Umair Aziz

Steal: to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force.

Thief: a person who steals, esp. secretly or without open force.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the verb (Steal) and how it is used to describe the spiteful act of the noun (Thief). I’m here to talk about a thief who stole from my company, directly attacked our employees and has tarnished the image of the offshore outsourcing software industry in Pakistan.

Custom application development firms like ours are usually engaged in providing software development services through a fixed time fixed cost contract. These are typically 3-6 month long projects after which support and maintenance services are provided as mandated by the SLA. Projects that require more than 6 months of development, or where the customer wants the offshore team to work with the onshore (local) development team often choose to go the ‘Dedicated Resource’ route. With the dedicated resource arrangement the development team works exclusively for the customer on their project. The Project Manager is responsible for being the bridge between the customer and these dedicated resources. His job is to make sure the work gets done according to the satisfaction of the customer. This model works very well for both the customer and the offshore company. Until you hire a rotten apple – a thief who after establishing a rapport with the client decides to steal your customer.

We hired Nadir Khan last year as a Project Manager. Nadir was a smart, confident young man and we assigned him to manage an important US dedicated resource account. Nadir did well. Over the next year and a half he did a good job managing his dedicated team (comprising of software, qa and design engineers) and kept the customer happy.

In May Nadir resigned. He told us that it was time for him to take the entrepreneurial route. He wanted to start up his own company. Being young entrepreneurs ourselves, my partner and I gave him a crash course on the challenges of doing business in Pakistan – wished him good luck and parted ways on a positive note. Nadir visited us a couple weeks later and told us about this little firm he started called ‘Exzbit’.

In July our US client (whose project Nadir was managing) decided to terminate their development services contract with us. They gave no reasons and no prior notice or warning before pulling the plug. We were devastated to say the least. This was an important customer. We had spent almost two years to build capability and invested heavily in the relationship.

With the loss of a key account, my partner and I were left to make some very difficult decisions. July is the month when everyone expects their annual increments. Losing a key account like the one we just did meant we would not be able to give our employees their annual increments. Moreover, we had a team of really smart developers but now had no work. Keeping them on the bench would be an expensive proposition. There were rumors about layoffs. Understanding that our employees are our greatest assets – we immediately called a company meeting and let everyone know that in the interest of the greater good we have decided not to lay anyone off. Everyone keeps their jobs. However this meant we would not be able to give our increments at this time. However we would reevaluate the increments in December.

In the past 9 years, we have never let anyone go because of financial reasons. We didn’t want to tarnish this unblemished record. We understood that not giving out increments would probably upset a few, however we hoped that everyone would realize that giving an increment at the expense of laying-off some of their friends and colleagues would be poignant.

Last week we found out that Nadir had colluded with our client, staged a series of events that led to the termination of our contract with them. We learned that Nadir is working for another software company and is servicing our customer as a Project Manager. Nadir also tried to poach some of our key software engineers who being faithful and conscientious declined his offer.

Nadir violated the terms of his employment agreement with Creative Chaos, the non-disclosure and non-compete agreement which explicitly prohibit him from engaging with our customers or competing in a similar business for a minimum period of 1 year. By stealing from us, Nadir has directly attacked our employees and their future.

Our lawyers are already working on suing Nadir for civil and criminal redress. The immoral and unethical route to entrepreneurship that Nadir has taken wrecks the very foundation of the outsourcing industry that companies like ours have been laying over the past decade. These thieves in the outsourcing business need to be weeded out and alienated; for they are blood sucking leeches that kill their hosts.