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It’s great to be a consultant
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Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#62> When you’re an internal employee, you’re often encouraged to ‘stay in your box’ and not disturb the existing hierarchy. By contrast, as a consultant you don’t need to worry as much about the internal politics or history when suggesting changes. Indeed, you’re often encouraged to step outside your boundaries and make suggestions. What companies encourage this? I want to work for these companies. I have the feeling t…
You might have an approach that is unlikable.
I say this because I am exactly that. I often cut straight to the point and can't really read the room. I think I'm helping and being brutally honest when in reality it comes off condescending or arrogant.
I heard a quote that I really like, honesty without kindness is cruelty. That helped me rethink my approach towards how I communicate.
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#63I 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've been one for over 20 years, and wouldn't trade for FTE, ever. What you describe does happen, but usually it's the reverse. In financially hard times, companies often downsize their biggest expense -- employees. They can control costs easier by instead hiring consultants, to whom they owe no benefits or long term financial commitments.
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand this comment. I've been in consulting for my whole career, and my job security has never depended on a single contract. When a client doesn't extend, you move to a new client. Sometimes this can be disappointing or feel unfair, but it's never resulted in me losing my job. The whole point of having management in a consulting company is surely to make sure that the consultants always have a cl…
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 who are familiar with remote work. 2020 and 2021 were my two best years by far (like one order of magnitude).
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#656. 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…
Do like I (and the author of the article seems to do) do: Work for a consulting company. Company have sales, accounting and a lawyer. I have all the benefits described in the article.
In my experience and from what I hear, the rates are nothing like working for yourself - just the usual distribution of salaries for what you work on. If it's SAP consulting, yeah you might earn well (Germany - SAP stuff pays like 50%+ more).
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#66I might add two amendments here: The first is that "time and materials" is infinitely preferable to "fixed scope." In the former case, both client and consultant have an incentive to set priorities and make difficult, pragmatic choices. In the latter case, the potential for inadvertently over-promising is ever-present. Then comes either "fail and take the blame" or work through sunrise to deliver. The second is that…
While I don't think you are wrong, and that is a very common viewpoint - in my own experience I always preferred fixed price jobs - but you do need to be careful about the projects you choose.
I love the freedom of just building what the client asked for, without tracking my hours and billing for them. Some projects I might spend more time on them - beyond what I had estimated - just because it was a fun project, was learning something knew - or knew it was something I would be able to leverage up with for the next project.
On the other hand, sometimes projects would turn out easier than I thought, and be done in less time - and would end up making more money that I thought.
It does help if you are good at estimating - I always thought it was one of my strongest skills; rarely was I off much - but my general rule of thumb was estimate how long it would take to do, and then add 25-50% as profit margin (or buffer if I was off). Can't remember it ever turning out bad for me in a financial sense, though not all clients are nice to work with.
Always worked out OK for me, for small to medium size clients and projects - I wouldn't take on a 7 figure project on fixed price, but once you get into this sized projects - getting the project 'done' usually has many, many layers of different stakeholders who might choose to jerk you around and who are very removed from the actual delivery of the project - i.e. legal, marketing, some guy in purchasing that enjoys squeezing vendors for no reason etc; but smaller companies often you deal with 1-2 stakeholders that are easier to communicate and can make final decisions and who are happy to have the predictability of a set price.
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#67Is 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?
No, you've got the distinction right. Many folks don't understand that difference. Many consultants crank out a lot of code, but they also do advising, planning, recommending, analyzing,...
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#68I 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 value job security, and therefore a financially secure life, over any of the benefits this consultant has.
As someone who has done contract work for most of my working life I think it's kind of the opposite.
When doing contract work you have the option of having multiple part time jobs. Not everything is based on full time yearly commitments.
You might choose to do 15 hours a week for 2 different gigs, or maybe 4x 10 hour ones. Or maybe you have a few where you do 2 hours a week (code review type of stuff) but you have 3 of them.
Any of the above combos could be range from 1 off things to sticking around indefinitely. I've had so many multi-year contracts, those I like because it's quite stable and lets you maximize your hours on doing work instead of finding new clients, reading new contracts, etc..
You're diversifying your income streams. If one goes away you're not left scrambling to find another one as soon as possible and you can continue paying bills with your income instead of dipping into your savings.
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#69A potential downside with consulting is that it seems to me that your pay may be lower if you are a consultant vs working as a developer at a product company (and no stock options etc).
That's true in the US. For many in Europe, it's the other way around.
Re: It’s great to be a consultant
#70The 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.…
For the sake of numbers, how much do you earn?
200-250 on average, bigger when working fulltime (average around 28-30h a week)