Randomness

Time for a break from professional stuff. The only thing common to this post and my professional posts is my tendency for voodoo crap (although I do consider myself a very reasonable guy).

Lately I've been subject to several events that made me wonder if everything is really a coincidence. What's more interesting is that those different kind of events are not something I've invented and I know many people (supporting comments please) who have experienced similar things as well (and that's not the first time I experience this kind of events as well):

1. Useful Fact - Everyone has some relatively known facts that he's missed during his life, me included. What is strange is that many times you learn one of those facts and then it suddenly pops up everywhere. My example from this month: a lecturer was giving a probability example and mentioned the - unknown to me before - fact that pingvins do not live near the northern pole, a day later this fact was mentioned in a movie.

2. Lucky Instinct - A few weeks ago I was checking out Google Dashboard and saw that my last chat conversation has been with someone I knew I didn't talk in a while. I started constructing my next blog post about how Google showed me totally wrong data, but decided to check my "All Mail" anyway. To my surprise I did have a conversation with this person. Apparently she sent me a message just as I closed GMail and unlike in other times when I miss a chat, GMail didn't put this conversation in my Inbox so I had no real way of knowing this message was sent(that's actually a GMail bug as well, but not as bad as showing totally wrong data). This person wished me a happy holiday so this coincidence saved me from being rude. This whole story is a bit like when you forget something minor at home, come back and then recall you actually forgot something much more important and start wondering what would've happened if you didn't recall about the minor thing. But here you can give credit to subconscious, unlike in my example where I just happen to check the Dashboard on the same day. On the other hand, I might have missed a lot of other chats.

3. Déjà vu month - During life you meet and interact with many people and with most of them you later lose contact, you might occasionally meet one of them but that's it. So it strikes me very unlikely that during the last month I've met\reconnected with three different people (with whom I had significant interaction before) from my past. The average amount of time I didn't have any contact with those people is 4 years! And no, those people don't have anything at all in common and don't know one another. I actually had similar month a couple of years ago (interestingly - and unlikely - I think it was the same time of the year).

Do you believe in voodoo now?

Business Model

Every company has a business model. It can focus on selling a product, selling accessories for the product, selling support, etc.

One type of model is the "consultation" model, it's used when the product the company sells is sold for near to nothing, but the company still has to make money somehow, so the company presents you with experts that will help you through every phase of the implementation.

Now there are two options - the consultant gets paid either on a per project basis or on a per hour basis. The per project option is OK, but it's highly unprofitable for the company - it's never a good idea to commit yourself to an amount of work you don't know how to translate into time(==money).

The per hour option is problematic from the client's side. A "good" consultant from the company's perspective is one that can do the same work for the longest amount of time - to me it seems to contradict professionalism, but that's not my point here - that kind of consultant has no motivation to do his work to the point and as effective as possible or even answer questions on the phone - every question can be seen as something that should be thoroughly discussed on the client's site (and expense).

Now, with support things are easier - if a client feels dealing with a support issue is taking too long he concludes there's a problem with the company, and that's obviously not so good for the company. But consulting taking a long time can easily be painted like a good and thorough work on behalf of the consultant, and since the client often really doesn't have a good idea about the product he can be easily fooled.

Another pitfall you should beware of when taking on a software project.