http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html

On the principle that many of us seem to work as consultants, I thought
Cringely's latest rant might be of interest

John

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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"Doctor John" <doc### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
news:482edb21@news.povray.org...
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html
>
> On the principle that many of us seem to work as consultants, I thought
> Cringely's latest rant might be of interest

I suppose it depends on the type of consultant, the kind and quality of work
they do, and the value (if any) they add to the client. All too often, the
unfortunate truth is that the consultant does nothing and adds no value, and
charges a large amount of money for the service.

Especially at fault there (imho) are the large consulting companies -
Deloitte Consulting, Accenture, ...I've had the pleasure (and displeasure)
of working with Accenture before. They have a few good people, but mostly
they're trying to sell vastly overpriced serviecs to people that don't need
them.

It gives the good people in the inducstry a bad name.

As a contrast, the company that I'm joining later this year gets a large
portion of their money from crisis fixes. The paw-paw's hit the proverbial
fan, the client has no staff with the necessary skills to fix it, so they
call in outside experts.
A lot of the database consultants that I know or know of spend a lot of
their time doing database performance analysis, performance tuning or
security audits. All, I would argue, require specialised, rare skills that
most companies won't have on hand.

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"Doctor John" <doc### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
news:482edb21@news.povray.org...
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html
>

I really like this extract. Could not have said it better....

"Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating
the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots
of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than
make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to
prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is
cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often
takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the
company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time,
this is okay because IT is spending less money.
Yeah, right.

Much of this comes down to the decided lack of professionalism in IT, which
is after all a very new job classification. There is a huge difference, for
example, between someone with an engineering degree and someone in IT who
calls himself an engineer. Real engineers are often valued employees. Their
opinions matter and they have real responsibilities. Good companies know
engineers are important to their business and treat them accordingly. But IT
workers are a commodity and are treated as such. Many IT workers are
clueless about the technologies they are working with. They aspire to be
project managers and are often not very good at that either."



And those few who aren't clueless about the technologies are ignored by
management and their opinions and advice discounted because "They're just
programmers/syadmins/DBAs. The consultants cost a lot more and hence must be
more knowledgeable."

I've personally seen 2 cases of that so far this year

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On Sat, 17 May 2008 20:37:42 +0200, "Gail Shaw"
<initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote:

>I really like this extract. Could not have said it better....

If you had you could have been a consultant :)
I agree with both of your posts and I've worked for Accenture, IBM,
Origin and SAP as an external (read contractor). Some of their
consultants are good but most are just expensive with enormous chare
out rates. Me I'm a functional consultant, I try to create a system
that users can use but most of the time I write documentation that
ticks boxes for the project managers. But then I started on the shop
floor and am not very good at BS :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Doctor John wrote:
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html
> 
> On the principle that many of us seem to work as consultants, I thought
> Cringely's latest rant might be of interest

A ______ and his ______ soon are ______ .

Regards,
John

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> And those few who aren't clueless about the technologies are ignored by
> management and their opinions and advice discounted because "They're just
> programmers/syadmins/DBAs. The consultants cost a lot more and hence must be
> more knowledgeable."

Certainly the company I work for won't listen to a damn thing *I* say. 
But hey, I'm just the tea boy. I keep the servers running, but I don't 
really *know* anything about anything. It's not as if I spent 6 years of 
my life and tens of thousands of pounds in loans to study computing, or 
like I've been running these same systems for 5 consecutive years now, 
or anything like that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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John VanSickle wrote:
> Doctor John wrote:
>> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html
>>
>> On the principle that many of us seem to work as consultants, I thought
>> Cringely's latest rant might be of interest
> 
> A ______ and his ______ soon are ______ .
> 
> Regards,
> John
Fool, money, parted?

John

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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How did a fool and his money *get* together in the first place??

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> How did a fool and his money *get* together in the first place??
> 

The fool's father died.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> How did a fool and his money *get* together in the first place??
> 
He inherited it from a distant relative :-)

John

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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