Lovers lie down in trust.

[reddragdiva]

You know, when I heard about the UK ID card plan, my first thought was "EDS are going to land the contract, aren't they."

When I was at Ericsson, I got to be the company admin trying to beat service out of EDS. Outsourcing Liaison Committee, no less. I can't tell you how fucked up it is having your IT outsourced to EDS. Every contract I've heard about is the same. They start off with glowing promises. The first three months is fuckup hell. The next three months is slightly less worse. At six months, they put the halfway competent on the contract. I got this from multiple sources, then it happened just like they said.

I mind the occasion we had a pile of Sun workstations to be upgraded from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7 (the next version) for a particular program. The right answer is: install a test workstation, make sure the installation works, then jumpstart all the workstations from that configuration. A "jumpstart" is when you have a carefully-tweaked installation and you install it just by telling it "install, please." Total time: a few hours, no matter how many machines you have. (This is part of why Unix is nicer than Windows.) EDS came back to us with a quote for AUD$30,000 labour in which they installed each machine, one by one, by hand, four hours each. In the Windows manner. This was actually a serious business proposal. Their clueful Solaris admin blanched when I told him.

I know many an outsourcee who has been sent to EDS. The corporate culture is built in the image of Ross Perot's brain. It is not only deeply psychotic, it's Texan.

I am now hearing that the division I work for is for sale (yet) again. The prospective buyers are IBM and ... EDS.

Every detail of your life is, of course, utterly safe with them.

(*pint* to wyrdlinks for provoking the above.)

Comments

[vatine]

I'd say taht salary discussions is part and parcel of "occasional coffee-table discussions" at non-set-payscale workplaces where it isn't explicitly forbidden. Possibly not in the "how much do I earn pre-tax" sense, but at least in the "how much is my take after taxes" sense. I see it as a healthy thing in the workplace, as long as mentions are made less often than, say, every half year or so. It's also something that gets discussed between aquantainces in the same industry, selling their work to different work-buyers.