OK, so I am the technical dogsbody for a company who peddle consultancy services for the bloatware known as SAP (I could spell out what the initials stand for, but it’s so dull you’ll want to kill yourself). This is huge, database driven mainframe software that has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 1990’s. Shame that it’s now 2006.
Anyway, the SAP world is an alternative reality in which crappy, outdated software is sold for literally millions to credulous fools, who are then obliged to call in armies of eye-wateringly expensive consultants who ultimately fail to get thing thing working the way it said it would in the reams of marketing bullshit. This is the point at which my employers become involved - we sell our very expensive SAP-support services to the poor saps (heh) who bought this junk.
So we have these SAP consultants who are charged out at maybe $1,200 a day, and take home a sizeable chunk of that themselves for their expertise. And yet, of the thirty or so that I have to look after in my company, maybe three of these very highly paid computer experts know that, for example, in Windows you can press Return, instead of picking up the mouse and clicking on OK or the default button. They don’t know that you can press Tab to move between fields, instead of laboriously locating and clicking in the next field with the mouse. They use Internet Explorer because they are not aware that there are other web browsers. These are poeple who persuade multinationals to spend millions upgrading their software because the new version has a better user interface. But they don’t even know the absolute basics of GUIs, stuff that has been standard since about 1985.
Is there any way that I could become one of these highly-paid consultants? I read the Dope; I even know that there are key combinations on the Windows key!
Just goes to show which skills are more valuable. If you owned the company who would you rather have working for you? The guy who knows all the Windows shortcuts, or the guy who can persuade others to spend millions?
The guy who can sell is rare. Guys who know the shortcuts are a dime a dozen.
Besides, they’re selling to guys who haven’t a clue themselves. Techies can’t sell for shit, they can only talk to other techies, and they usually spend half their time or more posing and posturing about who is the techier tech. They would talk it forever and the POS software would never even get to Purchasing.
As a consultant of that type, I can defend them a little but I still don’t think it is admirable. Consultants for these types of huge enterprise systems are most concerned with process flows, data structures, and business impact. It has little to do with what is on the GUI although there should be someone that is concerned with those types of end users as well. I have been at my current job for 11 months working on manipulating data from some very large systems. I am ashamed to say that I absolutely cannot even log in to the major system that drives the data there, While I probably should familiarize myself with that at some point, I really don’t need to. My job is with the back end databases and programs. I don’t need to see a user screen to get to those. While it is handy for anyone to know keyboard shortcuts, most consulting isn’t really concerned with the people doing data entry. It is with the data and the data structures itself and how that drives the business.
One of these days, I’m going to teach a class called, “Learning to Speak Computer,” or something. It’s going to be a general GUI class, in which I teach people Control+Z, Control+Y, tab to move between fields, and a variety of the other tricks that have made people, and this is not a figure of speech, drop their jaws when I’ve shown it to them. I won’t even charge $1200 a day for it.
I was prepared to be humbled by your tech-ness in telling me that I’m an idiot because I don’t know that Windows + 6 + CTRL + SHIFT = quick log off (it doesn’t, was joke)…but not knowing how to tab through forms and hitting enter to submit?
That’s totally how my mom uses the Interweb and it irks me…and she does it for FREE!
As an IT guy and a short cut user, I also judge people on their use of short cuts. The smartest guy I ever worked with at least when it comes to Windows programming tools, could barely type at all. And I’m not kidding. I’ve seen toddlers navigate a keyboard better than this. He realizes how awful his keyboarding skills are, and, eventually, he let lose the fact that his eyesight is very bad and typing just isn’t easy. He uses the mouse for almost everything, highlights, right clicks and copy/pastes everything. And he charged something like $150hr.
I’m pretty confident that the great teams of folks who know none of the shortcuts and such are not all businesspeople who can all convince others to part with millions.
It really is frustrating to be standing next to highly paid consultants, having to teach them computer basics. Or worse – having to show them how to do their job. How’s this one for size: bringing in data warehousing experts and then watching them as they make very fundamental modeling flaws (glaring errors that are not correct in either dimensional modeling or normalized modeling).
When you pay the big company to do a job, you expect them to bring in at least a few top experts to make sure the rest of their team is not making egregious errors.
Stuff like not knowing many basics of Windows is just symptomatic of deeper problems.
I work for a company which has the best(?) of both worlds: SAP for backend financials, and PeopleSoft for benefits admin and payroll. Since I work with the latter, my exposure to SAP has been limited to getting the two to speak to one another; but I’ve seen enough to get the impression that they’re both offshoots of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, based on the following maxim:
Having worked for a number of firms who’ve brought in consultants to help them “improve” their operations, IMHO, the only people who are dumber than consultants are the people who hire them. In every case, the consultants were more interested in flirting with the good looking women at the company than actually doing anything they were paid for. Every recommendation that they made was simply physically impossible (in sense that they were wanting us to cram 400 cu. ft. of stuff in a 2 cu. ft. space) and had they been paying attention, they would have known that.
An application consultant’s job is to know business processes, why they are important and how best to support them with the software. That’s what they get paid a bunch of money for. The lack of knowledge of windows shortcuts does not necessarily indicate they are not very valuable.
No, but in my experience of 5 years implementing and re-implementing SAP, it’s the ones who don’t know ctrl+C who do not care about what the original, “starting point process” is and who say things like “oh, we don’t need to do data cleansing beforehand, we’ll just do it later!” and “who cares what the end users want” (hint: if the peons aren’t happy, they won’t use the system; if the peons don’t use the system, the general manager doesn’t get his reports; if the general manager doesn’t get his reports, you have an unhappy customer)
That particular decision led to my having a job for 9 months cleansing data after the fact; doing it beforehand would have taken me about 5 days. My piggybank is happy but I reserve the right to consider that guy a moron. He was also one of those guys who want everything to be automatic but change with his whims. One of my customers invented a name for this: “automagic”.
Too many of the “three-piece suits” walk into factories telling people “this is how you have to do your job” instead of asking “how are you doing your job now?”
Well, in fairness to the clowns who are installing SAP, that is one time that such people are exactly right. SAP took a different approach to writing software than any of their predecessors such as McCormick & Dodge, MSA, ASI, Baan, PeopleSoft, etc.: they decided that rather than having to write endless modules that would have to be designed to mix and match with other modules to fit the the way that each company ran their business, they would “simplify” things by writing one set of systems and then telling the customers that they only needed to change their entire business structure to match the software. Why in the world SAP got even a second contract, much less built an entire business, I have no idea, but there are CEOs and other idiot officers who are willing to buy that sales pitch. (Of course, one of the reasons that thete are so many companies providing consultants at $1,200/day to implement SAP is that few companies ever really change their business models to match purchased software, so then the company winds up having to spend four times their initial SAP investment building interfaces to change the company input to match SAP and SAP output to match the company business.)
