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It’s great to be a consultant

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Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#141
post #75
post #14

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame.…

This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trus…

So a consultant’s job is to ameliorate incompetent management?

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#142
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social security systems in European countries tend to be based around people earning a regular salary losing their jobs, rather than consultants having occasional dry spells between projects. This is a problem with the gig economy in general - our social security nets aren't very well designed for it (perhaps an argument in favour of UBI, or at least some different thinking into how social security should work for th…

You can't expect society to pay for you regularly if you choose to become a consultant. You need to charge more and keep a buffer.

[deleted]

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#143
I was a consultant for the first 13 years or so of my career, then switched to working on one product. I agree with everything he said, but there are downsides too.

The downsides for me were:

* You rarely (almost never) get to work on multiple iterations of a product. You parachute in to get something working before launch, or fix the work of some other contractor, or (in the most fun case) to take an idea from zero to launch. But, in all my time, I never got to do the version of that, where we learned what didn't work and then made changes to improve things after launch. That's a huge part of product development, but it's simply not part of the model of consulting. After completing your contract, you'd Fulton out of that company and drop in to a different contract. If you want to stand by your work in the long term, and have the feeling of shepherding something to success, you won't get it as a consultant.

* The flip side of always learning is that you have to learn whatever stupid stack you've inherited from the client. Always different. Yes, you will always be learning, never in your comfort zone, and if you work with startups, you may even be on the cutting edge. But, that can also get real old after a few years.

* The business side can swing wildly from feast to famine. When I was an IC, I would spend weeks not doing anything because there wasn't a contract for me. Can be fun to sit around, but the novelty wears off when you realize your job may be on the cutting block 4-5 times a year, just due to what lineup of clients are coming through the sales funnel at the time.

* Related to the above, I think there is just a fundamental problem with the business model for consultancy shops that will tend to make them unstable in the long term: you have to staff up to get new contracts, then when those contracts run out, you either lose those employees (if they are not salaried) or spend a ton of money as they wait around for the next contract (if they are). You end up going for new contracts, but if those contracts don't exactly match your roster of available staff, you have to hire new people. As time goes on, you end up making bigger and bigger bets with staffing, and eventually you lose. I saw this happen so many times. The result is not that the company goes out of business, but that there are huge layoffs, with such a massive change in company culture, that it is effectively a different company afterward.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#144
post #11

It can be very shallow though. Steve Jobs on consulting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc

I 100% agree with this. At the moment, Consulting seems to be running around, getting the barest of understanding of a clients needs and throwing a solution at the wall until we get shifted to another engagement

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also the "legit" channel for corporate espionage (or, research sharing, if you prefer), especially for processes and such. They didn't make up that "best practice" they're teaching you now—they stole it from your competitor. They'll figure out if you're doing anything better than them and clue them in on their next engagement. And the wheel keeps on turning.

I'm not sure I can agree with the word "stole." It's clearly in everyone's interest that that process goes on, or at least the interest of everyone who hires consultants; if a company was uniformly better than all of their competitors or thought they were, they wouldn't hire external consultants.

Yeah, I intended that a bit tongue in cheek. Of course everyone knows what's going on, though to some extent they pretend not to.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#146

This is purely an advert for the company. I don't count any of these to be "Great": * You are outside the company hierarchy - That means you actually have 0 power normally. Most consultants / contractors I've worked with have to do exactly what they are hired for no more or less. Permies generally have a bit of wiggle room and you should get more the further up the pole you go * You have to keep learning - That's rig…

You have to keep learning - That's right slow down for even a year and you can be left behind in consulting. That's not what this means. You're not being brought in for your knowledge of new tech X. You're there because you've demonstrated that you're smart. They know that they can drop you in sideways to a broken project in an unfamiliar stack, with confidence that you'll be committing code the first day. That's whe…

I'm not convinced consultant style learning is THAT useful.

I know my AWS, I can be tossed into learning whatever product a client needs. The problem is that AWS is such a varied product that has its individual quirks that might not actually mesh properly with other services.

Sure I can probably deploy completely unfamiliar product fairly quicky, but without owning the product medium-longish term, you have no idea if it was actually properly deployed, meaning whatever you learned probably wasn't the best way to do a thing

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#147
post #21

I did not hear a single consultant telling me how great it is to be one, when a collective announcement by the director was made that due to financial problems not a single consultant contract would be extended this year. This would help the company to get into financial stability again, and would prevent to fire anyone in the company. I'm happy I'm not a consultant. I value job security, and therefore a financially…

I have been laid off several times as an FTE. The boutique s-corp I am with now has never laid anyone off in 18 years. We turn down work every day and have a massive pipeline of new work and customers. If I get booted from a company I just shrug happily and choose my next client.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#148
post #30

6. The sense of relief when your invoice is paid is amazing. 7. Having to go into projects that really don't make sense but pay your bills teaches diplomacy and patience. 8. Having long-term financial committments on the one hand (mortgage, school and medical bills etc.) and short-term uncertain revenue is an interesting mental exercise to engage in. The last one is the killer for me I think, having dabbled in this a…

TLDR suffering builds character?

yes, as long as you're the type that doesn't try to blame all your suffering on externalities, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can agree with the word "stole." It's clearly in everyone's interest that that process goes on, or at least the interest of everyone who hires consultants; if a company was uniformly better than all of their competitors or thought they were, they wouldn't hire external consultants.

Yeah, I intended that a bit tongue in cheek. Of course everyone knows what's going on, though to some extent they pretend not to.

There's a (humorously) fine line between the apparent antipodes of pretending not to know something and thinking that it's such universal common knowledge that there's no need to discuss it. :-)

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#150
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trus…

Yeah, this is pretty universally the job of a management consultancy: interview the staff, and report what they're saying.

"So... what would you say... ya do here?"
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