November 9, 2007 at 11:03 am
Steve Jones - Editor (11/9/2007)
As far as Antares, his long hair makes him look like the expert, and they probably love that. Especially when working with strange hardware 😀
Here here. Mad scientist look works!!!!
It seems it's mostly that we've "upgraded" our titles to consultant when we're really temp, contractor, fill-in staff, data monkey or some other position besides expert. Acutally it's probably the fault of the companiues that pimp us out
It's unfortunate indeed. It's just that "will do anything for money" takes up too much space on the business card....:P
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
November 9, 2007 at 11:11 am
From the other side of being a consultant to using one.
About 18 months ago, I was finally given the go ahead to do a overall system upgrade. A M$ Partner was engaged to provide a quote on the project. This was a political move. The quote came in well over $50K. I was told to do the work for $20K instead. After some discussion, I was able to bring in a consultant to help design the overall project with me doing most of the work.
In searching for a consultant, we asked each potential person/company about being able to advise us on what would work best for us be it a Windows, Unix or something else based system.
Most of the consultants said no they could not or would not do that. We only found one that worked in both worlds and hired him. It's been a good fit. We spent a fair amount of billable time going over all the pro's and con's of the project and finally settled on a course of action. I don't think he has billed us for a lot of his time since, in fact I've had to remind him several times to invoice me. It's been good to work with him, money well spent. He has filled in some areas that I would have missed and I might have taught him a thing or two. Because he was honest with his assessments and strengths, the work went well. We knew that some of the others would only do what was in their best interest. This was apparent during the interviews. I agree with Janet's comment about contractors. We hired a consultant who did a little hands on verses someone who does a turnkey operation. This consultant even loaned me at no charge, an external drive with a training program on it so I could become familiar with a certain portion of the upgrade that I had no experience in. That was really helpful so when we came to that part of the project, I could understand what was needed to be done. That's the mark of a good consultant, not a contractor.
Unfortunately, the project has been cancelled due to the business being sold.
Oh yeah, I was able to bring about 80% of the project in for about $25K. Not bad thanks to the consultant.
November 9, 2007 at 11:13 am
I think this perfectly illustrates the need for strong consultant-client communication and project plan documentation. A good consultant will demonstrate his/her ability to perform before a line of code is written.
November 9, 2007 at 11:35 am
Steve Jones - Editor (11/9/2007)
As far as Antares, his long hair makes him look like the expert, and they probably love that. Especially when working with strange hardware 😀
Hey I resemble that remark.
Keep telling my boss the only sane people in IT need to be random drug tested or they need to start sharing. 😛
November 9, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Antares686 (11/9/2007)
...the only sane people in IT... 😛
Uhh... oxymoron, nonsequitur, Sufi proverb... is there such a thing? I've yet to encounter such a beast and I've been malingering in this field for over 20 years now. 😀
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
November 9, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Hi All
Seen from the floor of my company, consultants are often (not always) used as cheap variable cost labor, which is easy to get rid of here in the European regulated job markets. And as resources that have time to research and focus, when they don't have full schedules and tons of work in their in box.
So we often see consultants with less than desirable skills. Some of them also show a fast learning curve in regards to technical knowledge or business understanding, the later is pretty OK for me. And at the end of the spectrum there of cause is the "great" consultants we all have experienced, which is like a huge library of knowledge about their area, which poor out this knowledge to the customer.
//SUN
November 9, 2007 at 7:01 pm
OK, after my earlier rant, and having read the ensuing comments, I too will agree on the difference between 'consultant' and 'contractor'.
But why is it that we are arguing these semantics amongst ourselves? Why isn't the difference between these two terms so apparent amongst our customers?
Is it our own fear that we aren't up to the task? That technical issues move so fast that even we, ourselves, don't know where the line is drawn?
Or - and I personally think this is the case, not least because I (as have so many of us) have found myself in the position of *HAVING* to learn OTJ, that there just isn't a hard-cast definition of 'Expert'?
No matter how much any one of us knows, there is always someone else who knows more. Where our value lies, is in tying together multiple (and ever-growing) threads of knowledge with years of expertise in our chosen field(s), and having knowledgeable opinions on what could possibly be the best [of a bad bunch] of a host of possibilities.
I have an extremely narrow area of expertise, myself, but what I market myself on is my ability to predict my customers' expectations in their particular market. Not to mention my willingness to learn but hey, that's what we all have to market ourselves on.
November 9, 2007 at 9:13 pm
It's Friday night, and I just can't help myself. I keep giggling when I see the title of this editorial because of this cheesy commercial that keeps playing in my neck of the woods. I finally broke down and found said commercial on Youtube.com.
Let's just call this "another industry's take on 'Wiggle room'". Interestingly enough - if you watch the others, the guy IS trying to drive home a point about doing the job right and doing it well, but that's NOT why I'm posting it. It's just goofy, and well... cute...
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
November 12, 2007 at 6:03 am
Coming to the discussion late...
I've worked both sides of the issue. From the consultant side, things just get gray very quickly. If I know more than anyone on your staff, I'm an expert, whether or not there's another 1000+ guys one floor down who know more than I do. However, I have to deliver on what you're paying me for or you won't pay me for long.
Hiring consultants, quite frankly, we grill the hell out of them. If they know enough, we bring them on board. If they don't, we toss them. Best of all, since you're not hiring them, if for some reason they got past the quiz but still stink, you can kick them to the curb quickly.
I love getting resumes that show guys with 10+ years of experience in SQL Server and when asked the difference between a clustered and a non-clustered index, they honestly don't know the answer.
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November 12, 2007 at 7:01 am
I'm a little late on this discussion, but I would agree that most IT "Consultants" are really contractors. I view a consultant as someone who has the ability to see the big picture and offer solutions to a problem and a contractor as someone who comes in and does the work. I spent some time last year working for a fairly well known "temp" agency and while I was called a consultant I was really a contractor. I did not solve any problems for the client I worked for I just did a lot of work that was already defined and that the employees just could not get to.
Having said that, I also had this agency call me several times with .NET opportunities when I had made clear to them my expertise was in SQL Server and that I had limited experience in .NET. They called me because I scored well on their .NET test. I politely turned down each of these opportunities because I did not want to mis-represent myself to a company when I went into an interview. So beware who a temp agency sends to you. Be sure you interview them thoroughly.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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August 8, 2012 at 2:18 am
Unfortuately we now have to give consultants full technical interviews like we do permanent staff. Some of the consultants I have interviewed wouldn't even get a full time role if one was being offered, that for me says it all.
August 8, 2012 at 7:48 am
Coming in from the re-post of the editorial today.
I used to know a manager who insisted that "consult" was just a phonetic contraction of "con" plus "insult".
I've worked with a couple of good consultants, and a lot of mediocre ones, and a few who were more out of their depth than the people who hired them.
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August 8, 2012 at 9:31 am
Consultants can often uncover "no brainer" stuff that should have been easily caught by the in-house personnel, and this can be potentially very damaging for them. So as a consultant, always beware of the people on-site trying to sabatoge your efforts or make you look bad, before you end up unknowingly doing the same to them. I have been in meetings in the past where the Director of IT said very heatedly "I cannot believe our people didn't catch that first! We had to hire a high-price consultant to catch this?" An on-site consultant can make a manager re-think why they are keeping certain overrated full-time people around and that can make the consultant's life hell on a job sometimes, because you are a potential threat to their livelihood. Been there, done that one, as a consultant.:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
August 8, 2012 at 10:39 am
I'll only take on freelance work if I'm certain I can do the job. If there's any areas I feel I'm weak on then generally I'll let the client know. If I'm weak on the whole spec I'll turn down the work and explain why - I've done this before, rather than overreach myself and let the client down.
Consultancy gigs are not in abundance in the UK and they're difficult to get - there's not a great deal of competition, but scope creep is the enemy. One minute someone wants their business data transferred from Access to SQL and some reporting set up, next minute you're trying to diagnose the gremlins in their website. Most clients don't distinguish between IT problems particularly if they're non-technical. It's very easy to get bogged down in issues you don't want to touch.
I work full-time now and rarely take on any external projects, simply because of this. I'd rather be a FTE or trundle around as a babysitter contractor than take work on-spec (although I'm always open to a discussion 🙂 )
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August 8, 2012 at 11:02 am
In most cases i would expect a highly paid consultant to know what is he is expected to know. Companies do not pay consultants on their learning curve. On the other hand, consultant is a misleading word that means 'high paying' to some folks/companies and that is hardly the case. We have people on visas who make minimal wages and work very hard just because they have to keep their jobs until their paperwork is done. For people like that I would cut some slack and allow them to learn as they go. We had a very bitter experience some years ago with an MVP consultant who came in when I was gone to take a look at a server with performance isseus. He turned in a 40 page report including several pages on Disk i/o - without even knowing the disk system was SAN based!! He later claimed that it was the client's job to tell him that, not his job to ask.
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