In 2013, a quiet software developer known to his colleagues as "Bob" became briefly infamous when investigators discovered that he had secretly outsourced his entire job to a contractor in China. He had mailed his security credentials overseas, paid the contractor a fraction of his six-figure salary, and spent his own workdays browsing Reddit and watching cat videos. Yet his performance reviews were stellar. Bob was, by every visible metric, one of the company’s best engineers. When his secret arrangement was uncovered, he was fired. But a decade later, his story looks less like a strange aberration and more like a preview of work in the age of AI.
