Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose • Hacker News Board

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#41

Post by derefr » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 6:05 AM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #24

Dylan16807 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's talking about consulting. I would sure hope the person paying him for advice wants his advice. And the idea here is that it's preferable to get a job with someone who will listen to that advice they paid for to reach a reasonable conclusion, which seems like a perfectly good plan to me.

Often consulting clients only want the consultant to validate what they've already decided to do. Sure, it's best if they listen to you; you are the "expert" after all. But sometimes the best you can do is sit back and do damage control after the fact.

It seems like you could hire someone to tell you you're right for much less than the cost of a consultant, though, since they wouldn't actually need to be any sort of domain expert.

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#42

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 6:37 AM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #24

Dylan16807 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's talking about consulting. I would sure hope the person paying him for advice wants his advice. And the idea here is that it's preferable to get a job with someone who will listen to that advice they paid for to reach a reasonable conclusion, which seems like a perfectly good plan to me.

Often consulting clients only want the consultant to validate what they've already decided to do. Sure, it's best if they listen to you; you are the "expert" after all. But sometimes the best you can do is sit back and do damage control after the fact.

Oh yes, some will want a certain type of advice but they still want the consultant to tell them that. But it seems to me that the idea here is that if the best you can do is wait for a chance to do damage control then you should try somewhere else.

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#43

Post by liquidcool » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 8:14 AM UTC

Very funny, but he also brings up a great way to approach alternative bean placement by focusing on results and defining success.

All too often, the client's motivation is FUD, and to continue the analogy, they spend all their money on what they hope are magic beans. When no beanstalks grow from their nostrils, they discover too late that they’ve no money left for bean removal surgery - or anything else. So moving on, for the consultant, is not so much a choice as a necessity.

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#44

Post by JangoSteve » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #39

JangoSteve wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this sort of response is that, somewhere down the road, someone else using that open-source project will be working on an entirely different problem and actually have a legitimate need to make that same jump from point a to point b . Naturally they'll hit up the googles and get excited when they see that someone else had that exact problem before. But then, instead of a solution, they are presented w…

On the other hand, I love when I search for the answer to some specific question I think I have, and find an answer that points to the thing I ought to use instead. People often follow the same wrong paths to a solution.

Which is why my favorite answer includes both (e.g. "if you really want to do it this way, it's like this... but you should consider this way..."), rather than simply assuming that I don't know what I'm doing.

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#45

Post by JeremyBanks » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 3:44 PM UTC

JangoSteve wrote: post #30

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason that Open Source communities often react to strange questions with "can you explain what you want to do?" or a similar request for the bigger picture. Too many people start down a chain of reasoning based on how they want to solve a problem, get to step 7 of 10 of a bad plan, and ask for help proceeding to step 8. Explaining how to get to step 8 solves the problem they think they have, but asking for…

The problem with this sort of response is that, somewhere down the road, someone else using that open-source project will be working on an entirely different problem and actually have a legitimate need to make that same jump from point a to point b . Naturally they'll hit up the googles and get excited when they see that someone else had that exact problem before. But then, instead of a solution, they are presented w…

I've found this to be a common issue on Stack Overflow. Someone will ask a question that might indicate they're doing something wrong, and all of the answers will be pointing that out, usually ignoring the possibility that the user has a legitimate reason for wanting to do whatever it is.

A current example is a question I asked recently: How do you safely use variable table/column names with SQLite in Python? [1] I want to write a slightly high-level wrapper over Python's SQLite API, so I need to be able to escape table/column names. The first response is one of Stack Exchange's top users telling me the premise of my question is "evil".

It's very frustrating.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6514274/how-do-you-safely...

Re: Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose

#46

Post by sleight42 » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 7:46 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #13

dkarl wrote: post #9

Of course, if they answer they enjoyed it and it was wonderful, then they are not someone I can relate to or help in any way. Or, of course, you might be about to learn something, since sticking beans up your nose is a metaphor you chose for something you think is so stupid you would never actually try it.

Congratulations, you've just displayed a level of perception which is almost completely absent from I.T.: that there are often reasons other than the purely technical ones involved in decision-making. There are a couple of traps in consulting. One is the trap where the consultant believes that they have a bird's-eye view of the problem to be solved, when they're actually looking through a keyhole. (Security-related c…

Brilliant!

Yes, I'm learning that it's just as important to question what delusions I may be operating under when suspecting my client of same.