Outsourcing
not for Everyone

The MittStake - Poster Boy for Outsourcing

Above we see the sorry excuse for an American presidential candidate that the Americans were spared last November, who can go back to working on becoming a billionaire - which he was getting close to before him and his backers (actual billionaires) spent millions upon millions trying to get him elected. Of course a main source of the riches the Man from Bain has accumulated is his role as a pioneer of outsourcing manufacturing jobs, and others to cheap slave labor jurisdictions like China. Mostly, especially in ReThuglican circles the Mitt is lauded for his success in getting rich, in spite of the jobs in America he had to eliminate to achieve his wealth, hell even Democrats had to be careful to not vilify him for his "success."

But it would seem that outsourcing is only acceptable if it is executed by the right people, the corporate elite. Recently a case came to light of a clever employee who outsourced his own job to a Chinese company and once his tactic was discovered found himself fired. An un-named employee (referred to as "Bob" in media where he has been covered) of an un-named high tech company was spending $50,000 of his $250,000 salary for a Chinese company to do his work, programming, while he sat at his work station watching cat video clips, updating his facebook page and playing online games and taking home whatever was left of the other $200,000 left after taxes.

As that rapidly declining hotbed of plagiarism and general b.s. the Globe and Mail put it:

Bob was his company’s best software developer, got glowing performance reviews and earned more than $250,000 a year. Then one day last spring, Bob’s employer, an American infrastructure company, thought its computer network had been attacked by a virus. The ensuing forensic probe revealed that Bob’s software code had in fact been the handiwork of a Chinese subcontractor.

At some point the service provider for Bob's company noticed that there was a persistent link onto the company's server from "from Shenyang, a city in the historical Manchurian north of China, near the Korean peninsula." This raised fears of some kind of espionage, something the Chinese are noted for doing to both companies and countries via computer networks. Anyway, the end result was that Bob who had been considered the best programmer at the company,

“His code was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion,” Mr. Valentine noted. “Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.”

was fired. I guess he didn't realize that making money off the backs of what is essentially slave labor, isn't considered kosher, unless one is part of the club!