I've been one of those guys on contract, but only for really big deals, not really the ones I've seen on HN. The last one I worked on was a deal which was funde

I've been one of those guys on contract, but only for really big deals, not really the ones I've seen on HN. The last one I worked on was a deal which was funded by Morgan Stanley and a few others - they put in about $800 million, I believe. They bought the platform (mostly written in Oracle) and we recommended they re-write their external APIs (which were written in Java). They did both, re-wrote the APIs in .NET, which is what we recommended (because they had no Java programmers but they had 6 really solid .NET guys already on staff...honestly, companies have no idea of what assets they have in house). Company went public last year. Just hit $1B in revenue just before going public. If we had walked in and seen a bunch of No SQL or some fad junk, we would have told them to bail. You can't play around when you are playing with these level of businesses.