http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1317274--mallick-why-outsourcing-your-own-job-is-closer-than-you-thinkMallick: Why outsourcing your own job is closer than you thinkCan the story of the man who was caught outsourcing his own job to China be true?
Of course it can. Ever since “cheaper” overtook the word “better” as the favoured adjective for “product” in the West, most of us — including the paranoiacs, which is, again, most of us — have wondered if someone in Asia, or even Youngstown, Ohio, could do our job for less money and no benefits.
The employee investigated by the Verizon Risk Team got away with it for years because he was so boring, a mid-40s software developer with “relatively long tenure, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator.” So they called him “Bob.” They were hardly going to call him “Sebastian.”
Bob was betrayed by his own technology. As the risk people put it in a report in an admirable effort to make their jobs sound too difficult to outsource, “as illustrated within our DBR statistics, continual and pro-active log review (at the VPN concentrator) happens basically never.”
In the end, it wasn’t “zero-day malware initiating VPN connections via external proxy” — we’re thoroughly baffled now, guys, so let it go. Bob simply couriered his RSA token to China and let a Chinese firm do the work. Bob was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his excellent programming and his temps in China earned 50 grand.
To this point, the scam is pure Office Space, a Mike Judge movie I urge you to see if you hate your job.
What fascinated me about this story was how far outsourcing could be taken. Industrially speaking, some American states have degraded working conditions to such an extent that outsourced jobs are returning from foreign countries because wages are similar and you don’t have those Chinese transportation costs. This is known as “re-sourcing.”
Canada has lost jobs to re-sourcing. Free Canadian health care isn’t a saving because in the U.S. employers don’t have to bother with health-care benefits in the first place.
I would not outsource my own job but would happily outsource bits of my own life. For this, Judith Thurman, a New Yorker writer who moonlights as a very good novelist, turned to TaskRabbit, a website that matches the moneyed and the desperate for an 18-per-cent cut of whatever fee is agreed upon, and hired people to perform the mundane tasks that would be done by a movie star’s entourage.
You, the TaskPoster, post the joblet along with the maximum you’ll pay and hire the allegedly background-checked TaskRabbit who makes the lowest bid.
Amazon Mechanical Turk, an Amazon subsidiary with a racist name that I hope will soon run into trouble, offers a similar service for requesters who need HITs (human intelligence tasks) performed online, which sounds a lot safer.
And here we are in 2013, with minions running around for pennies doing things lazy people can’t be bothered with and neurotics can’t bear. Just try massaging your own back.
I need someone to: get me out of bed, sit through Django Unchained, reread The Origins of Totalitarianism, build an addition on the house to accommodate piano/guests, buy piano, take lessons, visit Germany, surgically give me the small apple-shaped breasts of the actress Portia de Rossi, submit herself to “the destructive element . . . and with the exertions of her hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep her up” — in other words, someone to live my life for me without struggle, without alarm.
At this point, we are in the realm of despair, where rabbits and Turks aren’t going to help. Perhaps other people are perfectly content to farm these things out. But I was raised in the Calvinist manner. Whenever I feel ill, I clean the house, reasoning that it would be depressing to be sick surrounded by squalor. And then I go to work, effectively re-sourcing myself, because I can’t let my body have that kind of dominion over me.
Canadians are hard-working little TaskRabbits, aren’t they? It bodes well for the future.
