Ask HN: What's the value of consulting experience?
I'm a current college senior dealing with an existential 'post college' dilemma. One form of this question is, "Does working at a good consulting firm teach you skills valuable for running your own startup?" or - does it teach you something worth more than what you would learn by trying and failing at something else?
In my estimation, the best way to learn is to actually do something, but the chance to get exposure across different companies and industries does have a certain appeal to it. This being said, I am obsessed with the opportunity cost of such an action, especially in terms of my ability to task on more risk now (debt notwithstanding).
I'm passionate about tech and have worked in different capacities within the industry to date from a business side. I do some web-based work for myself and continue to try to improve my coding abilities, but it's not my forte at the moment. Thus, I'm contemplating taking a consulting gig, killing my life with work, and trying to learn a lot in a year or so before poaching my CS friends from Google, Facebook, wherever they are and trying to get them to jump in the deep end with me.
Thoughts? I'm hesitant about taking such a 'path of least resistance,' but know that it's not quite as if I am selling away my soul forever. Curious for perspectives from the community here.
20 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 56.0 ms ] threadI also got web development experience, which I was severely lacking at graduation.
Something which I didn't learn while working at the consulting firm but picked up when I actually started consulting: selling stuff, negotiation, moving orders through the pipeline, and the ability to look a CEO in the eye and not be reduced to a quivering blob of Jello. These all help.
Noting goes better than working at a startup.
Caution: Working at a startup is addictive and can hamper your employability or comfort level at a corporate.
On the other extreme, I did interview for a PM position with Microsoft, but because of location issues wasn't really able to follow through there further. I'd love a way to work while building out these talents more.
Startup is a startup - regardless of size.
Do an OFFER HN with list of all that you can do. I am sure you will get enough insight of what kinda people need you.
Good thoughts on making an Offer HN - I'll try that out and see how things shake out. My strategy the last few months was to try to pitch myself to different startups that I liked, mixed results. I should have networked more the last two summers in SF bay!
I'm going to be practical and suggest you take the job and save some money (assuming you don't have tons of it already). You will need to survive a few months without income if you're going to work on a startup.
PS: Make sure you don't get too comfortable with your new job! Try to keep an inexpensive lifestyle or otherwise, you might never again get the courage to jump in startup land.
For instance, I am probably trading away the chance to go spend a year doing more intensive language study in China if I take such an offer.
One reason to try to do _something_ is that, as of right now, I really don't have much runway to actually start something. I guess I could try to put together some brilliant MVP in time for S'11 YC, but... :)
All you'll learn at a big consulting firm (or any large corporate) is how to enjoy a high income and learn to accept getting bogged down by corporate bureaucracy. You'll pick up more useful skills faster elsewhere without learning the bad habits.
Get out there and make something people want instead.
If you want to make the world a better place in some way, then just jump in the deep end now! You will learn more by doing. Keep reading HN, there's a ton of great stuff to learn.
That is, mostly consultants are hired for (as other have said here) psychological / CYA reasons, rather than for the actual business value of the advice they provide (which is often mediocre). And of course when it comes to technology products, the actual (source code) contributions of consultants, dollar for dollar, is often especially low, indeed.
Another nifty thing you'll learn when doing consulting, which is hard to learn otherwise, is that the higher rate you charge, the more people value you and you work, for some reason. Which is a very useful thing to have a visceral, bone-marrow-level grasp for, indeed.
They also all charge quite high rates, I would imagine, so hopefully my work would be valued - if not valuable.
* The ability to keep on working even though you want to kill someone how annoying their project seems to be.
* The ability to keep on iterating small changes which unfortunately are just warm ups to even more iterations.
* It's very annoying, even though you are probably making a good chunk of money. Great thing about it, once you move onto your project/startup(which I really suggest you do as soon as you have a proven idea and market) you'll pretty much love it and become very good at building something good.
* Oh, not to mention that you'll have a better outlook on things after you've worked on a few projects for clients.
If you mean freelancing or small company consulting, then yes, you'll learn a lot of practical skills that will be directly applicable to a startup.
In a broader sense, working anywhere will help you with a future startup - some jobs will just be more useful than others. High end consulting, banking, and the like are way down on the utility list.