There’s nothing worse when you learn that your job is about to be outsourced to another country. Apparently, one U.S. software developer took matters into his own hands and outsourced not just his own job, but a couple of his jobs to China – raking in the profits.
*Not the actual programmer who pulled off this scheme.
No matter what you think about this, you have to admit that this was a clever scheme, especially since the employee had this con going on in a couple of different companies, earning him a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. While he was at work, he checked Reddit, surfed the net, watched videos, and checked up on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Verizon noticed this after a company asked them about some odd activity on the firm’s VPN logs. The records show that the employee was logged in from China, while at the same time he was sitting in front of his monitor at work. While he was running his scheme, the employee received great performance reviews, and was considered an expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP and Python. Apparently, he paid the the Chinese firm about $50,000 a year.
"Made in America." For some reason, my parents -- and the parents of many of my peers -- take great pride in seeing that phrase. I've seen people buy inferior products just because the label on the back proclaimed that it was thrown together in one of our 50 great states instead of across some imaginary line in "another country." Part of me wonders if people actually check to see if said claims are legitimate. As a business graduate, I fully understand the importance of producing goods within one's borders. There's a delicate balance that needs to be struck between imports and exports, and a huge part of a nation's economic growth hinges on how well that balance is executed.
I suspect the generation before mine remembers a very different America than the one I've grown up in -- one where smokestacks outnumbered high-rise buildings, and one where jobs requiring steel-toe shoes were more lauded than those requiring a fancy degree and "knowing the right guy." Manufacturing was the backbone of America through some really, really trying times, and there's some sense of national pride that comes along with images of swinging hammers and climbing ladders. "We built this country," as they say.
Continue reading Made in America: could your next phone be homegrown?
Made in America: could your next phone be homegrown? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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