Lazy US developer pays Chinese firm $50,000 to do his six-figure job

A U.S. software developer who worked for Verizon (UPDATE, see below) has launched himself to the pinnacle of lazy. How’d he manage this? By paying a Chinese consulting firm to do his work for him. It shouldn’t concern many, then, that the work he ‘did’ for a company using Verizon’s services handled critical infrastructure, according to PCmag.

The industrious man was outed when the company working with Verizon grew concerned over the dangers of telecommuting and decided to start monitoring its Virtual Private Network (VPN), PCmag reports. What it found were consistent log-ins from Shenyang, China.

To log into this company’s VPN — again, a company which apparently handles critical infrastructure — it’d need two methods of authentication — one being an RSA key fob. After checking for malware, which came up empty, the company took a closer look at the logs. The logs, according to The Next Web, occurred on an almost daily basis and spanned the workday for six months. So, then, they took a closer look at Bob the employee.

What they found, according to this Verizon case study (cached version), were hundreds of .pdf invoices from a consulting firm in Shenyang, China. Turns out Bob paid the company roughly $50,000 annually, and sent them the RSA key fob allowing the firm to login.

So what did Bob do with his bought time? Here’s his schedule, directly from Verizon:

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

Yep, he went on Reddit and watched cat videos. But here’s the kicker: according to the Verizon report, Bob had the same scam going with other companies, allegedly pulling in “several hundred thousand dollars a year” without lifting a finger. His performance reviews noted him as “the best developer in the building.”

Update February 5, 2013, 1:00 p.m. PST: Verizon has contacted us to let us know that “Bob” had never worked for Verizon at any point in time. Bob worked for a U.S.-based infrastructure company which contacted Verizon for help on their mysterious VPN logs. Verizon used the incident as a case study for their RISK team. Consider this a case study for eating crow.

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