What would Tim Ferris Do?

http://www.fastcompany.com/3004896/software-developer-caught-outsourcing-his-own-job-china?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

So I read the aforementioned article today and I immediately recalled a famous book by Tim Ferris, which provided private outsourcing as a way to reduce the amount of time that you work. I thought that the book was thought provoking at the time that I have read it, but I was skeptical to say the least about the real life application of those principles.

I think that legally speaking the company may have a case against this worker, if they can prove damages. That is going to be difficult to do, seems like more investigation would certainly have to be done to achieve that. What’s interesting however is – “Amazingly, the developer received glowing performance reviews from human resources while pulling his outsourcing scam”.  That must be an interesting company where the direct supervisor does not do performance review. Human Resources can assess past behavior and complaints, if they are forced to review performance, if someone has more free time to contribute to the social aspect of the job, as this article suggests, then I think the review would be good and there shouldn’t be anything amazing about it.

Anyways I wonder what would Tim Ferris say about this event.

Expat HR Consultancy middle management compensation

I've come across an article that quoted the results of a survey in regards to the salary of expatriate workers, and I was impressed by the numbers that they highlighted.

A survey by human resources consultancy ECA International found that based on overall pay, expatriate middle managers in Hong Kong receive about US$249,814 (S$301,201) a year on average. Even though the whole compensation package includes benefits such as housing and school fees, expats there are still paid much lower than Japan’s US$351,516 (S$423,824) and India’s US$269,176 (S$324,538).

http://humanresourcesonline.net/news/28315

I always get curious about the source article once authors start throwing averages at the reader. I feel like an average could be a very deceptive interpretation of data, particularly in the case of surveys as it doesn't address the range of data. I've decided to look further into the details of the expatriate compensation by going to the source article. I have found this interesting graph that shows the components

of the compensation and their value. (Source: http://www.eca-international.com/news/press_releases/show_press_release?ArticleID=7434). I believe that the original article had made a correct suggestions to the people that may be faced with this decision, that is to do the research. Looks like the ECA-international is as good a place as any to start that research.

The results, free to participants, enable companies to benchmark their expatriates' actual salaries against the market. 234 companies took part in the survey covering 119 countries and over 10 000 international assignees.

ECA's MyExpatriate Market Pay Survey 2011 is now open. Details can be found here: http://www.eca-international.com/myeca/surveys

I am not really familiar with the actual number of expatriates to assess the appropriate population, but that sample size of 10 000 seems appropriate for a compensation survey. 
Fortunately I also found this youtube video of the rep from ECA-international talking about the survey and explaining the results.

Private outsourcing

So recently I have bumped into the website called oDesk.com. This site has a neat purpose, which is to bring people that have work and people that want to work together, which essentially is outsourcing work. Now this being the internet, the nature of work is really mechanical, there are plenty of IT assignments offshoring, data entry and blog writing. The best function of this outsourcing site is that it lets you see how many people bid for that job and what the average rate is for those bidders. This approach is perfect for economists, because it’s a transparent competition based on wage (price). This would allow for the most economical results for the employer, who decides that outsourcing is appropriate for their function.

I am just curious to see where else can this approach be applied. I understand that KSAs will have to be measured and monetized. This may prove to be difficult to do for most knowledge based jobs, as well as retail environment because the retailers that want to keep costs down usually pay minimum wage already, and hence cannot benefit from this cost cutting approach, and the retailers that pay above the market do so because of the need to be selective and get the best candidates. Similar approach may be already used for contract positions, especially in the business to business setting, but I doubt that it is transparent, which should be beneficial for the sake of perceived justice.

Beyond the employer this may be useful for someone outsourcing their own work. I’ve first read about that concept in the book called 4-hour workweek. It’s an interesting approach to work and it tries to leverage the technology to essentially become an agent that delegates rather than an employee who contributes to the company. I believe that this approach is in the grey area ethics wise for a number of reasons. First of all you are leading your employer to believe that you are working for them when in fact you can be doing other things with  your time, especially since you have more time after offshoring all of your work to someone across the internet.  Other things can include: distracting co-workers, exposing your company’s confidential information to other parties and so on. Moreover, if the company found out about the arrangement, they would likely cut the agent out and in fact outsource this function, which would reduce the number of jobs available to the society overall.