How many times (if any) have you been "bobbed"

[darrenb]

Never. I've just been bobbing about too much myself. You can throw a Bob at me, you will miss.

During the financial crisis I was once so desperate for work I agreed to a phone interview with BigBob Agency. I got the impression that they had all the problems of a typical bureaucratic paranoid British large IT company except multiplied by ten.

They had bought into a number of complex proprietary technologies that they wanted to get working together. The project manager presented me with a greenfield project using these things that would obviously go on for six months, or maybe years if things went wrong. Now, an English PM would typically try to bluff me and get me to agree to an estimate of two or three months. But the Indian PM wanted me to do it in one or two weeks. About the same amount of time it had taken them to produce the graphical mock-ups.

Anyway it gives you an idea why bobs just say "yes" to everything. When you're dealing with managers like that, everything becomes sort of meaningless. I didn't take the project.

[ChimpMaster]

Never. I've just been bobbing about too much myself. You can throw a Bob at me, you will miss.

During the financial crisis I was once so desperate for work I agreed to a phone interview with BigBob Agency. I got the impression that they had all the problems of a typical bureaucratic paranoid British large IT company except multiplied by ten.

They had bought into a number of complex proprietary technologies that they wanted to get working together. The project manager presented me with a greenfield project using these things that would obviously go on for six months, or maybe years if things went wrong. Now, an English PM would typically try to bluff me and get me to agree to an estimate of two or three months. But the Indian PM wanted me to do it in one or two weeks. About the same amount of time it had taken them to produce the graphical mock-ups.

Anyway it gives you an idea why bobs just say "yes" to everything. When you're dealing with managers like that, everything becomes sort of meaningless. I didn't take the project.

Good point well made.

The problem is - and it surprises me - that so many of our client's British management falls for this "Yes" talk. It's like all they see is someone saying "Yes" to getting the job done for a 30% cost saving. Management here are totally oblivious to the fact that the project/support will fail and will cost several times what the Yes man quoted. But one thing was blatantly obvious at one of the IBs I was consulting at: mid to senior management there were all having their pockets lined to offshore dozens of not hundreds of UK jobs.

[mos]

Now, an English PM would typically try to bluff me and get me to agree to an estimate of two or three months. But the Indian PM wanted me to do it in one or two weeks. About the same amount of time it had taken them to produce the graphical mock-ups.

Anyway it gives you an idea why bobs just say "yes" to everything. When you're dealing with managers like that, everything becomes sort of meaningless. I didn't take the project.

Bobco may bluff that they own "reusable assets" and have expertise.
That's when they will be trying to hire unsuspecting Western freelancers to actually do the job.