Re: "The contractors were fired."
In my first employment, as a junior dev, I was working with an expert just contracted for his extensive DB2 knowledge. He was supposed to set up a battery of DB tests on a Friday for me and my mates to follow up during the weekend (as this was a Y2K project and time was running short, we, the minions, would be there - but not the expensive contractor).
The bad news is that he managed to screw up on every single test he was supposed to prepare by not allocating disk. space - and the leaving logs of it for us to see. That meant he had just wasted the whole team a Saturday By the end of the day I'd managed to redo - this time correctly - everything the expert was supposed to have done for us and our team got it's work done for others to take on next Monday.
The good news it that the following Monday, our manager heard us arguing about what had happened (I may have been expressing in not very pleasant terms how pissed off I was about all that sorry affair) and, after investigating it, called me apart and told me I didn't need to worry about it any more as the 'expert' was no longer working there.
Even better news is that I also got promoted a month or so later, with the way I handled that incident being a factor.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
