He wont last a week.

..that the directors of Northern Rock can become IT consultants to the UK Government? Maybe they have already, it would help to explain the shambles that Gordo and his pals have got us into. Mind you, as El Reg reported a while back, the abominable and incompetent Patricia Hewitt, former Blurrite Health Minister, loathed by health practitioners but loved by management consultants and outsourcers, got a nice phat 60K+ a year job as a non-exec director of BT, which shoorly wasn't a reward for all the highly profitable NHS spine work that she bunged BT's way for them to right royally frak up. Shoorly not.

So don't worry, senior directors and managers, if you b*lls up in the private sector, don't worry, just get on Gordo's public sector gravy train and you'll be just fine, Govt contracts a-plenty to over-promise and under-deliver and rake off a tidy sum from the muggins taxpayer, Joe Public.

(I've worked in the NHS and other public sector institutions and left to go into the private sector because I just couldn't cope with the incompetence, nepotism, graft, and corruption in the *streamlined and efficient* Noo Labour public sector.)

Hmmnnn,

Lets give him credit where credit's due.... He was actually making a profit before someone got shit scared and pulled the plug on his oppo....

Now the BOFH has a new challenger! The beancounters will be shit scared of him...... He should meet up with Simon and the PFY and work out a new scam!

Obviously you are jealous. Given how incompetent most IT people are, and his demonstrated abilities, he might be useful.

BTW: The term “cowboy”, in American English where the term comes from, is not a pejorative, it’s a complement. It means someone of strong character who does the right thing even when surrounded by weaklings who do the wrong thing because that’s the consensus or easy thing to do. That’s something dumbass Europeans can’t get through their tiny brains. But then, their tiny brains is why basically nothing of significance in IT ever came out of Europe. Microprocessors, RAM, hard drives, CRTs, LCD displays, Fortran, C & C++, BASIC, UNIX, DOS, Windows etc. – all American inventions. And what did not get invented in America (like Flash), was invented in Japan.

Who cares ?

What the stock holders and the French government should really do is sack the entire board of directors and the external auditors as they are truly crap and mostly asleep at the wheel at the best of times !

As it's already been pointed out, A _lot_ of IT/Computer innovations/inventions came from Europe. Yes, Windows came from the US, keep it, Linux came from Europe, I'd rather us it ;).

Anyway, The Register comes from Europe, so we'll use the European definition of cowboy thanks. I mean, it's not like you yanks can complain about a few misuses of your vocabulary, considering how much you've mangled ours!

A cowboy is a person who looks after cows.

Where are you from? In the US a cowboy also has the same meaning as in the UK - a reckless person.

You're an idiot. Especially if you don't know the computer is a European invention, never mind the other ones.

Bjarne Stroustrup was born and bred in Aarhus which is in Denmark, which is not in Sweden, which is not the capital of Austria, by the way.

Hey Homer, check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display#Brief_history.

You yanks *did not* invent computing.. (Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Niklaus Wirth, Just like you didn't invent jet engines or rocket propulsion.

And lest we should forget, if it wasn't for Europe, the USA would not exist. get over it.

Nothing of significance ever came *from* Europe, yeah,I'd agree with that. Tell me, anonymous coward, where were your forebears from?

Windows? Yeah, you can have that one.

Linux, Hmm, where was that Torvalds bloke from again?

Paris, she's the epitome of ignorant, tiny minded America.

I love how some of these comments escalate into Yank Bashing. Hell, we should introduce it as a new event at the London Olympics. There would be plenty of countries willing to participate

AFAIR, Jerome Kerviel used to work in IT for Societe Generale (you can put your own accents in here if you want to), where he worked on their compliance and control systems. When he became a trader he thus knew exactly how all the things worked that would alert to excess exposure and how to avoid / work round them.

Having screwed up big time in his new job, he's gone back to the old one.

"By Solomon Grundy

Posted Saturday 26th April 2008 02:45 GMT

This just proves what I've been saying for years. Your resume isn't important, it's all about how you market and handle yourself."

Sorry but that's just twaddle. Ultimately if the person(s) doing the hiring has no clue about anything technical that's where the fault lies.

Over the past 4 years I've inteviewed probably around 50 people for positions ranging from junior developer to technical architect and contractor. I generally find that the people with the better CV's (non UK read "resume" :) ) perform better at interview. You can tell the person's standard of English from the grammar, PLUS if they're technical and yet have spelling mistakes in something as important as their CV it's a big red flag to me (No spell check!!?).

I'll reject someone if they haven't bothered making their CV presentable as that to me speaks volumes about their attention to detail in their work.

Sadly, Indian consultants in particular all seem to copy parts of each other's CV's and it's easy to see through their lies if they're poor - even over the phone. I must have seen the same paragraph of technical skills and self-description about 15 times!

That's the annoying thing - foreign consultants are generally 10x worse than the ones in the UK, and tend to be nothing more than copy and paste code monkeys - so my question is - WHY are they continually being let into the country?! We should be training our own people - the results will nearly always be better. We actually started phone interviews before face to face because these type of people were wasting so much of our time.

As for those who say foreign is cheaper - if you had worked with these people you'd realise the error of this statement - it would be cheaper IF you didn't have to have a full time person in the UK to manage the person offshore because they can never be bothered to do anything other than EXACTLY what they're told - forget think outside the box - they never realise they're in it!

Rant over :)