Why we love highly paid consultants

Flashback to the 1980s, when this company is in need of a major database management system upgrade, according to a pilot fish on the scene.

"Our highly paid consultant says we don't need to recompile all the applications' code," fish says. "I argue for it. I get overruled.

"Migration is complete, weeks pass, highly paid consultant is long gone. Then a nightly job goes down with an error in one of the four shared linked modules. Standard procedure is to put a standard patch in to skip the problem transaction, recompile that module and run again. Bam again."

Fish knows this can't wait until the morning for debugging. He finds which module is failing and puts in a display for the bad transaction, so he can see what's happening when the program gets there. Then he compiles and reruns.

And the program runs fine. Huh?

Next morning, fish and his two most senior compatriots put their heads together, but just can't spot a pattern in what happened. But they decide there's no need to remove the the single display that fish put in until the next time fish is on call.

Weeks go by, and then another big nightly program goes down -- and this one has 13 linked modules. Fish's compatriot, who's on call, puts in the standard patch, and it goes down again.

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