allycat53

To bring these two quotes together with the overall thread ... I worked for a big six consultancy in the late 90s and as a new consultant was dropped into a very large gas company to do a job I had no experience or training in, but just cracked on and made it up as I went along / did the best I could and the job turned out well in the end. One of the things I needed was a dataset that had to be extracted from a mainframe system and I was told it could take months as their was a queue for new requests and they were in the midst of outsourcing parts of their IT and unfortunately the guys who knew how to access the data were about to be made redundant. On discussing this with the specific individuals involved I was a little apprehensive in case they were angry/upset etc about losing thier jobs. In actual fact they couldn't have been happier as they were leaving on Friday with generous golden handshakes and coming back as self-employed contractors on Monday on the day rate equivalent of 3-4x their previous annual salary. They were the only ones who knew how certain parts of the system worked (they probably coded lots of it) and they had the client over a barrel in some ways. The client needed to show "cost savings" and "headcount reductions" after privatisation, but higher costs in a different accounting bucket were ok They reckoned it could be several years before their gig might end. I think our day rates were still higher than theirs though . Ah, consultancy, the days of flying round the world at client expense and gaining my first Gold card in around 1999 before children came along and I got off the road. Now about to get my second Gold card just 23 years later thanks to the double TP promo and a rather cheap F trip to JFK tomorrow, booked during covid for about £1600 and rebooked twice since.