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It’s great to be a consultant

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Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#151

Post by immutology »

wrnr wrote: post #84
immutology wrote: post #42

Is this "consulting" or "contracting"? In my mind, "consulting" is knowledge work. Your role is to lend knowledge and expertise, help with strategy, architecture, tool/platform selection, etc. "Contracting" is high-skill grunt work. Your role is to code your fingers off, deliver-deliver-deliver, typically according to someone else's (possibly ill-conceived) plan. Have these things truly become synonymous?

I understand what you are trying to say but it is also a form of master-slave dialectic, you don't like something and feel above it and try to organise your social life with strict rules to isolate you from it. It's not even always a bad thing to do, like I an a coder who tries to avoid working with people who think like you.

I find this intriguing. Care to elaborate on it?

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#152

Post by datavirtue »

scrollaway wrote: post #64
Silhouette wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly not everyone has been as lucky as you. When the pandemic hit the flexible workforce and outsourced activities were the first things to go in a lot of industries, as businesses naturally looked to their own survival and the protection of their permanent staff. The first few months of COVID were brutal for a lot of smaller businesses whose revenue comes from offering services to larger clients.

Not the person you're replying to but also a consultant. While I realized this is an extremely privileged position, the above does not ring true for tech consultants in general. I know this is all anecdotal, but the pandemic has been a huge boom to tech consultants. Yes, some companies fired theirs, but also a massive influx of companies seeking help with completely new systems and procedures, especially by people wh…

Same here. Our firm set records during the pandemic as tech layoffs were coming by the thousands in our city. None of our people were without clients. Some of the lower quality clients pulled back but there are plenty of companies with enormous tech backlogs.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#153

Post by elb2020 »

GiorgioG wrote: post #5

Also: when the client makes sub-optimal decisions you can take solace in the fact that you won't be around to deal with the consequences. And if it causes you to bill more hours - it's a bonus!

A consultant should at least voice his opinion, I think, and not actively stay silent just to generate more billable hours. It might be slightly different for a contractor, but a consultant is, generally, hired for his knowledge.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#154

Post by datavirtue »

immutology wrote: post #42

Is this "consulting" or "contracting"? In my mind, "consulting" is knowledge work. Your role is to lend knowledge and expertise, help with strategy, architecture, tool/platform selection, etc. "Contracting" is high-skill grunt work. Your role is to code your fingers off, deliver-deliver-deliver, typically according to someone else's (possibly ill-conceived) plan. Have these things truly become synonymous?

I end up doing both.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#155

Post by vladvasiliu »

leeter wrote: post #75
franze wrote: 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…

I had a boss who said, "a manager is someone who tells you the time with your own watch."

> That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trust their team at all

I think this is usually the root issue: management doesn't trust the team, and the team thinks management is out to get them.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#156

Post by AitchEmArsey »

potamic wrote: post #140
brtkdotse wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this is "charge more". You should be pulling in _at least_ 2 hours worth of payroll costs (note: not 2 hours of pay) for each worked hour. This give you a buffer for lulls.

Could you elaborate? What's payroll costs?

They mean the costs a company would bear for you if you were a full-time employee. This includes your theoretical employment salary plus extra costs an employer pays for having that employee on their books, for example in the UK there is employers national insurance (tax), as well as other overheads like a fractional contribution to office space and software licenses.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#157

Post by faangiq »

kelvin0 wrote: post #136
leeter wrote: 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…

There's a saying: 'No one is a prophet in their village/town'. When the same info you communicate internally comes from an 'external' and 'credible' source, all of the sudden the message gets through. Pretty frustrating for the 'internal' people.

Nice saying.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#158

Post by AitchEmArsey »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #146
jasonkester wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Throwing something together based on unfamiliar components is indeed a bad move and likely to get you a bad reputation as a consultant. On the flip side, a permanent employee who wallows in analysis paralysis isn't adding any value to the company.

It all just depends on where the client culture fits on the "move fast and break things" spectrum.

Re: It’s great to be a consultant

#160

Post by AitchEmArsey »

nunez wrote: post #139

100%. Since you usually work across an org chart (not _in_ an org chart), and the company is paying more for your time than their FTEs, you can make great impact in relatively little time. Consulting is also great if you have trouble staying at a single place, as you usually don't spend more than a few months at any given assignment. (Usually. I know consultants who are on multi-year assignments with a single client.…

I moved from a boutique operating like your second model, to a >$1B consulting firm operating the other way. While I would recommend both employers, the quality of life improvement from making the switch has been dramatic. I do miss the highs of working with a small team of very smart people who get along well, but I now place more value on long term stability.
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