Well, they abuse consultants because they CAN! Not quite as bad now, but a couple years ago if you got upset at the way they treated you, there was a line ready to take your place! I too wouldn't work for them again, but I would worry about getting my fees. I've seen this done for many reasons but mostly as a way of getting something good for cheap when money is tight, and money ALWAYS seems to be tight in big companies. They gotta meet that expected earnings number and keep the stock price up:( I've never had any issues with smaller firms, sometimes the managment is more hosed up about what the solution needs to be and then doing it but they do pay on time and they do tend to respect you. I guess they are a lot closer to your position than a big firm, as many companies got started as just one consultant:) As always, YMMV!
Also, be sure to CAREFULLY control scope. Scope creep can cost you a lot of money. You should negotiate payment for anything outside the orginal scope. That is a tough thing to do, but it protects your business from begin stuck for years doing something that should have been done in a few months.
Amen! They don't trust the in-house idiots when the chips are down, and if it all goes wrong (even if THEY did it) then the consultant is blamed and the contract is not renewed. Due to the IT downsizing, i find firms seem to keep either the cheap entry level employees or the ones who know where all the political skeletons are and who put them there. Neither one knows much about what needs to be done to solve the problems,
Consulting is about customer management as much as it is about delivery of services.
I agree!!! It's about knowing which type of person they prefer and playing that part. It also depends on your role, I'm often hired as a Project Manager to handle difficult/trouble projects. In that role understanding the technology is often secondary to being able to communicate to the customer and get their buy-in on what has to be done. I have found the guys who authorize the expenditures want someone who can talk to them and tell them what's in it for the company, not some guy who gets them lost in the technology. Gaining the customer confidence is important as they will ofen give you a lot of lattitude in HOW you solve the problems. But bottom line is, you gotta perfrom regardless of what role you are in or which customer you work for.
OTOH, if I was dealing with a larger company who could afford it (this was a tiny 3-person outfit), I might have been inclined to charge for at least some of the phone support or on-site time.
Hold on there, large companies are MORE likely to try to get free time. The little guy knows you are little too, and he also count on you to keep his business systems running. The big company will try all sorts of things to get you to charge less, work for free, accept longer for payment, etc. Plus you go through 7 layers of management to get approval to be paid. And if you say "we have a contract that says..." they'll say "we have a lawyer who says..."
It's still a 32 bit core Xeon architecture. It's not runing full 64 bit instructions, what they did was a interesting tweak(kludge) and some marketing. They added special 64-bit instructions and ability to handle 64 bit memory addresses. Everything else is 32 bit, so it likely requires 2 clock cycles to execute a 64 bit instruction. I don't have time right now to dig into how it works.
You mean the Itanic (Itanium)chip? That one never lived up to it's promise, way overpriced, too hot, and with problems. I tried to order a HP box with that chip as a server for a company I worked with as they wanted cutting edge performance. The HP Sales guy said he would wouldn't take it if they gave it away! Perhaps things are better now, that was about a year ago, an eon in the processor chip market and the chip was brand new.
True, but in house code is free in most cases, the code having been depreciated to zero, plus the execution time is well known. And the results are proven! Engineers don't like to change away from what they know works, and sometimes that is a problem.
CPU time runs upwards of $5000 an hour on a large system. Engineer time is about $150. But think over the LIFETIME of the code, which in some systems is 30 yrs. You really don't save much time writing it in C, in fact I'd say (being a C programmer) it takes longer to write in C, and for SURE longer to debug if something goes wrong. C is a very powerful general purpose programming language and gives you lots of ways to kill your code. FORTRAN is simple,straightforward and good at Math, but useless for everything else. I like C, and I hated writing FORTRAN code but different tools for different jobs.
" it's a lot quicker to write/maintain makes most of that speed differential meaningless."
No it doesn't. Some of the FORTRAN code is used in algorithms that do things like Finite Element Analysis, High Energy Physics and Weather Prediction where it is not uncommon for something to run for HOURS or run many times with different variable settings (i.e. Monte Carlo). These systems invariably use highly optimized FORTRAN code. CPU time is NOT free and often an Engineer is charged a "tax" by IT for his CPU useage over his allocation. You only save the programmer time once, you save execution time EVERY run. I've worked in the Aerospace biz many years and have never seen big number crunching programs done in C/C++ or Java. I have seen some Assembler but not much. I've also written C code for embedded systems and I do know it can be written very efficently, but it's not at all optimized for Math thus FORTRAN beats it.
The REAL Math whizzes in college used APL and wrote complete programs in one line. Damn showoffs, I still hate thier guts! Good thing they work for ME now;)
Re:let's not single out the people with ideas...
on
The Dot Com Super Bowl
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Now I get it... the VC's were the ones on Crack! We were just taking advantage of them in thier diminished state. Catbert would be proud!:)
TX not TN, and yes I am because thats the way the article was written. If you want to ass-u-me that M$ annual revenue = 4X the quarterly revenue then they are bigger than TX. They don't outrank CA though, CA took in 98.7B last year, 77.3B from direct taxes, the other from other type of taxes/fees.
Just in case Bill Gates does not have 18,923 football fields he can stack 1 football field 18,923 *.0043[thickness of US currency paper] inches or 81.369 inches deep (or 6.7 feet deep).
Leave it to/. to compare them INCORRECTLY, I just looked up the State Tax "take" for my State (TX) http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxbud/bre2006/2006s ummarytables.pdf
for 2005 and it's $31B and we don't have a State Income Tax, only Sales Tax. So M$ income while impressive is NOT well above the other 48 states.
Or he may be unemployed just like all those Peoplesoft (ex)employees. When two big firms merger the one that was bought out often suffers the worst of the job cuts. Been there, done that, twice.
Even worse, what if it costs someone thier life or they become permanently disabled due to the records being corrupted or unavailable in an emergency. Who is at fault then? The doctor? The Hospital? The IT provider? The Worm's author? The authors of the software that was infected? Perhaps firms that have software in medical devices or that processes medical records have some sort of "out" in the license so they can't be sued. But, one thing is for sure the lawyers WILL get money from someone if this ever occured.
Correct, I just took out a medical insurance policy and by signing you gave the insurance company FULL access to you medical records related to any claim you might have. They can't go digging years back but they can see what they are paying for. If you participate in Clincal Trials or Government programs a lot of folks can see your data. HIPPA didn't close ALL the loopholes.
I agree. I also want to know how he talked $2M for 18 months work out of that sponsoring company. There is either a very large team or some very well paid developers. Seems to me he is getting big money for re-inventing and/or combining things that already exist. There are only so many ways to interact with a program without making things so complicated no one wants to use the interface.
Haliburton is DEAD. It's been investigated to a fare the well. Let it go. There are more important things to worry about.
Your Time article is political BS timed to occur right before the election. Lots of folks claim to be harrassed whistleblowers but few truly qualify. Most have an axe to grind. The laws on that are quite specific. I've turned in Gov't programs myself and never qualified under the law.
I told ya Congress critters seem to know how far they can push the law. I don't know about that case you mention. If he was not running for re-election he DOES need a job. Proving undue influence is very very hard. Even if it IS there, those level of folks play CYA very well.
Well, they are pretty darn independant right now! How much more CAN they get? They have thier own laws, Government, elections, etc.
China has been saber rattling over Tiawan for many years. Going to war with Taiwan would destroy what they want, the business assets and the land. They have no need for the people.
What if you have BOTH the MBA and have led a team (several times in fact) that delivered the software on-time, with high quality, AND with a profit. Can I be a VP now instead of a lowly Project Manager?;) The downside of success is that you get the chance to repeat it. Fail and you get promoted!
It can be learned in a classroom, however you can ONLY develop your own style of leadership by PRACTICE which occurs only in real life. Leadership is as much about passing on your experience and lessons learned as it is about anything else. It also involves trusting that others will benefit from your wisdom.
Quit flogging your Haliburton horse, it's long since dead. You are really showing your ignorance. When a person from private industry enters Gov't service they have to put any assets in a blind trust and they cannot be involved with any procurement from the company they worked at for at least 3 yrs. That situation is VERY closely monitored by the Government and by the Defense and Government contractor Industry. Boeing lost a 700M+ 767 Tanker contract for just this very reason. They hired someone to work on a program that had been involved in the Procurement of the same program when they were a Military officer. The laws used to be much more lax, but as I hear it from those in the business the Bush administration is MUCH more strict about this than ever before for those in the Executive Branch. Congress "critters" seem to get around this by not sending the money to a specific company but wording legislation to award $$$ to firms that operate in thier state, and some of that work, even if the company is based in another state will end up in thier state.
Which China? Goods made in Taiwan can also carry that label. It's an important distinction. I know of one large international company that was having its' laptops preloaded with software in China, and when those laptops were to be used by the group of the company that did Government business they had to completely re-image them just in case there were some Trojans planted. A LOT of large Chinese corporations have Government insiders in the management of the company, and they siphon off things they think are useful to advance the State. China on one hand is a very modern, (mostly)Free Market economy, but the Government is still FIRMLY in control. Do not for one instance think the people have any real rights. I don't know the details of Lenovo, but to have gotten as big as they are in the timeframe (less than 20 yrs) they had to have some help from the Government. I suspect the Gov't concerns are not the laptops themselves but things like the chip technologies that go INTO the laptops. I guess they could let the sale proceed but restrict Intel/AMD and others from selling the chips...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they abuse consultants because they CAN! Not quite as bad now, but a couple years ago if you got upset at the way they treated you, there was a line ready to take your place! I too wouldn't work for them again, but I would worry about getting my fees. I've seen this done for many reasons but mostly as a way of getting something good for cheap when money is tight, and money ALWAYS seems to be tight in big companies. They gotta meet that expected earnings number and keep the stock price up :( I've never had any issues with smaller firms, sometimes the managment is more hosed up about what the solution needs to be and then doing it but they do pay on time and they do tend to respect you. I guess they are a lot closer to your position than a big firm, as many companies got started as just one consultant :) As always, YMMV!
Also, be sure to CAREFULLY control scope. Scope creep can cost you a lot of money. You should negotiate payment for anything outside the orginal scope. That is a tough thing to do, but it protects your business from begin stuck for years doing something that should have been done in a few months.
Amen! They don't trust the in-house idiots when the chips are down, and if it all goes wrong (even if THEY did it) then the consultant is blamed and the contract is not renewed. Due to the IT downsizing, i find firms seem to keep either the cheap entry level employees or the ones who know where all the political skeletons are and who put them there. Neither one knows much about what needs to be done to solve the problems,
Consulting is about customer management as much as it is about delivery of services. I agree!!! It's about knowing which type of person they prefer and playing that part. It also depends on your role, I'm often hired as a Project Manager to handle difficult/trouble projects. In that role understanding the technology is often secondary to being able to communicate to the customer and get their buy-in on what has to be done. I have found the guys who authorize the expenditures want someone who can talk to them and tell them what's in it for the company, not some guy who gets them lost in the technology. Gaining the customer confidence is important as they will ofen give you a lot of lattitude in HOW you solve the problems. But bottom line is, you gotta perfrom regardless of what role you are in or which customer you work for.
OTOH, if I was dealing with a larger company who could afford it (this was a tiny 3-person outfit), I might have been inclined to charge for at least some of the phone support or on-site time.
Hold on there, large companies are MORE likely to try to get free time. The little guy knows you are little too, and he also count on you to keep his business systems running. The big company will try all sorts of things to get you to charge less, work for free, accept longer for payment, etc. Plus you go through 7 layers of management to get approval to be paid. And if you say "we have a contract that says..." they'll say "we have a lawyer who says..."
It's still a 32 bit core Xeon architecture. It's not runing full 64 bit instructions, what they did was a interesting tweak(kludge) and some marketing. They added special 64-bit instructions and ability to handle 64 bit memory addresses. Everything else is 32 bit, so it likely requires 2 clock cycles to execute a 64 bit instruction. I don't have time right now to dig into how it works.
You mean the Itanic (Itanium)chip? That one never lived up to it's promise, way overpriced, too hot, and with problems. I tried to order a HP box with that chip as a server for a company I worked with as they wanted cutting edge performance. The HP Sales guy said he would wouldn't take it if they gave it away! Perhaps things are better now, that was about a year ago, an eon in the processor chip market and the chip was brand new.
True, but in house code is free in most cases, the code having been depreciated to zero, plus the execution time is well known. And the results are proven! Engineers don't like to change away from what they know works, and sometimes that is a problem.
CPU time runs upwards of $5000 an hour on a large system. Engineer time is about $150. But think over the LIFETIME of the code, which in some systems is 30 yrs. You really don't save much time writing it in C, in fact I'd say (being a C programmer) it takes longer to write in C, and for SURE longer to debug if something goes wrong. C is a very powerful general purpose programming language and gives you lots of ways to kill your code. FORTRAN is simple,straightforward and good at Math, but useless for everything else. I like C, and I hated writing FORTRAN code but different tools for different jobs.
" it's a lot quicker to write/maintain makes most of that speed differential meaningless." No it doesn't. Some of the FORTRAN code is used in algorithms that do things like Finite Element Analysis, High Energy Physics and Weather Prediction where it is not uncommon for something to run for HOURS or run many times with different variable settings (i.e. Monte Carlo). These systems invariably use highly optimized FORTRAN code. CPU time is NOT free and often an Engineer is charged a "tax" by IT for his CPU useage over his allocation. You only save the programmer time once, you save execution time EVERY run. I've worked in the Aerospace biz many years and have never seen big number crunching programs done in C/C++ or Java. I have seen some Assembler but not much. I've also written C code for embedded systems and I do know it can be written very efficently, but it's not at all optimized for Math thus FORTRAN beats it.
The REAL Math whizzes in college used APL and wrote complete programs in one line. Damn showoffs, I still hate thier guts! Good thing they work for ME now ;)
Now I get it... the VC's were the ones on Crack! We were just taking advantage of them in thier diminished state. Catbert would be proud! :)
TX not TN, and yes I am because thats the way the article was written. If you want to ass-u-me that M$ annual revenue = 4X the quarterly revenue then they are bigger than TX. They don't outrank CA though, CA took in 98.7B last year, 77.3B from direct taxes, the other from other type of taxes/fees.
Just in case Bill Gates does not have 18,923 football fields he can stack 1 football field 18,923 *.0043[thickness of US currency paper] inches or 81.369 inches deep (or 6.7 feet deep).
Leave it to /. to compare them INCORRECTLY, I just looked up the State Tax "take" for my State (TX) http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxbud/bre2006/2006s ummarytables.pdf
for 2005 and it's $31B and we don't have a State Income Tax, only Sales Tax. So M$ income while impressive is NOT well above the other 48 states.
Or he may be unemployed just like all those Peoplesoft (ex)employees. When two big firms merger the one that was bought out often suffers the worst of the job cuts. Been there, done that, twice.
Even worse, what if it costs someone thier life or they become permanently disabled due to the records being corrupted or unavailable in an emergency. Who is at fault then? The doctor? The Hospital? The IT provider? The Worm's author? The authors of the software that was infected? Perhaps firms that have software in medical devices or that processes medical records have some sort of "out" in the license so they can't be sued. But, one thing is for sure the lawyers WILL get money from someone if this ever occured.
Correct, I just took out a medical insurance policy and by signing you gave the insurance company FULL access to you medical records related to any claim you might have. They can't go digging years back but they can see what they are paying for. If you participate in Clincal Trials or Government programs a lot of folks can see your data. HIPPA didn't close ALL the loopholes.
I agree. I also want to know how he talked $2M for 18 months work out of that sponsoring company. There is either a very large team or some very well paid developers. Seems to me he is getting big money for re-inventing and/or combining things that already exist. There are only so many ways to interact with a program without making things so complicated no one wants to use the interface.
Haliburton is DEAD. It's been investigated to a fare the well. Let it go. There are more important things to worry about. Your Time article is political BS timed to occur right before the election. Lots of folks claim to be harrassed whistleblowers but few truly qualify. Most have an axe to grind. The laws on that are quite specific. I've turned in Gov't programs myself and never qualified under the law. I told ya Congress critters seem to know how far they can push the law. I don't know about that case you mention. If he was not running for re-election he DOES need a job. Proving undue influence is very very hard. Even if it IS there, those level of folks play CYA very well.
Well, they are pretty darn independant right now! How much more CAN they get? They have thier own laws, Government, elections, etc. China has been saber rattling over Tiawan for many years. Going to war with Taiwan would destroy what they want, the business assets and the land. They have no need for the people.
What if you have BOTH the MBA and have led a team (several times in fact) that delivered the software on-time, with high quality, AND with a profit. Can I be a VP now instead of a lowly Project Manager? ;) The downside of success is that you get the chance to repeat it. Fail and you get promoted!
It can be learned in a classroom, however you can ONLY develop your own style of leadership by PRACTICE which occurs only in real life. Leadership is as much about passing on your experience and lessons learned as it is about anything else. It also involves trusting that others will benefit from your wisdom.
Quit flogging your Haliburton horse, it's long since dead. You are really showing your ignorance. When a person from private industry enters Gov't service they have to put any assets in a blind trust and they cannot be involved with any procurement from the company they worked at for at least 3 yrs. That situation is VERY closely monitored by the Government and by the Defense and Government contractor Industry. Boeing lost a 700M+ 767 Tanker contract for just this very reason. They hired someone to work on a program that had been involved in the Procurement of the same program when they were a Military officer. The laws used to be much more lax, but as I hear it from those in the business the Bush administration is MUCH more strict about this than ever before for those in the Executive Branch. Congress "critters" seem to get around this by not sending the money to a specific company but wording legislation to award $$$ to firms that operate in thier state, and some of that work, even if the company is based in another state will end up in thier state.
Which China? Goods made in Taiwan can also carry that label. It's an important distinction. I know of one large international company that was having its' laptops preloaded with software in China, and when those laptops were to be used by the group of the company that did Government business they had to completely re-image them just in case there were some Trojans planted. A LOT of large Chinese corporations have Government insiders in the management of the company, and they siphon off things they think are useful to advance the State. China on one hand is a very modern, (mostly)Free Market economy, but the Government is still FIRMLY in control. Do not for one instance think the people have any real rights. I don't know the details of Lenovo, but to have gotten as big as they are in the timeframe (less than 20 yrs) they had to have some help from the Government. I suspect the Gov't concerns are not the laptops themselves but things like the chip technologies that go INTO the laptops. I guess they could let the sale proceed but restrict Intel/AMD and others from selling the chips...