Outsourcing.  The scourge of the technology employee. You’re a resource and you have a cost and a value. When the cost/value ratio slips lower than someone else in the world is offering there’s a chance you’ll be outsourced. Or rather your job will be outsourced and you’ll be redundant. There’s been a trend in the last few years with micro-payments and flexible web-based communities to outsource things like programming projects or customer service to somewhere cheaper and do the bits that add value yourself. I decided I could outsource procrastination. Let someone else read Twitter and look at the Glum Councillors or visualisations of oil spills overlaid on Dorset, the Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway or latest liberal outrage at the latest Daily Mail moral outrage. The cost of paying someone to do this for me would free me up to do amazing things like invent the modern-day equivalent of penicillin, or design and build a viable alternative to the combustion engine, or even just learn jQuery. Instead I sit here pecking away at the links like a chicken noticing some more delicious seed has been dropped into the hopper.  A twittering catflap, a brilliant bit of human beatbox, some tit on a mountain bike jumping off a ledge, and suddenly I’m gone again for twenty valuable minutes I’m never going to get back. Thanks, Internet. Your fault entirely. [*picture credit unknown. I’d very much like to know whose it was though]

Outsourcing.  The scourge of the technology employee. You’re a resource and you have a cost and a value. When the cost/value ratio slips lower than someone else in the world is offering there’s a chance you’ll be outsourced. Or rather your job will be outsourced and you’ll be redundant.

There’s been a trend in the last few years with micro-payments and flexible web-based communities to outsource things like programming projects or customer service to somewhere cheaper and do the bits that add value yourself.

I decided I could outsource procrastination. Let someone else read Twitter and look at the Glum Councillors or visualisations of oil spills overlaid on Dorset, the Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway or latest liberal outrage at the latest Daily Mail moral outrage. The cost of paying someone to do this for me would free me up to do amazing things like invent the modern-day equivalent of penicillin, or design and build a viable alternative to the combustion engine, or even just learn jQuery.

Instead I sit here pecking away at the links like a chicken noticing some more delicious seed has been dropped into the hopper.  A twittering catflap, a brilliant bit of human beatbox, some tit on a mountain bike jumping off a ledge, and suddenly I’m gone again for twenty valuable minutes I’m never going to get back.

Thanks, Internet. Your fault entirely.

[*picture credit unknown. I’d very much like to know whose it was though]