Business-focused custom software

Not sure it's worth the added time and effort to make sure you are hiring the right programmer? Here's an example of why the time is worth it:

A client hires a new consultant. They have a database with about 4 million records, and then need help exporting some of the data to Excel. The previous consultant used a query that grabbed ALL of the columns, so the file was quite large. The new consultant asked if they really needed all that data. Guess what? They only needed 5 columns, so the new file was about 20% of the size!

Then the customer complained that the previous consultant told them that they had to manually remove all the places where it said "NULL". They spent 4 DAYS doing this. The new consultant spends a few minutes tweaking the query and boom: the data no longer has any values that say "NULL".

This is true story. The new consultant saved the client a ton of time for downloading and data tweaking. Was the previous consultant incompetent or lazy? We’ll never know, but one thing is for sure: the new consultant has proven their worth to the client!