Resource
I've worked in so many different companies and on different projects (as a contractor) and, looking-in as an external resource the problems are quite similar in every company.
I think IT workers, be they proj managers, developers, testers etc should be treated a bit more harshly. There are so many of these people leeching off skilled staff - they only survive by draining the time and energies of people genuinely skilled in their jobs.
Then there are people who've established a 'niche' skillset within their company, and they write some code or become specialised in a product etc. The problem is then that these people show aggression towards sharing their skillset/knowledge with others. For example, I worked at a place where new scripts for monitoring production servers could not be activated because the only resource in the company who could activate a middleware program they'd written (to pump data into netcool) decided to take holiday at very short notice. That delayed the project for a week!
The thing that annoys me the most is outsourcing - to both UK contract resource and abroad - to people who really can't do the job. These people then come into a company and earn a significant margin over the permanent staff who they rely on to do the job for them. Another company I worked for (when I was a permie) opted for bringing in resource, in fact a flood of Test Analcysts. These people basically created spreadsheets of dates from existing mpp plans. And that was it. They didn't actually do any of the work. So the company increased its project load and the permie staff took a hammering, which is one of the reasons I left.
Another is managers with political agendas. I was involved with interviewing outsourced staff for a certain project and, after about 9 interviews we had nothing. Then we found that the outsourcing company had an account manager on the interviews to 'coax' the interviewee's... then we also found that the candidates seemed to have pre-versed answers to our questions, so we changed the questions without informing our (Indian) manager and the candidates struggled like anything.
Eventually I was taken out of the interview loop and, suprise suprise a week later outsourced resourced flooded in (Indian), and there have been complaints about them ever since.
This post probably makes me sound like a right barsteward, but I'm just relaying my experiences!
In my opinion companies seem to focus on the wrong things.
To me the resource of a company is like a turd. A turd that contains gold nuggets on a small ratio of corn nuggets vs poo. A company should not focus on increasing the poo-matter, instead it should focus on digging the sweetcorn out of the turd and reducing the overall mass of the poo. In this way golden nuggets can achieve whilst the restraining poo can be chopped off.
All too often the sweetcorn within the resource turd is left to be overwhelmed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
