The Changing Face of Work

I walked to the supermarket this morning to get a few essentials, just in case the forecast deluge of snow does arrive (I'm off out shortly to do my snow dance). My return journey took me past a shop with a large inflatable hippo outside (don't ask me - I thought they sold carpets, but what do I know?). This hippo, perhaps in protest at being forced to stand outside in the rather brisk weather, was giving three employees the run around. They were attempting to secure the poor thing with heavy duty webbing tied to two bollards and an unsuspecting rubbish bin. It seemed an odd way to sell carpets, but I must admit to having very little experience of retail. Maybe hippo wrestling is an essential skill.

But for one rather enterprising software engineer it would seem that outsourcing is key. It emerged that the software engineer, who had been widely praised for the quality of his code, had been using part of his salary to outsource his tasks to a company in China. He then spent his days surfing the net and generally idling about, safe in the knowledge that his work was being done by a tidy coder on the other side of the world. It came to light when the company he worked for noticed that someone in Shenyang was accessing their secure systems. It's been suggested he was operating the same scam with several other companies, taking a tidy income for getting others to do his work. It might have been unethical, immoral and generally a bit naughty, but there will probably be a few programmers reading about it wishing they'd thought of it.