The Truth About IT Consultants | Hacker News Reader

The Truth About IT Consultants

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28 pointsnaish13 comments

News at 11: Witless, soulless corporate management seduced by consulting firm. "I really liked the cool golf shirt and the free lunches," said Jerry from middle management, "but we really need to blame our failure on someone outside of the company. It didn't take long to realize consulting firm X was only interested in our money and this very cool golf shirt is still not worth the couple million dollars we spent [on consulting firm X]. I'm still trying to come to terms with the concept of a 'free market.'"

Great parody of this column at http://cringelysucks.blogspot.com. Sure, lots of IT consultants suck. But Bob's thinking is, as usual, really lame. Read Cringely first, then read the parody.

I liked both of the lists. As usual, both of the articles could be elided and the lists would do the trick (of communicating 99.9% of the information present)

I'm tempted to hand Cringely's list (with "find yer best nerd" precaution prepended) to every last one of my clients. And then up my rate a little.

There are companies with whom I work where I would dearly love to implement a big-data-on-the-server, pay-as-you-go service model (eg. digesting microarray data, normalization, preprocessing, PCA) talking via HTTP (as deltas/resultsets) to a lighter-weight client. It's got to the point where any implementation of consequence basically has to be like this given the amount of processing required. I'd do it for free, for fun, if it weren't for the fact that I need that time to work on papers and other paying jobs... plus I like spending time with my daughter. It's one of those "shit, if I knew back then what I know now" situations that I figure old people find themselves in all the time. (Because I am now over 30 and, therefore, OLD)

Once upon a time, I hated my job(s) and needed to be paid exorbitantly just to show up. Now I need to be paid exorbitantly to turn down the 'other' jobs that pay well but are less interesting. I guess that is a good thing. I guess it also means that I am no longer an 'IT consultant' because the 'IT' part of what I do is ancillary to the meat, which is algorithmic and (multi-)domain-specific. Hmm.

Are you working on data mining algorithms or the supporting infrastructure?

Both. I prefer the former; the latter pays better at the moment, I'm sorry to say. That may just be a reflection of the fact that I'm not yet where I'd like to be WRT the former.

I prefer the former

Don't we all...The latter is a solved problem with a million variants, the former is new ground.

Would you recommend any papers/books in that area?

In my area the most recent terribly-interesting paper was by the deCode people re: genetics of gene expression and inferring network 'modules' from patterns of activity. There are more theoretically-interesting methods to deduce such graph-based causal networks (eg. Bayesian networks sampled via Metropolis-Hastings MCMC, or the paradoxically 'dumber' but more viable-in-the-cloud methods using MLEM, of which I am a proponent) but the deCode guys have the advantage of actually producing useful results right now.

Overall (i.e. not restricted to my field of expertise) I would suggest that the biggest trove of ready-to-be-applied material on the Web is Andrew Moore's site at CMU: http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/index.html

Possibly the worst-kept secret on the Web :-)

I love the Dilbert where Dogbert becomes a consultant when he figures out that it means you con the customer and insult him.

IBM rips a company off? Well there's a surprise!

I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.

In his service to mankind -- that’s why we are so gay. Hey!

"I'm a consultant, aren't you?"

No.

Maybe you should start - it's easy money

:-)

I'm not sure this is news. Maybe outside of the industry.

When I was at Oracle, about 12 years ago, they used to take the poor performers that they didn't fire and send them to the consulting division.

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