But customers—other large organisations—love this. They would, apparently, much rather spend millions of dollars on an over-specified ‘platform’ and a team of horrifically expensive consultants to attempt to build an application out of it (eventually succeeding months behind schedule and with half the feature set missing) than simply to get a few in-house programmer nerds to hack up a bespoke system in half the time and one hundredth of the cost. I certainly could have done such myself, and I’m hardly the world’s brightest programmer. (No, really.)
On I wrote Millions of dollars on an over-specified platform, on the subject of Uncategorized.
Dave Farquhar
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dfarq: I agree. I just wish the world wasn’t like that.
You bet they love it. It’s simple. “Oversaw $25 million server migration project” looks impressive on a resume. If your in-house programmers did it, you might not even get a line on your resume.
And money is power. The more money your department spends, the more important you look and the more likely you are to get a budget increase next year. Save the fat trimming for a crisis.