Architect needed for 1 month

One of the things that scare me (other than nuclear war and carnies) are people that want a senior software person for only like 30 days to "set things up" and then other people will take over. Yikes. What it says to me is that they do not have people who know how to do things by themselves.

Software is not paint by numbers or fill in the blank.

If the people you have working for you can't figure out it by themselves, you should get other people to do the job. No matter how smart or well laid out a projects framework is, it can go bad very quickly. It just sets of warning bells in my head that tell me to run away fast.

The other thing that bothers me is that people want and need to make money. They also want to make sure they make their lives as easy as possible for themselves. I want to make my own life easy, that's one of the reasons why I love TDD. If I was hired as a consultant for 30 days, I would probably like to be hired back for more work. Would I have a longterm investment in the project? Would I care about the quality of the project if I never have to see it again? Do I want teach the people I am handing off the project to everything there is to know so I am not needed anymore? Maybe, maybe not. So when you're hiring someone you are also trusting that they have your best interests at heart.

The whole idea of a developer swooping in, pointing everyone in the correct direction (which they follow to the bitter end) and swooping out sounds something like a super hero to me. It just sounds like fiction bound for disaster. Maybe I'm wrong, but at this point I don't think so.