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From: Martin Gregorie on 5 May 2010 19:09
On Wed, 05 May 2010 22:17:06 +0000, Arved Sandstrom wrote:

> In at least one case the cold-blooded, calculating intent of the
> consulting company was to OJT a junior hire on the taxpayer's dime,
>
The worst case I ever saw was on a Government contract, but that may have
been incidental. The, allegedly, competent COBOL consultant was entirely
incompetent - he didn't even know know that a COBOL paragraph falls
through to the next paragraph by default. This was proved by every one of
his inline paragraphs having "GO TO NEXT-PARAGRAPH-NAME." as its final
sentence. Some of the other contractors had seen him around for seven
years and swore that he'd never been known to complete a working program.
His one skill was the ability to extract lots of overtime and then leave
just before he was expected to deliver a working program.

Mind you, his agent was also an equal opportunity fraudster. Apart from
the above mentioned gentleman, he also tried to supply a junior
programmer with 18 months experience to the same project. It turned out
when he was interviewed that this guy's 18 months experience was 12
months as a computer operator followed by 6 months on a polytechnic's
COBOL course. The agent was also well-known for not paying departing
contractors for their final month. In this case the client helped out:
the contractor told the client but not the agent he was off, had his
leaving do and departed. He rang the PM when he'd banked the cheque and
the PM in turn told the agent the guy had done a runner.


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