Creative Outsourcing

Just read a short article in Wired that mentioned a programmer who outsourced his own job. Given my strong feelings in favor of laissez faire capitalism and strong feelings against short-sighted laws that attempt to hold back the unstoppable globalization of all business, this article instantly caught my attention and made me laugh.

Here is a guy who gets paid $67k to write code. In an effort to gain more free time and increase his hourly rate, he independently subcontracts his work to a guy in India for $12k/year. His employer thinks he is telecommuting but he now only spends about 90 minutes per day actually working. He says that he is thinking about taking a second job which, if it pays the same, will mean he now would have to work a total of 15 hours per week for $110k per year. Not bad if he can pull it off.

Of course if both his subcontractors decide to flake on him, he will have to work an 80 hour week until he finds decent replacements – probably not a big risk. The downside occurs when his subcontractors get better at coding than he is and he then can’t take up the slack if someone bails. He is now effectively an employer with some of the problems that come with that arrangement.

The really interesting thing about all this is that even though the job has been officially outsourced, the job still exists here in the U.S.; it is just that the ultimate employer is not getting the difference. Eventually, this guy is going to come up against the problem of his original employer deciding to outsource directly and he will have to hit the bricks looking for a new job, or he will have to leverage his experience and start a new business that is based on managing offshore programmers. The gist of this article is that even though outsourcing is going on at an increasing rate, there is also a steady increase in new jobs being created here in the US to adapt to the changing job landscape. The article doesn’t say what kind of jobs, but one can assume that all these outsourced workers need to be managed by someone and that the increased efficiency ultimately creates jobs in other areas.

I guess the thing that I love the most about this guy is that he is being creative and entrepreneurial and that technology now makes it possible for him to operate independently from his house. It is one more small indicator of how “work” is changing.