Re: The so called 'Consultants' from India

an404544_at_anon.penet.fi, Pretending to be Sandy Sears, writes:
>
> I am a project manager at a fortune 100 bank based in Boston. I have
> the sole ownership of about 30 different client/server systems
> globally, most of these are built around Powerbuilder and Sybase. As
> you can imagine with a setup this big, we always have a number of
> outside consultants working on various projects.
>
> I recently decided to hire 20 consultants from a firm from India, this
> firm the name of which I would not say publicly is supposed to be THE
> consulting firm of India, and has a number of U.S and European companies
> as their clients.

    There is no such thing as "The" consulting firm of India; there     are several large companies competing to supply the demand for     contractors.

>The 20 consultants arrived about 6 months ago, at first, they had to go
>thru all the problems of leaving their country and families for the
>first time, which is understandable. But as time went on, myself and
>few others in the team started noticing that many of these
>'consultants' are pretty much devoid of any knowledge of computers at
>all.

    In that case, how did they make it through your technical interview?     Surely, as the sole owner/manager "of about 30 different client/server     systems", that too "globally" no less, you _did_ have someone conduct     technical interviews to ascertain whether these folks would fit in,     didn't you?

    Secondly, what kind of project is it that requires 20 "consultants"?     From the rest of your post, you seem to refer to contract programmers.     As the sole owner/manager "of about 30 different client/server     systems", surely, you know the difference.

>Although, a lot of the resumes did indicate they have MSc MCA(god
>knows what the hell that is!)

    Yup, god knows what the hell the degree is, but go ahead and hire them     anyway.

> 'upto seven years experience building Powerbuilder applications',

    And none of the whizkid interviewers you delegated to had the savvy to     investigate exactly how they could get _seven_ years of Powerbuilder     experience? Of course, you, as a manager "of about 30 different     client/server systems", could not be expected to know how many years     the products you were using have been available.

> Well, needless to say, eventually all the consultants were slowly
> replaced with local ones, they are more expensive, but atleast they
> knew what they are doing.
> Sandy Sears.

    When is your bank going to replace incompetent managers with those     who know what they are doing, and who won't anonymously slander an     entire community of software contractors merely to cover up their     own impenitent ignorance? Received on Thu Oct 12 1995 - 00:00:00 CET