Comment On Consulting The Consultants

"combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

25 years combined experience?  And they still don't RTFM? 

I imagine the warning sirens were already blaring when "Could you send us your [entire!!] production database to us?" came in.  

Alex Papadimoulis:

Hi Dustin,

Can you have one of your DBA's give us a call? I 
need to know what command to run to import this 
database file into our database.

Thanks,
Edward

Err... try  Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Alt+F6

Should put you out of misery. 

Alex Papadimoulis:

. . .The start-up touts itself as a "small, agile consultancy" lead by "five gurus" with "over twenty-five years combined experience working at Oracle Corporation." . . .

So . . . was Edward one of the gurus?  It sounds like he was the intern.
 

Wow - how can you spend 5 years at Oracle and not know how to import a database? Even I can do that, and I'm a dev.     

When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

They probably worked as janitors at the Oracle offices in Hyderabad, most "gurus" are from India.

Anonymous:

They probably worked as janitors at the Oracle offices in Hyderabad, most "gurus" are from India.

I nominate this as the funniest line of the day, or possibly the most unintentionally ironic line of the day.

But, to stay on topic, I'll bet by now that Dustin wishes he had FedExed that server out to them. 

haha yeah I was thinking along those lines... probably not janitors (I'd hope), but I doubt they held any overly technical positions.

 

Now, I haven't worked with Oracle since Uni (sql server and pg here), but I'm pretty certain I'd have no trouble importing a database, even if it cost me a massive 5 minutes on google. Heck, wikipedia probably has a walkthrough for it...

 

Every Joe and his dog thinks they're an IT expert. 

 

EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

Anonymous:

"combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

Google for "small, agile consultancy", and you get these guys. 

 CAPTCHA = 1337. Brilliant!
 

Anonymous:

When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

In this case, one month of experience 120 times.

captcha: truthiness

Howi:

EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

 

...and the professor said it would never work.

I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter.

 
No! I want to see it! :-D

Anonymous:

Google for "small, agile consultancy", and you get these guys. 

 CAPTCHA = 1337. Brilliant!

we are a small, agile consultancy serving
"Suit and Geek" partnerships who want to improve the
vibrancy*, dynamism and commercial value
of their relationship.

 
 *batteries not included

Anonymous:

"combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

It had to be the latter. The former surely would have resulted in the aforementioned stupidity being resolved by the one guy.

Advertising youself as a guru is a warning itself.

Hiring feng shui experts would've yielded a nice user interface at least.

Anonymous:

Howi:

EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

 

...and the professor said it would never work.

 

The punchline is that the founder later Fedexed a copy of the paper to that professor.     

Not quite true.  The founder indicated in a later article that he doesn't remember the grade but that it was probably pretty bad since it wasn't a very well thought-out idea.  That's the extent of legitimacy that wikipedia ascribes to the article at least.

Small and agile? Apparently they're just small and agile enough to slip under the BS detector of the suits who'd want to hire them. Although, in some companies, they wouldn't have to be all that small...

This is an urban legend.  The original idea for FedEx, which was presented in that business school paper, was for express check clearing between federal reserve banks by actually processing the checks in the air as they traveled between banks. (Federal reserve, Express processing) Even the founder of fedex has said the professor was right that it would never work.  That is why FedEx ships packages instead of clearing checks.  When the check idea, and several others, turned out to be untenable, they stepped back and realized that the transportation system they devised would be perfect for overnight delivery.
 

Anonymous:

Not quite true.  The founder indicated in a later article that he doesn't remember the grade but that it was probably pretty bad since it wasn't a very well thought-out idea.  That's the extent of legitimacy that wikipedia ascribes to the article at least.

 

And here is the article itself.

 

what's worse than the fact that they asked for the production DB.... after they asked for the QA, I get the impression that they actually wanted the product box, not just the data in the DB ;-)

OMG.

 

The start-up touts itself as a "small, agile consultancy" lead by "five
gurus" with "over twenty-five years combined experience working at
Oracle Corporation."

In what department... Janitorial?

Jebus...
 

 

 

W00h00! i got the edit in time!!! Looks like half the other ppl posted like the same comment lol. 

bob the dingo:

"...or they were all janitors there...

Janitors? I'm guessing with copy like "small, agile consultancy lead by five gurus with over twenty-five years combined experience," they're from Oracle's marketing department. Even a janitor knows enough math to figure out that 5 years average a piece is not enough to make someone a guru of anything, even janitoring.

"Guru" 1: Dang, Edward, five years in Oracle's marketing department, and I'm still not making as much as some of those unstylishly dressed programming dweebs.

"Guru" 2: Let's start our own consulting firm and rake in the big bucks. How do you like the title "guru"?

"Guru" 3: Wait, what about technical knowledge?

"Guru" 4: Oh, we can pick that up. How hard can it be to just press some keys all day?

"Guru" 5: Yeah, the only hard part is coming up with a succinct way to communicate our vast experience. Let's add up our years a Oracle.

"Guru" 1: Well, 5 plus 4 plus 3 plus 3 plus, um, 10 months, is 25 years. That sounds impressive, doesn't it?

--RA

Alex Papadimoulis:

 

I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter. Amazingly, he hasn't been able to convince anyone to boot them out door yet.

 Obviously Dustin was transitioned off.  I'm surprised he still works there.  The certainly wouldn't hold an executive accountable for hiring a dumbass vendor.

One can find many small and agile companies to do business with.  Many move around enough so the feds can't catch them.  Not the best criteria when searching for a vendor.

This only prooves my impression of "it/cs-businesses".

 experience != knowledge

 I have seen several people who have tons of "experience", but has less knowledge than the intern who started last week.
 

hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

 p.s.: captcha is always 1337? Wtf...
 

Anonymous:

hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

 p.s.: captcha is always 1337? Wtf...
 

 I should have quoted:

 

Anonymous:

Google for "small, agile consultancy", and you get these guys. 

 CAPTCHA = 1337. Brilliant!
 

p.s: wow, captcha changed. shame on me. :/
 

Clearly Paula is the CEO of the consultancy.

 

Anonymous:

I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter.

 
No! I want to see it! :-D

It was probably along the lines of:

Dear [Consultants]:

You just asked me how to do an amazingly basic task. You also wanted to take the time of one of our professional staff to answer something that you should know if you're as qualified as you say you are.

This shows your ignorance in several key ways:
1. You don't know how to do the basic parts of your job.
2. You can't even be bothered to look up the answer on google.
3. You didn't look up any newsgroup help.
4. Apparently, you don't even know how to read. You should read the Spanish Love Story "Manual".
5. Your local support network (i.e. coworkers) doesn't know how to do this task.

You have also asked me to contact Oracle on your behalf. If you are Oracle "gurus", then how come you don't know how to contact them yourselves? It's clear to me that you have almost no Oracle experience. The only reason you even HAVE Oracle is because I bought you a copy on eBay.

Quite frankly, you're a fraud. I've found you out. If you're still here when I come in tomorrow, I'm going to take my collected proof of your incompetence and bring it to our boss. People like you - who inflate credentials, fake compentence, and just flat-out lie - are the reason MY industry (note that I do NOT include YOU in it) has a bad reputation. I hope you do something flat-out illegal and get caught. I'll even visit you in jail, because I'd want to see it with my own eyes.

Sincerely,
[Dustin]
 

Uh, not that I've had the daydream of saying that to anyone I work with... ;)

Edward Oracle Expert:

Dustin,

That'd be great! Could you ship your QA server to us:
  [mailing address]

Thanks,
Edward

This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

[Editors Note: Per the Editorial Guidelines, this is not an artifact of anonymization. The gurus did in fact expect the physical server.]

Anonymous:

Hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

The day that "DailyWTFed" is as commonly-used as "Farked" will be a happy one indeed.

catpcha: mustache (?!)

Oracle is f*cking complicated. Everyone knows that.

 captcha: wtf
 

Anonymous:

This only prooves my impression of "it/cs-businesses".

 experience != knowledge

 I have seen several people who have tons of "experience", but has less knowledge than the intern who started last week.
 

 

 And education != knowledge

I can't even count the number of graduates I've worked with who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. We hired this one guy, just graduated, who's major was in Web Development, I constantly had to explain to him the difference between client-side and server-side execution, and he had never heard of CSS.

Howi:

EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

 

Somehow I'm not surprised. No other shipping company has as bad a service as them.. Once I was trying to have some stuff sent to me (San Diego) it ended up in Yemen (San'a). According to FedEx, they have the same airport code. I think about that every time I check in my bags at the airport and they put that little tag that says SAN on them. Then I think about it again when they don't show up at the baggage claim. The point is, no matter how many times they lose my bags no one ever tries to tell me they are in Yemen because the two cities have the same airport code. I believe that is mainly because San'a's airport code in SAH.

themagni:

Anonymous:

I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter.

 
No! I want to see it! :-D

It was probably along the lines of:

Dear [Consultants]:

You just asked me how to do an amazingly basic task. You also wanted to take the time of one of our professional staff to answer something that you should know if you're as qualified as you say you are.

This shows your ignorance in several key ways:
1. You don't know how to do the basic parts of your job.
2. You can't even be bothered to look up the answer on google.
3. You didn't look up any newsgroup help.
4. Apparently, you don't even know how to read. You should read the Spanish Love Story "Manual".
5. Your local support network (i.e. coworkers) doesn't know how to do this task.

You have also asked me to contact Oracle on your behalf. If you are Oracle "gurus", then how come you don't know how to contact them yourselves? It's clear to me that you have almost no Oracle experience. The only reason you even HAVE Oracle is because I bought you a copy on eBay.

Quite frankly, you're a fraud. I've found you out. If you're still here when I come in tomorrow, I'm going to take my collected proof of your incompetence and bring it to our boss. People like you - who inflate credentials, fake compentence, and just flat-out lie - are the reason MY industry (note that I do NOT include YOU in it) has a bad reputation. I hope you do something flat-out illegal and get caught. I'll even visit you in jail, because I'd want to see it with my own eyes.

Sincerely,
[Dustin]
 

Uh, not that I've had the daydream of saying that to anyone I work with... ;)

 

I hope I'm not out of line, but have even seen an Oracle database before?

How can anyone call him self an expert of Oracle and not know how to import
a database? That's one of the most basic commands there is. Selecting data from
a table is more complicated than that!

 - or, even better -

 

Dear Edward,

There's a fantastic new site you might want to check out. I think it would
help you enormously:

http://oracle.com

 

 

savar:

This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

 
We actually had somebody ship us a build machine for a large C++ project once, after weeks of trying to configure all the undocumented environment variables, very specific versions of various tools, etc that the other guys knew about but never bothered to tell us.  Sometimes just shipping a hard drive/actual server is the easiest thing when outsourcing (though obviously not in this case).

Anonymous:

Google for "small, agile consultancy", and you get these guys. 

 CAPTCHA = 1337. Brilliant!
 

They should rewrite their website in haiku.

     Who are we?  A small

     and agile consultancy

     serving Suit and Geek.

     Improve vibrancy

     and commercial value of

     your relationship.

    

Anonymous:

savar:

This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

 
We actually had somebody ship us a build machine for a large C++ project once, after weeks of trying to configure all the undocumented environment variables, very specific versions of various tools, etc that the other guys knew about but never bothered to tell us.  Sometimes just shipping a hard drive/actual server is the easiest thing when outsourcing (though obviously not in this case).

We do this all the time. Often the soon-to-be-production-server is used for the final tests to see wether you get the expected performance. It's also way easier to install and configure a server that's sitting on a desk in front of you or in a room two doors down the hall than one that is in a secured intranet at the clients site. Sometimes during stress testing, some hardware problems crop up and switching components once the server is on site is way more difficult as well. Shipping is not that costly nowadays, so why not. Actually asking the client wether they'd supply their own testing server they use for development hasn't happened yet - but I can imagine that this might be part of a contract when exotic hardware or configurations are required that are difficult and expensive to replicate exactly.

regards

fg 

 

Anonymous:

Somehow I'm not surprised. No other shipping company has as bad a service as them.. Once I was trying to have some stuff sent to me (San Diego) it ended up in Yemen (San'a). According to FedEx, they have the same airport code. I think about that every time I check in my bags at the airport and they put that little tag that says SAN on them. Then I think about it again when they don't show up at the baggage claim. The point is, no matter how many times they lose my bags no one ever tries to tell me they are in Yemen because the two cities have the same airport code. I believe that is mainly because San'a's airport code in SAH.

 

Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.  This is often dropped since most air traffic occurs within the U.S.  Even if the airport in Yemen was SAN, it wouldn't be KSAN.  Any international shipper should know this and have software that uses the full four-character identifier.  That person you talked to was full of shit on a few different levels.
 

Anonymous:

Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.

"as our KSANs go rolling along" ? 

Anonymous:

When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

 Classic.

 Trust me, this was just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.  Now they want their own performance testing environment so they don't have to share with other projects.  And of course, they want it on the same scale as production.   Let me see if I have another 32 processor unix box laying around.

We had something similar happen with a subcontract to a certain prominent consulting company that shall go unnamed.  Said consultants are supposed to analyze our performance data.  So we gave them a copy of the MRTG data files and told them they were MRTG files.  They sent us back email asking what MRTG was, so we sent them a weblink.  About a week later, they sent us email telling us that they had searched the web, and found a link that described the data file format -- and included the same link that we had sent them already.  Another couple weeks passed, and they sent email saying that they weren't able to import the datafiles into Excel because they were too large.  So we asked them what they needed us to do, and they asked us to preprocess the data and get them certain statistical info.  So one of our programmers did so, and sent them the processed data.  At which point they finally got back to us and gave us the results of their analysis -- which was essentially regurgitating what our programmer had done.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Dustin,

That'd be great! Could you ship your QA server to us:
  [mailing address]

Thanks,
Edward

 that has to be one of the best quotes i've ever seen on WTF... I wouldn't even know where to begin if someone asked us to just ship them out one of their servers... that is carnage

Anonymous:

Also, the actual airport code for San Diego
would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts
with a K.  This is often dropped since most air traffic occurs
within the U.S.  Even if the airport in Yemen was SAN, it wouldn't
be KSAN.  Any international shipper should know this and have
software that uses the full four-character identifier.  That
person you talked to was full of shit on a few different levels.

This
is wrong, and if you looked up "airport code" on wikipedia you'd know.
They are two different sets of airport codes, so no letter is
'dropped', and it's certainly not because "most air traffic happens in
the US" (something I suspect is becoming less true anyway). I've never
seen a four-letter code on baggage tag, and I've only flown to/from the
US once.

Anyway, K is mainland US, not "North America". Stop making things up, it makes you look bad ;)

Anonymous:

hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF
doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got
blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

 p.s.: captcha is always 1337? Wtf...

 

+4 insightful 

This WTF proves.. there are people, when given a task and a sheet of blank graph paper, will flip it over expecting to find the instructions on the back side. Finding none, they'll flip it back and ask for another sheet.