Re: pl/sql code maintenance

Reminds me of 3 stories.

One company hadn't finished the software so they sent out the floppies anyway and purposely damaged the first disk. (thereby making it impossible to install. We are talking a long time ago when CDs did not exist or not in any quantity.)
Meanwhile they finished the program and when people complained to support , support apologized , blamed the US postal service and said they would send out a replacement disk. Two weeks later when the program was finished they sent out the replacement disk. They bought themselves about a month with this method.

Another company (made tape backup software) would put in wait states in patches so things would take longer and longer to backup. Then they would market the next major upgrade as a speed improvement. (which you had to buy to get)

A large computer company (known by three letters), had a requirement to have a timesharing system where the performance of a benchmark would be the same for 1 user or if all 30 users were on the system at the same time. Engineering met this marketing requirement. They put in wait states in inverse proportion to the number of users.

So I agree with Daniel, fools can only do so much damage; it is the intelligent unethical ones I worry about. Sorry you have such lousy experience with consultants. The other thing that really burns me is when someone in house is totally ignored and the consultant's word is taken as god. (no questioning etc.) Just because you are paying them exhorbinate fees doesn't mean you have to treat them as god. In fact, I think management should get their moneys worth and demand results and proof.

Have a nice holiday season.
Jim

"DA Morgan" <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:3E03C576.AE76F293_at_exesolutions.com...
> Sybrand Bakker wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 20 Dec 2002 15:26:54 -0800, DA Morgan
> > <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote:
> >
> > >If there are developers in a test or production database ... the DBA
isn't
> > >doing the job the DBA was hired to do.
> >
> > In many situations that's not the situation, because usually
> > developers think they are God and a DBA is by design *stupid* or he
> > wouldn't have become a DBA.
> > My firm has been dealing several times with button-trained monkeys
> > coming directly from school, employed by some very large consultancy
> > firms (which will always get away with the mess they are selling
> > because they can afford to hire the best lawyers), without any
> > specific Oracle experience, telling our DBA's what to do, and no DBA
> > was allowed to do *anything* without *explicit written permission* of
> > the consultancy firm. The term RFC (Request For Change) probably does
> > ring a bell, or are you really living in a paradisian ivory tower at
> > the University of Washington?
> > With *anything* I include *all* activities which are usually the
> > exclusive domain of the DBA. Only if the monkeys screw up (which they
> > do very often) it is the privilege of my firm to restore backups
> > (because no trained monkey would even deign himself to clean the mess
> > that he caused)
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA
> >
> > To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address
>
> Of course at the university, as an instructor, I can make my own rules.
But
> 90% of what I do is consulting where I have been in firms such as Boeing,
> AT&T Wireless, a bank, etc. And in those environments I can assure you no
one
> other than a designated DBA, a member of the DBA team, gets access except
read
> only. And even read only access is rare.
>
> The people the consultancies send in are definitely a problem. But from my
> experience even they are refused access to production except in an
advisory
> capacity. They advise ... we tested before implementation. And from my
> experience with them ... and I'm about to paint a very broad brush here
...
> you are correct that many/most haven't a clue what they are doing. But
worse
> than that ... some of them do ... and I have observed one top consultancy
> (part of a Big 5 accounting firm that shall remain nameless but whose name
> starts with the lettes KPMG) intentionally mistune an Oracle Financials
> project so that they could come back latter, charge more money, and tune
it.
> This wasn't incompetence ... it was intentional.
>
> The moral of the story is that they aren't all untrained monkeys. Some of
them
> know exactly what they are doing. And they may be the most dangerous of
all.
>
> Dan Morgan
>
Received on Fri Dec 20 2002 - 20:18:59 CST