Ever wished that you could pay someone else to do your job? Bob is one step ahead of you.
Ever wished that you could pay someone else to do your job? One US worker thought he had come up with the perfect plan. He was the top performing software developer on his team and never had to do a day’s work. Paying his Chinese counterpart a fraction of his six-figure salary, ‘Bob’ could spend his work days surfing the net.
The former developer’s perfect plan came undone when routine checks by the US critical infrastructure company Verizon, noticed anomalous activity on one of its client's virtual private network (VPN) logs. In simple terms, the VPN log showed that the developer was logging in from Shenyang, China, despite the fact that he was sitting in front of his computer in the American office day in, day out.
On further investigation, Verizon discovered a shameful web browsing history and pdf invoices (saved to his desktop!) from the Chinese consulting firm that was doing his work for him.
The developer reportedly spent a typical work day browsing Reddit (approximately two hours), shopping on eBay (approximately one hour), and updating his Facebook and LinkedIn accounts (around two and a half hours). What’s more, the company also uncovered his favourite past-time of all: watching cat videos on YouTube.
Despite this abysmal lack of productivity, Bob had apparently received excellent performance reviews in the past few years, but thanks to the work of his Chinese counterpart. He was considered to be an expert in various computer languages, including C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python, and his code was reportedly clean, well-written and on time.
One almost feels sorry for him for being fired.
