In 2006, a report published by Inc.com concluded—ridiculously—that productivity losses cost U.S. employers more than half a trillion dollars—$544,000,000,000, to be a little more precise. The report found that in an eight-hour day, employees spent an average of 1.86 hours “on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks.” Of those surveyed, 52 percent “admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours [was] surfing the Internet for personal use.”
The data is garbage, of course; the idea that employees should be always-on and that anything less is going to result in productivity losses isn’t based in science or reality. But every once in a while, there’s an example of an employee who goes to the extreme, not doing much work and perhaps none at all. Take, for example, a former software developer identified only as Bob. According to a report by NPR, Bob’s schedule—determined by a retrospective look at his Internet browsing history—consisted of the following:
Curiously missing? Work. Apparently, Bob didn’t do any.
That didn’t match up with Bob’s performance reviews, though. As TheNextWeb reported, Bob “apparently received excellent performance reviews, even being hailed the best developer in the building: his code was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.” He was, somehow, producing great work without actually working. Bob’s employer didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t doing any work, because from the corporation’s vantage point, he was productive.
However, Bob’s employer did notice something else—weird traffic coming into the company’s servers through Bob’s remote login credentials. The traffic seemed to be coming from China. To make matters even stranger, the Chinese connection via Bob’s remote connection was active while Bob was sitting in the office. Baffled—why would Bob be logging in remotely from China while at his desk?—the company contacted Verizon, its telecom services provider.
The company assumed that some odd sort of malware had infected their systems, but that wasn’t the case. Verizon determined that the problem was Bob himself—and it explained how a guy with great performance reviews matched up with that schedule of cat videos and shopping on eBay.
Bob had outsourced his work to China.
Verizon later determined that Bob had probably been doing this for a few years, using about a quarter of his pay to buy the services of lower-cost overseas providers. Bob was fired, of course—beyond the obvious fraud he committed, the employer was working on developing software for the U.S. government. Outsourcing that to China wasn’t acceptable. But Bob probably laughed all the way to the bank. According to the Verizon security team, this wasn’t his only job—and it probably wasn’t the only job he had outsourced. Bob was making “several hundred thousand dollars a year,” according to Verizon, and “only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually.”
Give a customer service number a ring and there’s a good chance your phone call will be connected to a representative stationed outside the United States. However, there’s an increasingly decent chance you’ll find someone in the United States on the other end of the phone. The reason? Many companies have found a low-cost, domestic solution: prison inmates. According to CIO.com, prisoners earn about $1 an hour to provide level-one support to customers in need.