Thanks, and ya ya. I was in a hurry to post that and promptly forgot about it.
hobbes
@hobbes
Best posts made by hobbes
Latest posts made by hobbes
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RE: How often are consultants actually the good guys?
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RE: How often are consultants actually the good guys?
In my experience, consultants are usually brought in for one or more of the following reasons;
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Blame deflection. In a largish project ( 100 gs or more ), consultants are the perfect "fall guy". They do the job asked of them, complete with all the conflicting requirements, and get it working to a semblance of what was asked of them. Although there is beauty here, as no one really knows what was asked of the consultant, so they have great leeway. Anyway, once "delivered", they leave. Then everyone gets to deal with the shit pile they dropped. Blame gets attributed to the consultant, who never seems to want for the next job opportunity.
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"We don't pay that guy enough to have an opinion"-syndrom. I can't tell you the number of times we've been handed a project, given our write up regarding it, only to have a consultant come in. The first things out of their mouths is often, "What would like to see come of this"? To which we hand over our report. The consultant will sometimes reword it, maybe reformat it, and hand it off to the bosses as original work. They'll be paid gross sums of money for THE EXACT SAME opinion/writeup/ect...that has already been turned in.
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Personal friend of the boss. Or a yo-yo boss brings in a consultant to do "fact finding", instead of learning the business processes for himself. Usually this consultant and the boss will have worked together in the past on multiple projects. IE: The only difference between this and nepotism is blood. Speaking of which...
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The "Consultant" is a nephew, or child, or niece of a C*O position. They have no working knowledge of the field, but they took a class in college, which obviously amounts to the same thing.
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And finally, we have the real consultant. Your company wishes to do "X", but there is no in-house experience doing "X". The consultant comes in, trains staff inhouse, sets up the service, documents the hell out of it and gets out, having delivered a real product that everyone likes. Also known as a "Snipe" ( for obvious reasons ).
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RE: What are your server names like?
Well, look at the bright side. You could have a medium sized organization which has a deeply ingrained culture of naming servers after video game characters.
Yes, I've dealt with this. I got called all sorts of names when I began suggesting we make the names meaningful and "at a glance" worthy. Practically got lynched when I recommended the same for the workstation names. Yet, just a short while later that's exactly how everything is setup now. I really hate the "that's how it's always been" mentality. Makes me what to break things ( specifically, "how it's always been" ).