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Windows & .NET Watch: Congratulations on a job well billed!


By Larry O'Brien
December 8, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Dear Bob:

I have reviewed your outrageously padded consulting bill to Client X for last month. Well done! In these tough economic times, we here at Lucifer Consulting have to go that extra mile to make sure that our interests—not those of our customers—remain first and foremost in our minds.

As you know, Client X came to us with the usual problem: Its development team was “90% done” but seemed unable to progress further. How we love those 90% completed projects! We know that we will get to spend long hours in meetings during which the complexity of the project will be explained, and poor choices justified, in long digressions based on invalid assumptions.

How delightful it is to enlist the aid of the team’s embattled manager when, instead of pointing out the project’s unnecessary complexity, we concur that the problem is indeed a particularly difficult one, and conclude that the way forward is to introduce another, even more complex technology!

The introduction of unnecessary complexity is, of course, aided by our friends in the tool industry, who generate the acronyms we use to befuddle our victims. Nor do we have much to fear any longer from “free and open-source” software; there are now so many well-intentioned libraries and add-ons, so many reinventions of the wheel, that we can always find something useless to bolt on to a project and thereby slow it down further.

As we add complexity to a project, we burrow deeper into our client, emulating our company mascot, the boar tick. We work hard to get in, and then we slow down and begin feeding.

And what a fantastic job you’ve done with your billable hours! You’ve attached a multipage spreadsheet to your invoice, filled with hundreds of actions and the associated billable time. I laughed when I saw that your billing unit is a sixteenth of an hour, as if you start an egg timer every time you get an e-mail message in your inbox. If you respond within 3 minutes and 44 seconds, you generously don’t charge for it, but add one more second and, of course, the exchange must be recorded and billed.

Related Search Term(s): professional development

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