Funny that: one of my last days as a contractor on a client site before running direct, there was a project to rewrite one of their major asp/sql/mts (that's mts being used as a means of putting something down on a contractors CV which didn't do anything but add serialization to all SQL calls and add layer overhead) jobbies.
The band of contractors there (me included) (1 SQL, 3 devs) reckoned we could do it in 6 months in XML/XSLT/.NET/SQL and on contractor rates would have worked out ~£200,000.
Instead, they bought in a bunch of fucking retards who couldn't speak English from the following countries: Sweden, India, Asia, South America, Middle East etc but funnily enough, no-one from good old UK, under the umbrella of Sword Management and they immediately decided to Java the project and spend time on hundreds of meetings, asking the client stupid questions and writing lots of reports that had grammar that would embarrass A-level students etc
This client was stupid - they even bought in a consultancy before us whose flavour of technology for that time was Documentum, which they used to store the data in the form of excel documents. Now, an Oracle or SQL DB would have been the most obvious choice, but oh, no...
It wasn't even complicated project - plain DB/web thing.
£3m was what they were charging... and the client paid.
I knew there was money to be made in IT....!
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Can you slow down a little
One of the senior developers on site has passed me some work to finish.
"How long should it take me" - I asked.
"Well it would take me two days, so it wont take you as long" was his reply
"Oh right, I doubt it, bearing in mind you've been working on it already' I said
'No, trust me you will do it quicker than us. Seriously can you work a little slower - you're making us look bad'
Oh dear.
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