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What if you could just go to the office, look at cat videos all day,
pay a fraction of your salary to someone else to do your work, and get
excellent performance reviews? Although it may sound impractical and
even impossible, one anonymous software developer did exactly that.
According to Verizon Enterprise Solutions, they were called in to
help with investigations on what a local company deemed anomalous
activity on their servers. Apparently, someone from China was regularly
logging in using an employee’s credentials, while the employee was
present on site from 9 to 5. At first, the company suspected this was a
result of some kind of malware, but later investigations proved
otherwise.
The employee was a quiet, inoffensive person with excellent
performance reviews. He is in his mid 40s and is a family man, and had
been with the company for a long time. In other words, no one would have
ever suspected him of foul play. However, investigation into his hard
drive revealed he had been receiving invoices from an IT consultancy in
China, and spent most of his day surfing the web while the consultancy
did all his work.
Interestingly, he received excellent performance reviews consistently
for several years. His code was neat, his work was always according to
specifications, and he never missed a deadline.
He had sent his keycard to the Chinese firm through FedEx, and paid
them 50,000 dollars a year out of his annual income of several hundred
thousand dollars. It took two days of thorough investigation and deleted
data recovery for Verizon Enterprise Solutions to figure out what he
was doing. The company has fired the employee for violation of rules.
While back office jobs, and several IT projects are increasingly
being outsourced to emerging economies, this is the first case of its
kind. Given that the company was more than happy with the quality of
work, we would not be surprised if they cut the middle man and simply
hire the Chinese consultancy firm to do the employee’s job. Just in case
you are wondering, here is a list of the employee’s daily online
activity:
- 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.
Some people are viewing the employee (now being dubbed as ‘Bob’ on different online platforms)
as a hero who beat the system. Companies outsource work to other
companies and individuals all the time, and get to keep a neat profit
due to outsourcing, so why is it wrong for Bob to do it?
A strong case can be made in the employee’s favor, and even the
Verizon representatives who investigated the matter are calling him
clever. He found a way to assure high quality and timely work done for
his company, without doing any actual work himself. For some of us out
there, Bob is a hero. However, what he did was illegal and we are in no
way encouraging you to do the same.
