I think you hit the nail right on the head. If everything was simple, then how would consultants justify 150/hour rates?

I have always said that Comuter "science" in general and IT in particualr are just Con Jobs.

Something to do with human psyche and information hording and all that good stuff. Also note that humans are hard-wired to defer to "the priest" who intermediates with the "higher power".

This is why most IT and Computer professionals make a conscious and constant effort to blame the users and make them feel like shit and stupid for things which they shouldn't have to worry about.

Making you feel guilty so you will let the priest/mullah do what they want?

ring a bell?

Each of us carries more processing power than all the computation power used to fight the second world war AND send man to the moon.

Yet, notepad still wants to put a 4GB text file in a 20GB memory buffer. Isn't this cute?

Tech Tips

This is an interesting story and I think that the biggest real story behind this is that the fixers and tech guys of IT do not like this witch doctorness that causes great ideas to be dragged out into meetings either

I can understand your frustration. But you have over simplified it. Let me give you a bit of the IT guys' point of view.

Let's play with an example. You want to create a simple database of information for your division. Your IT guys don't want you to create a simple little MS Access ditty but they are understaffed and can't get you want quickly so you ignore them and do it anyway. You are just trying to get your job done and don't have time to wait for the unresponsive "witch doctors".

So let's jump ahead a few years. Maybe your division has expanded from a half dozen to 50 people since you used a DESKTOP class platform (Access) your app does not perform well with 50 people. Or maybe you stored it on the local hard drive of a machine in your division and it crashed and took years of your data with it. Or maybe since the app was created to "just work", the data was not normalized so you have inconsistent entries like "Witch Doctor" and "WitchDoctor" that over time gets impossible to do searches on to extract the data in usefull ways. Or maybe the guy who worked in your division who wrote it in the first place leaves and since no on in IT knew anything about what you were doing has no idea how to support this thing you absolutely depend on. Or maybe you created it in total secret in a government agency without IT knowing and when a Freedom of Information Act requests comes through they don't even know about your data to include it and therefore open your agency to being sued for non-compliance. Or...a hundred other things.

IT is not just about the geek down the hall fixing things on your PC that you could have done yourself. It's about applying INDUSTRY STANDARD and BEST PRACTICES to to gathering, storing, retrieval, and security of your data. The idea is for you not to have to think about these details so you can concentrate on the mission of your particular division. I covered just a little of it above and here are some labels for those simple examples - scalability, data consistency, corporate memory and documentation.

I learned something a long time ago when I was working in a factory: No one's job is as easy as it may appear from a distance.

Yes, some do act as witch doctors - but only because they only know a little more than whoever hired them - and they are scared they will be found out!!

I work advising people on IT from an impartial perspective - basically pointing out when its black magic!

The good geeks in IT are much more open to letting you know how it works, and why something needs to be done.

Consultants are very much for pushing the hyperthetical situations because they know they never happen - but business is all about reducing risk. Put one against the other - and the IT consultant feeds his family for a few weeks!

I find security people are the worst - although helpdesk jockeies can get very close - especially the ones dealing with retail and small business customers.

Security is all about being sensible and balancing convenience against security. Ever wondered why Dr Solomon (the man who invented the anti virus package) never actually used one himself?

In the end its all about listening and asking questions. If you don't understand the answer, tell them, but also point out when their answer contradicts something they said before. It takes a while to spot a fake - but its very satisfying exposing one!!

Surely the biggest witch-doctor gig is to be a celebrity CEO eg. Sol T. Any companies problem can be fixed by killing the existing witch-doctor and getting a better witch-doctor with more powerful magic. But you must pay them at least twice as much as that charlatan witch-doctor you had before.

Well consultants are paid for the advice they give, so is it little wonder that they like to rabbit on and on....kind of like a financial adviser, really.

Consultants are like lawyers, they bill by the hour.

Is it any wonder then that they are trying to maximise the number of billable hours.

Until customers stop paying by the hour and start pushing for a different billing model, don't expect the above to change.

there are witch-doctors in any profession. they are more commonly known as "people who really don't know what the hell they're doing". they throw out a lot of busy talk in order to appear intelligent, and overcomplicate everything so they lock themselves into a job.

but i work with six guys are intelligent as f***. we work hard, and solve difficult problems to keep our company running. all our customers in our company are grateful for our help, and are grateful for the expertise we provide.

granted, we still use witch-doctoring, but only on the people we don't like.

Ha Ha...well spoken words..