Outsource Yourself ...

[aaron]

Re: Outsource Yourself ...

I do not think people understood what the time bomb is.

He put a bug in the code, specifically timed to do bad things on the date his wife would be there. It was wrong and certainly worthy of a civil suit.

[wayiwalk]

Re: Outsource Yourself ...

Kind of on a related note.

In our company, we write alot of reports.

It is the ultimate product we deliver to our clients. The months of planning, field investigation, sampling, analysis, evaluation, all boils down to a document with words and text and graphs and figures.

We also have many (maybe 20%) employees that speak/write English as their second language. There was one fellow, who was brilliant technically, presented excellent analysis and recommendations in his reports, ie, the ideas were all there, however his writing had always been filled with grammatical errors, well beyond what is able to be fixed automatically by MS Word.

Then one day, almost overnight, there was a 180 degree change in the quality of his writing. It was so dramatic that the project manager he was working for remarked to me that he figured the guy had someone else writing his reports for him.

Hmmm.

Can’t prove it, but when you consider that “good” writers who grew up speaking english, could not approach putting out the quality of writing in the documents this fellow was now producing, it raised questions.

Outsourcing?

Probably. I’ve read (maybe on itulip?) that college students “outsource” papers overseas to parts of asia where there are well educated people doing this type of piece work.

Back to my former coworker (he left after he accepted a job with another company).

His emails still contained grammatical errors, my favorite was his “goodbye” letter he sent to friends, it included a few obvious errors; you’d think the last email contact to a few dozen former coworkers would be something that would be composed carefully. It certainly appeared he didn’t outsource his emails.

It is very hard to do something about this – in our business – there is proprietary information, so the work we do should not leave our hands and go to strangers, it should only go to clients. But in an age when people can and do bring work home with them, and can easily email text to an outside editor – there isn’t much you can do to stop it.

The end product this fellow produced was of high quality, that is a good thing. However I’m really not comfortable with the larger picture of what was going on.....a muddy place of uncertain ethics and values, and ultimately, compromised principles.