Er, what?

<quote>

"undertaking the cuts to make sure we have the skills we need to drive the business forward".

</quote>

So, in EDS parlance, you ensure that your business has the requisite skills, by sacking staff? That guy was surely bonged up on something when he rattled that sound-bite off! He presumably read that from an corporate EDS "book of permitted stuff wot you can say."

What sort of bullshit is that?

Anyway, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I've been interviewed now twice by EDS when they were in Telford, and both times I told THEM "no thanks". Both times I could not actually get any sensible definition of a job description from them. If THEY don't know WHY they are hiring YOU, then that is a company that is badly out of control - nobody at the helm, as evidenced by their recent(ish) high profile IT disasters - Child Support Agency et al...

I got stuff like:

"Well, we're particularly interested in leveraging certain aspects your skill set with reference to projects that may be undertaken in the future, and moving further on we see certain skill synergies vis-a-vie our current global vision and directives that may indeed be to our mutual benefit."

And I'm like:

"Right... Cool... I can see why you'd want a VB and SQL bloke. Great." (everyone nods heads candidly)

EDS: The biggest bullshit and vapour vendor in the UK IT industry. Grown fat off of the back of UK government agencies and budgets. More spreadsheet jockeys, writing "upstream reports" than you can throw a stick at. It's not in their interests to produce tangible usable products. All that brings about is an end to the project in question. No, it's in their interests to delay, obfuscate, and talk about doing stuff, rather than actually "do the stuff", and submit as many VORs as possible... Keep as many bums on seats as you can... They're all chargeable. But for fuck's sake, don't write any code. At least, that works anyway. Write about writing code. No problem. But don't actually 'produce' anything.

No offence intended to the many talented coders and DB guru's etc that I KNOW are buried deep down within EDS, under the sixteen levels of managers, line managers, workpackage mangers, supervisors and 'career mentors' etc... I know you guys are in there, trying to get the job done. It's the management... Happens in all the 'big companies'. Who remembers IBM? "We're the greatest. We're the greatest. We're doing really well. God we're great... We're fucking ace we are. We are truly the best. Oh fuck... We're nearly broke...Shit."