Re: Double-edged sword - A few years later
Experience matters. I went on-site to upgrade a system and IBM had been flying 60+ people in every week for 3 months to develop a solution. While there I talked to the head developer and he was explaining a problem they were having and in less than an hour determined their whole approach would never work and they would have to start over. To them I was just the operations tech (but I had worked in development for 15 years before that) .Well the old guy obviously knows nothing so they went on as is. I brought it up to the project manager and 6 weeks later to shut me up they called the chief scientist who told them the same thing - they fundamentally misunderstood how the product worked and their approach would never work. Do the math - that's close to 30k hours at say 125/hour? Do you think IBM credited the customer for that? I left IBM to build server farms that ran for years w/o downtime. When IBM contracted me back for their cloud operations the new guys in charge had no experience and their cloud systems wouldn't stay up for more than a week w/o crashing. These days most IBM products have been sold off to HLC even if the brand name hasn't changed. IBM is just a big staff augmentation and service company these days.