Re: What Actually Causes Deadlock

On Dec 15, 7:54 am, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> I was once introduced to an individual who was purportedly the 'senior
> technical guy' at a consulting practice. He had many years of
> experience, and he was very fond of 'researching solutions', which meant
> spending two weeks identifying API's I could locate myself in less than
> 5 minutes.
>
> More than a year after the introduction, I taught him how to nest one
> loop inside another.

LOL. I know the type!

> While one occasionally meets a competent, conscientious consultant,
> 99.99% are disgusting parasites, and I have watched more than one kill
> the host. The consulting industry is rotten to the core with fraud and
> malpractice, which are criminal; however, ending the crimes first
> requires the political will to gather the evidence and to hold the
> criminals accountable.

While I have definitely met various individuals such as the ones you describe above (it's how I first heard of XML), I have met plenty of good ones. I don't find the competency ratio a lot different for contract programmers than for full time employees. OTOH I have heard repeated rumors that some of the larger firms are "rotten to the core" and even have some evidence to support that idea.

But *cough* I have done some contract work myself, and I recall at least one occasion when I came in to a company and discovered that the entire tech staff ranged from just adequate to abysmal. (It turned out they did have one really good guy but he was on vacation when I started. The funny part was that because of our organizational positions, we immediately distrusted each other, but within a few weeks we admitted to each other that we were the only sane and qualified ones present.) I recall teaching their programming staff that you could put a method in a superclass and then not have to type it in manually to each and every class.

Marshal Received on Fri Dec 15 2006 - 17:16:25 CET