Foul tale of outsourcing gone awry

As seen on Slashdot. A government agency exposed sensitive day-care data on the Net. This data included the schedules of hundreds of children. The data was posted to RentACoder for programming assistance. Why wasn’t this data treated more sensitively?

County attorney David Morris said that programming work for the day-care center had been outsourced to the locally-based Genesee Community College. The manager of the college’s program refused to speak to a reporter, but Morris said Dennis was a third party consultant hired by Genesee. Dennis, in turn, used RentACoder to once again subcontract the database work, which ultimately fell to a New Jersey-based programmer.

Makes you think of the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan thing (Tonya asks Jeff who asks some guy to ask some other guy to go after Nancy). When you’re that far removed from the actual customer involved, it’s hard to imagine getting the same results as someone who deals directly with the customer. People seem to care a bit more when they get directly involved… add three levels of indirection and you’ll be lucky to get something that runs.