Re: XML to PF

RIck wrote:
Contractors vs. Employees. who gets away with more?
I'm just askin'


Rick -

I think it depends on the person/situation...

When it comes to pure technical issues:
In my experience, contractors - given that they are technically competent.

On the other hand, when it comes to personnel issues such as attendance,
personal hygiene, drinking or other misbehavior on the job - employees.


On one particular project when I was working for a large oil refinery
company, I was specifically told NOT to help out the engineering department
with a problem they had. Engineering at the refinery had hired a local
technology company and spent $ 500,000.00 to create a PC-based weigh scale
system to weigh the asphalt trucks, and they knew of no way to get their
data onto the System/36 for billing purposes - they were stuck with manual
data entry.

The IT department manager was pissed off at engineering for not using the IT
department to do this project.

The engineers sweet-talked me and I told them about the HLLAPI interface.
It took 3 or 4 days to adapt a simple interactive program and I gave them a
diskette with the HLLAPI examples to allow them to run their BASIC program
on an emulated PC and do data entry from within their program.

I *almost* got fired over it, but the engineering manager went to upper
management and smoothed things over. The company ended up using the
solution I built for over 10 years, and didn't have to abandon the $
500,000.00 project....

- sjl