Out of the box consultants never have a clue when they set foot in our department. They fuck up at least one thing that causes us to wanting to grab a stick and chase him around the office. Yesterday, we had someone in for a 2 day job on testing pens. He ran an analysis script on our servers and apparently it was decided to use the smallest possible partition to store a gazillion analysis reports on. The smallest partition in this case was the home folder NFS share for the remote users. Byte-wise, the partition was far from full, inode-wise, it was an ex-partition. *SIGH*
Re:Any clued ins?
Ovid on 2007-10-01T12:02:09
I was impressed with an Oracle consultant I worked with. We needed serious help dealing with some performance issues and he was very, very good. Part of what helped is that he did serious interviewing of the entire development team to find out what we needed and many of our recommendations made it into his final report. He also turned out to be really good at database normalization (even to the point of recognizing when normalization would be a bottleneck).
Re:Any clued ins?
jplindstrom on 2007-10-01T13:13:16
With a name like that (dbperfman), you'd wonder whether the dude's gonna show up wearing a superhero cape.
But then I looked at the site, and he is obviously a ninja (and ninjas don't wear capes).
One company I worked at paid over $100,000 to consulting firm to come in and tell us what one of our systems did. This might not seem surprising as it can be difficult to answer this for legacy code, but this was a system that was currently in development! Only one developer was on the system and they arranged a meeting with him -- on the last day they were there and right before he was quitting the company. Not surprisingly, their description of the system was useless.
