[jiggy2011]

Interesting business model. Outsource as much of your work as possible but take on more responsibilities in the extra time it frees up. Make yourself look superhuman, get a pay rise/promotion and spend some of that extra income outsourcing even more stuff.

Repeat until the whole house of cards falls down.

[jonnathanson]

Isn't that basically the corporate middle-management playbook? Only replace "outsource" with "delegate to someone lower on the totem pole."

[jiggy2011]

Yep, I basically realised that after making the post. I've certainly worked in places where this wasn't too far from the truth.

[jonnathanson]

Same. I mean, I wrote that line with more than a hint of cynicism, but with an equal dose of earnestness.

At a handful of the larger corporations I've worked for, the folks who got ahead quickest seemed to be the folks who mastered the ancient martial arts of KU/KD (kiss up, kick down) and mass-delegation. (That's not to say that they weren't smart, or good at their jobs. Some of them were; some of them weren't).

[jiggy2011]

In order to be a true master at this , you also need to be able to kick sideways and treat other employees at your level as if they were your reports. You must do this in a way that gives you maximum face-time with senior management and minimum accountability in the work you actually do.

I worked with someone like this in an IT dept years ago. "Hey man, I'm so busy all afternoon! I gotta organise the dept football tournament, then I volunteered to do training as an evangelist for methodology X, oh and then I promised I'd stop by the big bosses office for a chat about our teams performance before I went home! I'm such a hard working guy" ,

"oh , do you mind if I assign some of my tickets into your queue? I know I can trust you to do them quickly because they're going to fail SLA in 2 hours but they shouldn't be too hard for you! I will be putting in a good word for you with the boss after all"

[jonnathanson]

True.

I realized I should leave a certain job right around the time I noticed that my quickest-promoted peers were the ones who handed off close to 100% of their responsibilities and, instead, spent their time organizing office karaoke nights, group lunches, and birthday parties. At one point, my boss (!) even confided in me that she rose very quickly up the ranks not by working hard, but by freeing herself up from her work in order to plan frivolous, but high-visibility office socials. (She sounded genuinely guilt-ridden in saying as much, though I suspect she was pretty good at compartmentalizing that guilt in the long run).

Now, I'm not a naif. I realize that office politics is always going to be a decisive factor in one's career at BigCorp (if not in general). And I'm all for a fun office function. But when politics is the sole criterion for advancement, something's rotten in Denmark.

Incidentally, I've noticed a strong correlation between this type of culture and the poor performance of said company. There's a general feeling, among middle management types, that the company is basically a giant ATM. You clock in, collect a fairly generous paycheck, and spend your time trying to do as little as possible for it.

By contrast, what subsequently attracted me so much to the tech industry was a genuine engagement with one's job. You may not love every day of it, but you feel connected to what you're doing, and you actually want to see the results in the market. Typically there are fewer layers of abstraction between your work and the actual product, and so there's less room to emotionally distance yourself from it and slip into the clock in / clock out mentality.

[jwdunne]

I didn't envision it working like that. I probably wouldn't keep my personal outsourcing a secret. If my employer was dead set against it, I wouldn't do it.

Since I work for a small company and have a good working relationship with the owner of the company, I will either receive an approval or a refusal, with a good explanation.

The way I see it is that if I can increase my productivity in a big way by doing that, I can't see a problem with it. That's especially since I have the ability/authority to hire a contractor on company funds if I need one.

Some say it's very shady but this could work well if you're completely honest and if you have good delegation skills (after all, anyone can delegate but effective delegation can be much harder to do).

It depends on your employer I guess.

[jiggy2011]

Well, if you are a programmer in a way you could see your entire job as "structuring tasks so that they can be outsourced to a computer".

Ultimately I guess it boils down to what other work there would be for you to do and how your employer would view your suitability for this work. The trick is to not outsource yourself out of a job.

[rmc]

So... basically "start a business"?