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The Truth About IT Consultants
- gruseom 19y agoI love the Dilbert where Dogbert becomes a consultant when he figures out that it means you con the customer and insult him.
- omouse 19y agoIBM rips a company off? Well there's a surprise!
- lithp 19y agoI. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J. In his service to mankind -- that’s why we are so gay. Hey!
- henning 19y ago"I'm a consultant, aren't you?" No.
- mixmax 19y agoMaybe you should start - it's easy money :-)
- sabat 19y agoI'm not sure this is news. Maybe outside of the industry. When I was at Oracle, about 12 years ago, they used to take the poor performers that they didn't fire and send them to the consulting division.
- zeraholladay 19y agoNews at 11: Witless, soulless corporate management seduced by consulting firm. "I really liked the cool golf shirt and the free lunches," said Jerry from middle management, "but we really need to blame our failure on someone outside of the company. It didn't take long to realize consulting firm X was only interested in our money and this very cool golf shirt is still not worth the couple million dollars we spent [on consulting firm X]. I'm still trying to come to terms with the concept of a 'free market.'"
- spanktheuser 19y agoGreat parody of this column at http://cringelysucks.blogspot.com http://cringelysucks.blogspot.com. Sure, lots of IT consultants suck. But Bob's thinking is, as usual, really lame. Read Cringely first, then read the parody.
- apathy 19y agoI liked both of the lists. As usual, both of the articles could be elided and the lists would do the trick (of communicating 99.9% of the information present) I'm tempted to hand Cringely's list (with "find yer best nerd" precaution prepended) to every last one of my clients. And then up my rate a little. There are companies with whom I work where I would dearly love to implement a big-data-on-the-server, pay-as-you-go service model (eg. digesting microarray data, normalization, preprocessing, PCA) talking via HTTP (as deltas/resultsets) to a lighter-weight client. It's got to the point where any implementation of consequence basically has to be like this given the amount of processing required. I'd do it for free, for fun, if it weren't for the fact that I need that time to work on papers and other paying jobs... plus I like spending time with my daughter. It's one of those "shit, if I knew back then what I know now" situations that I figure old people find themselves in all the time. (Because I am now over 30 and, therefore, OLD) Once upon a time, I hated my job(s) and needed to be paid exorbitantly just to show up. Now I need to be paid exorbitantly to turn down the 'other' jobs that pay well but are less interesting. I guess that is a good thing. I guess it also means that I am no longer an 'IT consultant' because the 'IT' part of what I do is ancillary to the meat, which is algorithmic and (multi-)domain-specific. Hmm.