Ed Gould wrote:
I am not sure I understand the question. They were expected to work on any work that was assigned to them by our company. Not use their time there for some other use. We had one consultant that was an ISV and was using our system to do development work on his product. THEN he tried to sell the work to us at the retail price. What a rip off.
I've been on both sides of this issue. When doing consulting work, it's a lot quicker (selling point) to use software you're comfortable with, instead of trying to learn non-standard software or options the client has. I had a standard agreement that they retained the right to use the software, in exchange for my installing it, and if necessary, modifying it to adapt to their environment. In twenty years, only two installations declined the offer; one was a government site with security concerns, the other insisted on 100% ownership of anything developed at their facility - so they got 100% of nothing, instead.
Yes it was a management issue but our management (and I use the term loosely) did not require time sheets and the like. Nor did management stay much after 5PM to see what was going on. When most of the goofing off was occurring.
That's poor practice. I have never worked on a consulting contract that didn't require time sheets.
*IF* we would have had had a single programmer trying to do a homework assignment I probably would never had done this. I would have probably run through SMF and sent the report over to the application people for them to decide.
To me that seems backwards. As systems manager, I had the chance to get other employees interested in programming; learning makes jobs easier to understand and carry out. One of our operators wrote a very nice football game, with suggestions and feedback from other operators and programmers, and it spoiled him <G>. Last time I ran into him at Share he was an IBM manager, complete with three piece suit and pocket watch with fob.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, VT new e-mail address: gerhardp (at) charter (dot) net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
