
The Truth About IT Consultants - naish
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080418_004737.html
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zeraholladay
News at 11: Witless, soulless corporate management seduced by consulting firm.
"I really liked the cool golf shirt and the free lunches," said Jerry from
middle management, "but we really need to blame our failure on someone outside
of the company. It didn't take long to realize consulting firm X was only
interested in our money and this very cool golf shirt is still not worth the
couple million dollars we spent [on consulting firm X]. I'm still trying to
come to terms with the concept of a 'free market.'"

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spanktheuser
Great parody of this column at <http://cringelysucks.blogspot.com>. Sure, lots
of IT consultants suck. But Bob's thinking is, as usual, really lame. Read
Cringely first, then read the parody.

~~~
apathy
I liked both of the lists. As usual, both of the articles could be elided and
the lists would do the trick (of communicating 99.9% of the information
present)

I'm tempted to hand Cringely's list (with "find yer best nerd" precaution
prepended) to every last one of my clients. And then up my rate a little.

There are companies with whom I work where I would dearly love to implement a
big-data-on-the-server, pay-as-you-go service model (eg. digesting microarray
data, normalization, preprocessing, PCA) talking via HTTP (as
deltas/resultsets) to a lighter-weight client. It's got to the point where any
implementation of consequence basically has to be like this given the amount
of processing required. I'd do it for free, for fun, if it weren't for the
fact that I need that time to work on papers and other paying jobs... plus I
like spending time with my daughter. It's one of those "shit, if I knew back
then what I know now" situations that I figure old people find themselves in
all the time. (Because I am now over 30 and, therefore, _OLD_ )

Once upon a time, I hated my job(s) and needed to be paid exorbitantly just to
show up. Now I need to be paid exorbitantly to turn down the 'other' jobs that
pay well but are less interesting. I guess that is a good thing. I guess it
also means that I am no longer an 'IT consultant' because the 'IT' part of
what I do is ancillary to the meat, which is algorithmic and (multi-)domain-
specific. Hmm.

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aswanson
Are you working on data mining algorithms or the supporting infrastructure?

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apathy
Both. I prefer the former; the latter pays better at the moment, I'm sorry to
say. That may just be a reflection of the fact that I'm not yet where I'd like
to be WRT the former.

~~~
aswanson
_I prefer the former_

Don't we all...The latter is a solved problem with a million variants, the
former is new ground.

Would you recommend any papers/books in that area?

~~~
apathy
In my area the most recent terribly-interesting paper was by the deCode people
re: genetics of gene expression and inferring network 'modules' from patterns
of activity. There are more theoretically-interesting methods to deduce such
graph-based causal networks (eg. Bayesian networks sampled via Metropolis-
Hastings MCMC, or the paradoxically 'dumber' but more viable-in-the-cloud
methods using MLEM, of which I am a proponent) but the deCode guys have the
advantage of actually producing useful results _right now_.

Overall (i.e. not restricted to my field of expertise) I would suggest that
the biggest trove of ready-to-be-applied material on the Web is Andrew Moore's
site at CMU: <http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/index.html>

Possibly the worst-kept secret on the Web :-)

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gruseom
I love the Dilbert where Dogbert becomes a consultant when he figures out that
it means you _con_ the customer and in _sult_ him.

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omouse
IBM rips a company off? Well _there's_ a surprise!

~~~
lithp
I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.

In his service to mankind -- that’s why we are so gay. Hey!

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henning
"I'm a consultant, aren't you?"

No.

~~~
mixmax
Maybe you should start - it's easy money

:-)

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sabat
I'm not sure this is news. Maybe outside of the industry.

When I was at Oracle, about 12 years ago, they used to take the poor
performers that they didn't fire and send them to the consulting division.

