Why people dislike consultants

Dear All,

It seems to me, from my experience in the industry, that people do not like computer consultants very much. As my experience mostly falls in the Oracle domain, I thought this would be a good place to ponder this issue.

I thought I would scribe some of my thoughts to provoke the discussion. Some may be a little contentious, to shake the bag a bit, so to speak:

Q1. Who commissions a consultant?
A1. Your boss - somebody with enough approval authority to pay for the service. This is the first bone of contention - is it true that when a consultant appears, he/she is not entirely expected/wanted by the people doing the work?
Nobody can dispute that you really need help once in a while, for any number of reasons. How CHEAP would consulting help need to be in order to allow the purchasing decision to fall back into the hands of the guy/gal with hands on keyboards? Would this kind of model make the help more welcome?

Q2. Why do consultants get commissioned in the first place? A2. Bandwidth. Surely most of the value that a consultant brings is already available in an increasing number of online resources? Is a consultant not a redundant figure? What possible extra value can a consultant bring? Is it purely the case that there is not enough time to surf for the answers?

Q3. Are consultants good enough to rehire? A3. Mostly not. This results in a large proportion of the chargeable hours being spent by the consultant finding his/her feet, only to never return. Net result to the permanent employee: lots of wasted time, and only a small gain made.

Q4. What do consultants NOT offer as a service? A4. What people actually need. Things like a nicely organized approach to performance analysis, complete tools for space management, and so on. Consultants enjoy being enigmas, and cherry picking the nice work, like narrow-band performance investigations, and the best bits of architecture work.

Am I wrong, or are these common feelings? If I were a consultant, I would want to know what I could do to be a shining light - perhaps asking the following questions in addition to those above:

What are your most common performance problems? What duties takes the most time in your job? What duties do you dislike the most?
What can I do to help?

Just my two pennies!

James

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Before you buy. Received on Mon Nov 15 1999 - 07:37:02 CST