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Travellers Tales

Back in the day, I was a 'Software Consultant'. I know what they tell you that means but what it actually means is I got paid about 20% of my hourly rate to go to some far off part of the world to help a company put a project back into something that could be called successful. In my time out on the road I learned that whatever a company did for a living is where the "A Team" players were, the parts of the company that supported the actual doing of the company, those were the B and C team players. If a company was an oil company, you can bet the actual oil engineers were top of the line, but the payroll department was something less than impressive. I once visited a rather large retailer who got themselves in a world of hurt. The basic reason was their Vice President of IT was one of the original company employees and when the company started, he ran the payroll on PC's in his garage. When the company went national, he continued to rise with the fortunes of the company. Now he was in charge of several million dollars of hardware and projects staff with hundreds of people and he was in way over his head. He would fire people in the morning, only to re-hire them in the afternoon. He was a great example of B people hiring C and D people. The man was a walking insane asylum and his organization reflected it. You would walk through the cubicles and all you would hear was people getting interviews for other jobs. Once I had to fly out to their site to give a talk on some technical aspect of the project, after I finished he shook my hand and said thanks. I returned to the airport and having a few minutes to spare I called my boss. My boss said that the IT/VP had just called and was screaming mad that I had left before giving the presentation. I returned to the site, the VP said my boss was a “crazy woman” that no such thing had occurred. I then went to a conference room and had a conference with the VP and my boss. He said that no such call occurred, and that he was very happy with our company and our work. So, once again, I left.

Sure enough, 15 minutes after leaving, he called the CEO, and chewed him out, saying that my boss and I had failed to deliver. I returned to SF without delay. Back at the Office, On the map next to Atlanta, I wrote “ Here there be dragons”…

My job, and the many other “road warrior “ consultants was to try to put that mess back together so the VP could look like a hero, instead of the ignorant goon that he was. The technical stuff was easy, it was the people that made the projects hard.

It went that way at every project. When you are a consultant, your job is not to look like a hero, your job is to make the customer look like a hero. They make it very hard. Projects had a hierarchal pyramid of failure. At the narrow top were projects with adequate money and management goals and good staff. At the fat end were projects that were either grossly under funded or schedules that were at best, sugar filled fantasy or at worst, sadism writ large. There were ( and still are! ) a lot of project at the fat end. Staff was always a problem. In the 1980's most shops had software architects, programmers of different levels and years of experience with their customers needs. But the late 1980's everything began to change, pretty soon entire shops were staffed with contractors and consultants with only the management being actual employees. For those of us in the consulting end, offshoring wasn't such a leap, we'd seen the signs for years. Companies were spending millions of dollars for projects that had a lifespan of 36 months. It was like flushing money down the corporate sewer at an amazing rate. I once worked on a project to implement a piece of software at a company that had 500 people on this one project and was scheduled to take 24 months to implement. Now, bear in mind that the company I worked for, the company that created the software was only 75 people from stem to stern and we built the software from scratch in 14 months. The cost on this project was so high the system would have to be in production for 25 years in order to successfully get enough buyback to justify the spending they put into that system.

In those days, companies wanted all the goodies that came with software, but they never wanted the staff that came with maintaining it. Project after project was staffed by mercenaries like myself with only a caretaker group afterward. While we saw hundreds of large-scale implementations, most company staff was lucky if they ever started and finished a single project.

In 1999 and 2000 the last of the Y2K Gold Rush came to an end and the software engineering industry experienced something that most people in the business had never seen, a downturn. Aerospace, Automobile engineers know very well the vagaries of the market, but software people knew of nothing but “up and up” and “more and more”. That all came to an end after the gluttony of Y2K spending stopped.

In 2000, I stopped being a consultant, not due to the economics but after 14 years on the road, it simply became time to come home. Luckily the market changes actually worked in my favor as the emphasis on remote support and outsourcing turned into perfect ways to ensure that I never had to travel.

The time since 2000 has been rough for most of us in this business, but I think the drought is nearly over. Those of us still in the business know that there are essentially two gigs in the business, plumbers and management. Plumbers are the technicians, the kind of crazy whackjobs that work 14 hours a day on software then go to the book store to buy a book about computers then go home and play computer games for another 6 hours, sleep 3 hours and start over. The basic business rule today is that plumbers always work, managers go out in a blaze of glory.

I am a plumber. I work with Linux operating systems and Intel hardware in a stateless mode. Most of the things I do are only known by a handful of people and its rare that I ever find a book on the subject matter that I work with, if I can find a white paper that covers the stuff I work with, I’m thrilled. I love it, its great. I wouldn’t change my current gig for anything. I’m home every day, the work is incredibly engaging and I like the management. My team is literally all over the globe, none of us is closer than 800 miles from the next guy.

I've been management on occasion, but I find it the hardest kind of work. As a technical, I can put the work aside at the end of the day. As a manager I could never get my mind out of work. No matter how much was done, there was always something else to do, and people were a constant worry. I'm not particularly good at office politics and I don’t enjoy the sport.

Next week I will take my first business trip in a year. There was a time when I traveled 50 weeks a year. Nowadays travel is so rare that I actually look forward to it. I'm meeting with people that I've worked with day in and day out for 4 years but I’ve never actually met. 10 years ago you couldn’t even get a client to let you dial into their systems; today they would rather do anything except pay for travel. Suits me fine, as we used to say: "going on the road is fun, living on the road is the worst kind of hell."

I'm looking forward to getting out of the house. It will be nice to see people in person that I've worked with hand-in-hand for 4 years but never actually seen. What is really nice is I wont be doing for the next 50 weeks, week in and week out. It will be this one trip to sunny Florida, with no other purpose than to meet and greet people on my team that I've never met.

Posted @ December 02, 2004 09:06 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: mostly cajun at December 3, 2004 08:11 AM

Posted by: Frank Martin at December 3, 2004 10:58 AM

Posted by: Sharpshooter at December 3, 2004 12:34 PM