- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
That's not really an I.T. WTF; they just sent someone who has no idea what he's talking about.
Admin
That could be straight out of Dilbert
rob
Admin
I've been working with, eh, LAMP for years, and I've never heard of LAMP...
Admin
MySQL & Apache is Access & VB of the open-source world. -- an ex-coworker.
Admin
No, I'm here because no one else wanted to come
I think that says quite a bit about Angelo's company.
Admin
At least he was honest. I've seen people waste weeks before it was like 'Well I don't really know anything about what you hired me for.'
Admin
<font face="Verdana">No where near as exciting as the SOFA technology.
Storray, Object, Function, Abstaction
</font>
Admin
Damn straight. His consulting company deserves public humilliation.
Admin
Do you mean ":MySQL & PHP is Access & VB" of open source world?
Admin
I hadn't either until I went to a LUG here.... I was like, "oh, so they came up with a snappy acronym for that combo eh?"
best line:
<font color="#000080">Jesper</font>: Do you know ANYTHING about Debian Linux and PHP?
<font color="#a52a2a">Consultant</font>: I know a very little bit about Debian, but that’s mostly Red Hat
I'm trying to figure out what the Consultant means... If Debian's mostly Red Hat.... Erm... uh.... lol... I'll give him the benefit of the doubt though and assume he meant that he knows mostly about Red Hat linux.Admin
Exactly... I would take this anyday over some other contractor horror stories I have seen here. See Paula
Admin
Yes, you are probably right. However, I don't really see the WTF here. Since Solaris and Oracle are the Linux and MySQL of business critical systems. This is probably one of the few cases where the consultant was actually overqualified. They would better have sent a cheaper one.
Admin
I love lamp
Admin
Yes, I certainly did. Typo.
Admin
I love... carpet
Admin
Not a WTF at all. Who hires a consultant without properly interviewing them first?
Admin
Alright let me break this down:
"Expertise of subject matter": "I know a very little bit about Debian, but that's mostly Red Hat"
"utmost Professionalism": "I'm here because no one else wanted to come."
"top-notch Quality": Haven't found anything in that conversation to say whether or not they deliver quality products / service.
Thus, you can only say that Jesper managed find some one that was a minimum of 1 out of 3, with the potential for 0 out of 3.
Admin
I feel with this poor consultant. He might be an expert in other areas, but his boss sent him to a place where he obviously does not belong. Everybody who has been working for 10 years or more in this business and never been in that position: Hands up! (and consider yourself lucky)
Admin
Can someone tell me where these $150/hour jobs are? Do I have to go East/West because I'm not finding it here in the Midwest. Now that's the real W.T.F.
Admin
The consultant's company gets $150/hour, not the consultant.
Admin
Head East, Young Man!!! Everyone knows the real money in where the gov't makes it home, right here in beautiful Washington DC and it's surrounding areas. There are more people writing WTF code here, than the rest of the world combined.
Admin
Although, you probably won't be able to bill $150 here, unless you've already finished high school.
Admin
Damn straight
The company I work for usually does this kind of WTF-ery, there is no junior developer, no interns, we all start as "rogue consultant" and we have to climb all the way up to "vedette"
Mike Rod
Admin
Admin
<font color="#000080">Jesper</font>: Solaris Team?
<font color="#a52a2a">Consultant</font>: Ehrm... you know, the expensive Linux and hardware from Sun? Critical business systems infrastructure? The backbone of the web? Those big metal boxes in IT datacenters? Life before Linux? SCO-bait?
<font color="#000080">Jesper</font>: I've heard about Solaris... and the Sun
<font color="#a52a2a">Consultant</font>: Good grief, do you know anything?
<font color="#000080">Jesper</font>: I know very little but I do know LAMP
<font color="#a52a2a">Consultant</font>: Do you ever crawl out of your box?
Admin
I'm sure that's the billing rate the consulting firm charges. In the US, $150/hour is a middling rate for the large consulting firms. The consultant himself probably got a little more than half of that in salary and benefits and bonuses.
Back in the day, we independent consultants could command rates like that, but immigration and the IRS put a stop to it, generally speaking. Nowadays the typical customer will think, "why hire one guy at $150/hour when I can get 2 guys at $60/hour and lock them into salaries?". The smart customer will see the flaw in that logic, but there are not enough of them.
How can large consulting firms charge rates like $150/hour? There's a logic behind it that has nothing to do with technology or ROI. Lots of 45 year olds buy Porsches and trophy wives even though they have no idea how to drive, ahem, either. They think it'll makes them cool for the first time, and it's the same with budgets. Picture a urinal conversation: "I just hired a crew of 25yo's", "Well, *I* just hired Accenture!!!".
Admin
Yep been there too. The problem was the client called in a panic and nobody could pry any information out of them about what they were looking for our company to do. The best we could get out of them was, "We need a senior-level Java developer or system architect ASAP." I get there and it turns out they needed some DB/app server tuning work done, fortunately, I was able to help them, but I told them up front it wasn't my forte and if they wanted we can bring in one of our other guys who was better equipped for the task.
It's hard to help somebody when they can't articulate what they want.
Admin
Do you like Tai?
Tie good, you like shirt?
Admin
Ha, you certainly burned that person you know absolutely nothing about. Good one.
Admin
I was consulting for a big bank who was going to develop a new accounting system and since I had experience in developing another accounting system for the same bank they really wanted me. However the project for different reasons never started and they were afraid that if they would let me go temporarily that I would get signed up for some other customer so they paid me my regular hourly fee to surf and read in their offices until the project started. Several other departments heard about this and wanted to borrow me and I usually went over there to see what they needed help with and usually they sent me back since I had no clue about the technology they used. Or if it was like Excel or Access programming I just lied and said I had no clue so I wouldn't have to do it.
Admin
and you won't either, go west where the land flows of 250K garages and oversized .. um bloated Pricinators!
Admin
Um yeah, I suspect most people visiting this site have heard of the L, A, M and P, but a fair few have never heard it made into a snappy, enterprisey acronym. It's like the reverse of "CAPTCHA". Computer Automated Program To Catch Hell-loads-of Automated-signup-bots. Or something.
The number one security threat in IT today is stupid freakin acronyms which most people have never heard of. Upon hearing these acronyms a significant proportion of "experts" lie so they don't appear to be uneducated, ill-informed morons. Those ones get to keep their contracts and go on to create outstanding web systems secured by the magic of cookies. The ones who don't lie usually have the acronym-relevant skills but get canned because they didn't know the latest marketing buzzword, thus apparently proving to The Powers That Be that they don't have the relevent skills or personal desire to drive up their vision.
Admin
Go for it... we all know Sun is just a big LAMP after all... no... wait-a-minute...
Admin
Um, half? Not even. I used to be a consultant (but in a professional services department of a software firm) and I know they were billing out $250/hour for me but I only made like $60k/year. Since I billed far more than 40hours/week, it comes out to about $30/hour that I got if you assume I wasn't paid for my non-billed time. That's like 12%. (Oh, and I produced quality code. I left because of the nightmare of legacy code left for me that I wasn't allowed to start over from scratch that included html variable names.) The clients were also led to believe I was the technical lead (impressive for a girl right out of college) and had five people under me when in reality, it was just me working as if I were a team.
Admin
You bill $150 an hour because first, you pay all the income taxes -- for employees, the employer pays half the Social Security tax. That takes off about $60. Then, there are no benefits: you pay for your own medical insurance, and your own retirement savings. Figure another $30 an hour off there. Finally, as an independent contractor, you'll spend at least one unpaid hour looking for work for every paid hour. That reduces the effective pay to $30 an hour.
Admin
Try about a tenth of that, because of all the operating, um no ... because of all the great, um no ... because they are greedy americans who have their headquarters at a po box in the bahamas, and figure they can do with a horde of people who accomplish next to nothing for contracts worth 100+ million! how can some software be worth so much and be so crappy?
Admin
Just trying to point out the audacity some people have in thinking that their way is the only way on God's Earth it could ever be done... and if you don't know about it, you're a freak. Btw, do you have a complete acronym database?
Admin
**sigh** OK, these are quotes from the character "Brick" in the movie Anchorman. I am gonna go ahead and guess that you didn't get the references. However, for the benefit of those of us who did, can you please drop the condescending smartass comments?
Finally.. how do we spell "Tie" again?
Admin
Whatever. A assure you this "consultant" couldnt develop on Linux or Solaris, MySQL or Oracle.
I got my first job with solaris last year, although I've been working on Red Hat, Debian, and BSD for a while.
Admin
Someone mentioned Acc***ure nicknames - among consultant types they used to be known as "Indenture" because of their employment agreement. They are better known now, however, from their radio ad.
Anyone here ever worked at FisherPriceCoopers?
Admin
Consultant: an employee who was not screened in any way before they were hired.
Admin
I see the parallel between Access and MySQL as databases ( I use the term loosely), but what's the parallel between a programming language, and a web server application?
Admin
OK, now from someone who knows what he's talking about:
Half the Social Security tax (otherwise known as the "self employment tax" is about 7.5% on the first 90K- that's less than 7K a year, or about $3.50/ hour - not "$60". And, it's deductible, so it's effectively less than that. You probably already pay for your own retirement savings, since there are very few defined benefit plans left, but if you're self employed, you can open an SEP IRA, and stash up to $41,000 (or 25% of your income) before taxes- compare that with a 401K, even with the itty bitty company match you might be passing up. Unless you're in rotten health, medical insurance will quite likely be about the same as what your payroll deduction for medical is (if you work for a Fortune 500 company), so it doesn't make sense to even count that. And I never spent one unpaid hour looking for every paid hour, and never knew anyone who did.
You do have to pay your own travel expenses, though, which are going up, but still, should be less than $30/hr even if expensive cities- and that's tax deductible, so, you should really call it $20/hr (that's assuming you don't cheat, and it's really easy...)
So, you're still left with well over $100/hr of "regular" income. It's not a bad deal
Admin
<FONT face=Tahoma>
</FONT><FONT face=Tahoma></FONT>
<FONT face=Tahoma>the 'tai' quote is from Homer Simpson.</FONT>
Admin
That's a typical story. Those companies particularly exploit kids, and often boot them as soon as they get leverage. If you'd had leverage you could have doubled your earnings, although much of that would have been in bonuses. However, that kind of leverage means you're partner-track, which is a whole different type of hell.
I should probably have said "a little more than half after fixed expenses like taking corporate clients on yachting trips to the Greek islands". I'm not kidding.
If you're an independent consultant the relationship with the consulting firms is somewhat cleaner. I've worked as a subcontractor to the professional services wing of a certain DBMS vendor, and I got $130ish/hour while they billed the customer $320-325/hour. In that case their overhead was a racing yacht, and no, I didn't even get a Porsche out of it. My overhead working for those guys was $100/hour in psychotherapy. No, it didn't take.
Admin
does anyone else get pissed at people who write '..that's not really a wtf...' damn.....
Admin
I thought that was Half-price Coopers...?
I worked with a bunch of ex-Coopers consultants who had left to start their own sc*m er.. I mean business. (Similar business style to the radio ad link).
.
I left under a cloud and was hired by Sun.
.
Oops. . . . . . <Wrong forum to admit this?>
Admin
Hmmm.. Red Hat has its own core, correct? Not even Debian-based.
Admin
One point for honesty!!
Admin
NOPE! With DILBERT, it is the BOSES that know nothing!