Glory be to Bob
A star programmer fired for outsourcing his own job has learned a harsh lesson: exploitation is a job for employers, not staff. By Steven Poole.
DOWNTRODDEN EMPLOYEES of the world, take heart: a rebel hero walks among us. A man in his mid40s, identified in reports only as ‘‘Bob’’, was a star programmer earning a six-figure salary at an American infrastructure company. When the company commissioned a network-security audit, they belatedly discovered that ‘‘Bob’’ had outsourced his own job to a Chinese software company for a fifth of his pay.
Relieved of his workload, Bob would spend his entire office day on the internet, flicking from eBay to Facebook to cat videos, before writing a progress-report email for his bosses and knocking off at 5pm. Sadly, upon finding out how resourcefully Bob had managed his own productivity, the firm sacked him rather than marvelling at his initiative and promoting him to senior management.
Described as a ‘‘family man’’ and ‘‘quiet and inoffensive’’, Bob is a tech-wizard Bartleby for an age of ‘‘flexible’’ labour markets. Bartleby the scrivener, in Herman Melville’s much-loved short story, is the patron saint of all employee resistance: He manages to hang on to his boring clerical job without ever doing anything. When someone suggests he perform a task, he just replies, gently: ‘‘I would prefer not to.’’ Bob has more get-up-and-go than Bartleby, though. He would prefer not to, but in order to achieve the ideal state of not doing, he constructed an impressive managerial system to cope with his subcontractors.
Indeed, Bob is clearly a kind of antic satirical genius, employing the ideas of what companies euphemise as ‘‘rationalisation’’ to his own benefit. Had he been hired as an expensive management consultant, and fired himself before outsourcing the same work in the same way, he probably would have been given a bonus.
We are increasingly told, after all, that outsourcing even our personal errands and other irritating life-tasks – through websites with a local emphasis such as Task Rabbit, or through micropayments to workers in India and other places via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system – is the modern route to happiness. (Many journalists already use such services for outsourcing the tedious work of transcribing interviews.)
Getting other people to handle the mundane business of life for you – including earning a living – is explicitly the self-help idyll of lifeand-business coaching manuals such as Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek. But Bob’s story shows that the line for an employee is drawn precisely where you begin exploiting the company rather than the company exploiting you. Cross it, and the boot will come down very quickly.
Importantly, Bob’s employers never had any complaints about ‘‘his’’ work. On the contrary: he was regularly named the best coder in the building. Since Bob was, in exchange for his salary, providing the company with excellent work-product, it is arguably an onerous and even unfair demand to stipulate that he should have actually done the work himself.
The better to fund his Bartlebystyle not-doing, Bob had even taken simultaneous jobs at other companies and outsourced that work in similar fashion. In total he was earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for a fee of $US50,000 to his Chinese company. Bob is surely, then, the model worker of an age that tells everyone they must be prepared to have ‘‘portfolio careers’’ and exhorts us to admire executives who manage to cut their ‘‘cost base’’ by arbitraging global labour costs. The fact that Bob was sacked just shows that, in reality, the political rhetoric is not meant to be taken seriously, but is a euphemistic sticking plaster for the rapacity of corporate attitudes to ‘‘human resources’’.