in an eight-hour day, employers spent an average of 1.86 hours “on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks.” And of those surveyed, 52% “admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours [was] surfing the Internet for personal use.” The data is garbage, of course; the idea that employees should be always-on and that anything less than that is going to result in productivity losses isn’t based in science or reality. But every once in a while, there’s an example of an employee who goes to the extreme, not doing much work and perhaps none at all. Take, for example, the story of a former software developer identified by the press only as Bob. Bob’s schedule — determined by a retrospective look at his Internet browsing history — consisted of the following (as relayed by NPR): |
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- 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
Curiously
missing? Work. Apparently, Bob didn’t do any.
That
didn’t match up with Bob’s output, though. As
TheNextWeb reported, Bob “apparently received excellent performance
reviews, even being hailed the best developer in the building: his code
was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.” He was,
somehow, producing great work without actually working. Bob’s employer
didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t doing any work, because from the
corporation’s vantage point, he was productive.
But
Bob’s employer did notice something else. Weird computer traffic was
coming into the company’s servers through Bob’s remote login
credentials, and importantly, the traffic seemed to be coming from
China. To make matters even stranger, the Chinese connection via Bob’s
remote connection was active while Bob was sitting in the office.
Baffled — why would Bob be logging in remotely, and from China, while
he was right in front of them? — the company contacted Verizon, its
telecom services provider, and asked them to investigate.
Verizon
got to work and came to the root of the problem. While Bob’s employer
had assumed that some odd sort of malware had infected their systems,
that wasn’t the case. Verizon determined that the problem was Bob
himself — and it explained how a guy with great performance reviews
matched up with that schedule of cat videos and shopping on eBay.
Bob
had outsourced his own work to China.
The
plan was pretty simple: Bob had hired a consulting firm in China, sent
the consultants the work assigned to him, and then got out of the way,
collecting paychecks the whole time. The Chinese workers did the rest —
including returning the completed code to Bob’s employer’s servers.
(Bob could have masked the scam a while longer if he had done the
check-in work.) Verizon
concluded that Bob had most likely been doing this for a few
years, taking about a quarter of his pay and using it to buy the
services of lower-cost providers overseas. Bob was fired, of course —
the employer was working on developing software for the U.S. government
and outsourcing that to China isn’t acceptable — but Bob probably
laughed all the way to the bank. According to the Verizon security
team, this wasn’t Bob’s only job — and it probably wasn’t the only job
he had outsourced. Bob was making “several hundred thousand dollars a
year” per Verizon, and “only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm
about fifty grand annually.”
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Bonus fact: Give a
customer service number a ring and there’s a good chance your phone
call will be connected to a representative stationed outside the United
States. But there’s an increasingly decent chance you’ll find someone
in the U.S. on the other end of the phone. The reason why? Many
companies have found a low-cost, domestic solution (with dubious
ethics): prison inmates. According
to CIO.com, prisoners earn about $1 an hour to provide low-level
support to customers in need.
From the Archives: Free
For Me But Not For Thee: Another software developer scam.
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