How about new development where it takes six months just to understand the requirements? If you want someone who can do that, your best bet is to look for someone who's done it before.
1 year consultant gig means that just about the time the person is really starting to contribute they’re looking for their next gig. We want employees, long term employees. The entire engineering team has been here at least 5 years, got a few members past 15. We have no interest in consultants, it’s not our model. Not that they’re bad, they just won’t work here.
My guess is that you've never tried. Either that or all you want is good little mind numbed robots who won't object to watching sexual harassment videos once a month. Real consultants never abandon their customers after one year, or ten.
ML/NJ
Nobody here is a mind numbed robot, we don’t watch harassment videos ever. And I never said anything about abandonment. Consultants are around less than employees, even if they’re still around there’s always some other gig. This is life cycle software we’re working on, when we finish one version we start on the next. When I got here we were halfway through 8.5, now we’re halfway through 10.5 in between we’ve done 5 release versions and a bunch of feature packs and a bunch more service packs. The day after we have the ship party for 10.5 we’ll start in on the first service pack to fix those last minute bugs, meanwhile management will be finishing plans for the next release, then we get trucking. It’s not a consultant environment, it’s an employee environment. Nothing wrong with consultants, but each tool has its purpose, they’re phillips heads and we’re a slot head environment. Consultants are great for projects that have end dates that slide into maintenance mode. We don’t have end dates. We have label change dates, new code name, new release version, same damn product.