This talks about not getting stuck in the politics of the company and having the authority/right to instigate change. It can be equally validly read as:
Number 1: If your company is hiring consultants that are outside the hierarchy you have a potentially toxic political business culture and should look for a new job
Number 1 annoyed me most when I was in consulting and was one of the main reasons I quit. You can always give recommendations but have no leverage whatsoever if all advise is ignored and the work you did for months just lands in some archive. And even if that's clear from the start (and the work is just to tick some boxes), you might not be able to afford to lose that client by refusing the work. Working for months knowing that the output will be looked at once and discarded was too frustrating to me, no matter the perks and other advantages the job had.
All of that can happen as an employee, but usually you have some leverage via management or your internal network to either get results into action or stop projects if it's clear they don't make sense (one of the reasons they're then given to consultants instead if management insists they're done).
Basically the same thing has happened to me at two different corporations as an employee, I worked on big projects for months that never saw the light of day, although I didn't know that would be the case ahead of time.
In one case the lead developer quit and the manager suddenly decided to scrap the project and hire a consultant firm to do the rest. In another I worked for six months on a project that would be 'the future of the department' they were going to sell to major companies, got it to a UAT state, showed it to the client, and the client dragged their feet on signing contracts for it for months, then they decided they were going to replicate it in-house, an oh, could you share all your business logic with us so we don't have to recreate it from scratch (thankfully our company told them to get fucked on that request).
It did seem nuts we were doing work without a signed contract, but apparently that's just how the healthcare industry works, if you waited until the contracts were signed you'd miss the open enrollment window for some of these, the most important time of the year for these things to be working, so the corporation I worked for (a large corporation) decided they needed to get a several month head start without a signed contract, and were overconfident it would eventually be signed.
That same corporation also had a project for some grand overhaul of their systems (and intended to unify several departments that all had their own systems, since they were originally bought and merged companies). We were one of the departments that were supposed to merge with that new software, and I know it still wasn't ready six years later (might have been scrapped, but I'm not sure).
I'm happy for him but it was obvious even without reaching the end of the post that he's been a consultant only for two years or so. The consultant's life is not all sunshine and rainbows. Every one of his points, except 2, have huge downsides.
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 area. I wonder (genuinely, not sarcastically) how many proponents of consulting are in this boat.
Probably varies a lot by locale btw, if you can rely on state schooling and have a strong social security net it's very different.
Consulting companies take a cut and and working for one company closes more doors that it opens.
Businesses usually have a handful of preferred suppliers they source consultant from, as well as black lists.
One thing a consultant has to figure out is how the procurement works in places they want to join. Some things are surprisingly public, like many tendering websites. You do not have to answer to a tender directly, but you can always check who is winning and who is likely to need more people aboard and apply using that knowledge.
They do “take a cut”, but signing up and managing relationships with big companies is extraordinarily difficult, time consuming and expensive.
If you are working through one boutique consultancy you aren’t actually doing too badly. Sometimes you’ll be working through a system integrator, through a boutique consultancy, and through a staffing agency. And to some degree they are all delivering some value, simply because working with big corporates is so painful and getting direct relationships is so difficult.
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).
You are also paid peanuts (compared to real contractors/consultants), and you have close to zero say of what projects / clients you get to work on / with. And you are essentially just a cost cell in an excel spreadsheet for the HR of the consulting company (interestingly, clients may respect you more).
At least that was my experience. So you can have the best of both worlds, or the worst...
Well, you can do as I do and work for a company that is owned by the employees. I have plenty to say about were I work as long as there is a good opportunity and if there are none that our sales team can find I wouldn't have found them on my own anyways I'm afraid ;-)
But yes, I still only have a very good salary, not what HN would expect for "real contractors" but it is stable and worry free and I have good colleagues.
This is such a dumb saying. People who got into (say) a car crash and lost control of all their limbs surely did not get any stronger. Neither did the army veterans who spend the rest of their days traumatized after seeing their entire squad blown up.
There is a vast array of options to get weaker even if you have the right mindset.
the last one is the toughest, and really comes down to how strong your stomach is and how your business model is structured - e.g. it can't be hourly & net 60, more like flat-fee, 50% upfront.
The solution is an old financial trick that has fallen a bit out of fashion: saving. Not spending everything you earn. It's easy given the very decent consulting rates in software. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is financially illiterate now...
9. In many countries job is viewed as a tax dodge and people become hostile if you tell them you work as a consultant. Often this messaging is sponsored by big corporations providing consulting services - they hate independent consultants and spend a lot on lobbying to make it as difficult and costly as possible to work as independent.
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 the growing precariat).
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.
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.
If someone pays the same taxes and contributions into society as others, then surely they are entitled to something in return? I get there's no easy answer here but gig workers are also "consultants" who may not be earning enough to build a buffer.
Well yes, they do get something in return for their taxes, don't they?
As far as gig workers, they do get something in return for the instability, which is (in theory) higher hourly pay and more flexible achedules. If they aren't getting this, they aren't really gig workers and should be labelled as employees, but if they are, they get a benefit for the risk they take.
Personally I think that many gig workers should be simply classified as normal employees.
Another issue is that gig workers and consultants don't pay for unemployment insurance at all, so they're actually not paying the same contributions as others.
What about all the people with other responsibilities like single parents or caregivers or people with disabilities who can't commit to a regular 9-5 job? They're not getting high paid gig jobs, just flexible hours.
Exactly. Generally consultants can reduce their tax liability in various ways.
Gig workers who not earning enough would be better off with a permie low paid job, if they were able to get one.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are not useful enough to society to contribute and live in some places - I think the solution is to send them somewhere else where they can be useful and find a job.
Given how much money you can charge as a consultant, is not terribly hard to live well within your limits and tolerate a temporary lack of jobs.
That can be the chance to learn something or build some other passive income stream.
I think the main problem is that most people, once they can charge 1000£ per day, they go and blow a lot of it on expensive holidays and an expensive lifestyle.
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!
But do you want to work on projects that you already expect to fail? Money isn't everything, seeing your work in action and how it improved the organization or the life of others is much more rewarding imo.
Once you've started an engagement, you probably shouldn't up and quit because you disagree with a decision. As a consultant there's only so much you can do.
> But do you want to work on projects that you already expect to fail? Money isn't everything, seeing your work in action and how it improved the organization or the life of others is much more rewarding imo.
100% this. Doing a career retrospective as a long time consultant was very sobering: lots of 404s.
No, I prefer the projects I work on to succeed - but not because I enjoy seeing my previous projects succeed.
Merely because I hope I can use them to demonstrate success in future gigs.
I'm more than happy to forget the nth API or crappy frontend I had to work on to buy my house.
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.
I would like to add, that for people with little professional experience, working in a consultancy can accelerate the rate at which work experience is gained (by working on different projects, perhaps at different clients and with different technologies). This also expects a lot of commitment and willingness to learn (as pointed out in the article).
As an added benefit, one has the chance to look at the inner workings of a lot of different companies if one doesn't want to stay in consulting forever.
While I agree with almost all his points — especially you have to keep learning — there are of course trade offs with consulting. In my opinion (as someone who's been running their own consulting company for only 5 months), the major challenges are non-technical. Yes — consulting can be very lucrative but there's a whole other side to running a consulting company: sales & marketing. Without building a proper sales pipeline, you will experience the feast or famine, the constant up and downs.
Can be, doesn't have to be. I've had the same clients for over a decade. I've seen people come and go as employees and know more about the businesses than many employees themselves and help bring new executives/employees up to speed.
I've owned many projects that have had large impacts. I guess it just depends on how you go about it. So yeah, my experience doesn't align with Mr. Jobs at all.
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
worth noting that this OP seems like he is still an employee AT a consultancy, so in effect having the 'best of both worlds' - a secure income + wide exposure to client projects. Presumably, there will be internal politics within the consultancy, particularly if he wants to move up in status or responsibility.
I would add that senior roles in consultancies of this type inevitably become sales roles - responsibility shifts from delivery (individual contributor does this) to customer acquisition (partner does this), which will come with this its own set of pro's and cons.
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. And they need someone to blame, so just take it.
If you succeed, spread the praise. You worked with them, it was the right decision that they hired you, so they did great. And you just humble helped them to unlock the potential they already had.
Thing is, in scenario 1, if you deflect blame, they will not hire you again. And they will badmouth you if somebody asks. You you take the blame, they might not hire you again, but they will respect you when somebody asks about you.
In scenario 2, if you take all the praise, they will not feel good about themselves, and will not WOM (word of mouth) you. If you spread the praise, they will feel good about themselves, talk about their success and will so WOM you.
It's not unavoidable, a lot of people don't do it. I would say they are making a mistake though.
The thing is that people on the other side should either recognize what you're doing or appreciate you relieving the tension in their internal politics enough that your emotional labor is rewarded with a positive atmosphere.
If that doesn't happen then you can only hope they're paying well. Doing this comes naturally to me though and I struggle in environments where you need to be a self-promoter so maybe it's a "horses for courses" situation.
It's not unavoidable no, but it certainly makes you a better consultant. I found this out only a few years ago and franze is right on the money.
I'd say it goes beyond consulting, too, and that knowing how to "take the blame and distribute the praise" is a superpower. Especially that first part. Knowing to take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control, puts you on a different level to many people who will simply try to dodge it as much as possible.
As a consultants, clients aren't (generally) stupid and can smell the bullshit. What they'll see, if you do this right, is someone who is effective and professional. This inspires trust and gets you re-hired.
If this sort of thing makes you miserable, IMO then yeah it's not for you. Personally, I'd advise introspection: Why does it make you miserable, exactly?
> take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control
Although this might sometimes be a good idea for diplomatic reasons, it feels just as wrong and "bullshitty" as accepting praise for things that are outside your control. And it might lead to a loss of respect by people who see through this fake humility.
You're not wrong, but there's two situations that can call for it.
1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chances of it happening and ultimately, having a plan for it.
2. As a consultant, you're sometimes hired so bigger clients can externalize blame. It makes no difference to you, doesn't matter, it's not like they're hampering your career opportunities or something. They love that they have someone to blame for shit instead of blaming the actual people responsible. Yes, it's entirely bullshitty in this case. But it gets you re-hired :)
1. I think we're assigning different meanings to "out of one's control": If you can "have a plan for it", as you say, than I wouldn't call that "out of your control", even if it's not your fault. In your example, the unfolding of the sunshield wasn't out of NASA's control, even though a failure might not have been anyone's fault in particular, so NASA would have been the one to blame. In contrast, an untracked meteorite hitting the JWST after launch would have been out of NASA's control.
2. Yes, that's what I meant by "for diplomatic reasons" :-)
Wow, you might have just convinced me to consider consulting. This is my natural personality/upbringing and I’ve always hated the internal rah-rah needed to do well for business units in an org, but at the same time am comfortable with self-promotion as needed.
Just keep in mind that a lot of the time even if you start off right, new management comes in, thinks that consultants are for "busy work", tries to relegate you to that, then has you putting out little fires they create. And if you are clearly doing better work compared to what the new CTO is capable of? Well, it goes two ways - you are valued and praised or you are pushed out because you are perceived as a threat to their authority. And guess which way it goes a lot of the time when a CTO asks you for a "deploy document, showing which file will be moved, by whom, to which machine, and who will send out a notification email" and you tell them it's all automated in a yaml file and you just push a button.
I agree and I think it's true because of the way how working communities(i.e. a team, a company etc) are structured.
Just think about how a hiring decision is made in first place.
Someone in a company needs something get done and they are going to do it with someone else's money. Their interests are structured in a way to produce KPI specific to their job and their risks are loss of reputation.
It's extremely profitable(in a sense of career KPI) to get someone from outside get things done with the money of the company as long as the outsider transfers the success to you and assumes any blame for any failure. The only catch is, the consultant needs to have a track record that makes the successful outcome plausible at least on surface because the person who hired the consultant must be able to defend the hiring decision.
You know the “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM”? It's the same idea. With a plausible hire, the success is owned by the person who managed the process and the failure is on the person or company that executed the task.
Is your experience that this is universal, though? I could easily envision organizations (based on my own experience, albeit not as a consultant in that sense) that would take your representation at face value - if things go south and you take the blame, they will blacklist and badmouth you, and vice versa they will love you if you can somehow hoard all the credit for a success. Perhaps it rarely plays out that way, but I’m skeptical that it never happens.
Exactly what I was thinking. Even worse, doesnt taking the blame mean they can ask/sue for damages?
Not sure why this is controversial, but I saw agency funded projects if they fail the companies have to repay the funding. Employees are usually protected but if a consultant was on board who would take the responsibility for that failure, I would expect at least some of the companies with legal departments to try to get the money from that consultant.
In my experience there is very little actual blacklisting/badmouthing in this way. Such behavior reflects poorly only on the badmouther.
In consulting there are always functional and non-functional criteria for a relationship- on both sides. Sometimes/often invented after the fact, after parties have gotten to know one another. Engagements will be described to others against that criteria. The listener can glean and infer what they are able to.
And sometimes for the careful listener, there will be some barely detectable tepidity in an endorsement.
This is something like an added benefit. If an organization has a good culture they'll like what you're doing and keep you working for then, if not then they'll get rid of you and free up your time something better.
As far as hoarding credit for a success, certainly a lot of people make that work for them but I'd like to think the other way is more sustainable. Maybe I'm fooling myself though?
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 trust their team at all. So most of our time was spent untangling that and doing a little implementation.
Interviewing staff ("stakeholders") at a customer is always fascinating. I've seen the full range from sincere gratitude at being listened to, through to open hostility and suspicion. The latter was much worse when I was younger and worried about impressions I was making on older-but-not-very-senior people. At some point you just stop giving a shit and let them hate you if they feel threatened.
This too, we're a technical consultancy (DevOps) so we get the gamut of reactions from "You're on my turf" to "Finally someone that my boss will listen to". Getting the former early on severely hurts your chances of success sadly.
The interview has to be scoped right. Sometimes they get scoped too broadly and people will offer opinions about processes of which they don’t have a complete understanding and can lead them to saying things that are not germane and sidetrack other teams.
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.
The essence of consulting business is that if you ask a consultant what the time is, they take your watch, look at it, tell you the time, and keep the watch.
On the other hand, there is real value unlocked by simply getting information from team A to team B in a dysfunctional organization that is totally unable to do it themselves; and most large organizations are dysfunctional in this sense.
Exactly that. I work for an agency that was bought by global consulting conglomerate. This gave me insight into the workings at global companies that hire consultancies.
At first I really didn't understand why these global companies shelled out this much money for consultants until I understood that more often than not it is the lines of communication these consultants open up.
They make it possible for information to flow from one stratified silo into another. For IT to talk to marketing and marketing to talk to product. And so on.
Not that I really enjoy the political side and the PowerPoint side of the job, but at least I understood some things better.
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.
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. :-)
This is sound advice in general but it depends a little on your exact role. If you're the sole "important consultant" then this is true, but if you're sent there as part of a team doing a mix of consulting/bodyleasing/developing stuff for the customer it seems to happen quite often that someone at the customer will pretend (or not) to listen to your advice, do the exact opposite, and in the end blame you that the project didn't finish on time/on budget/whatever. And I think the problem is that you might be invested a little more as a temporary cog in the machine than when being strictly on your supposed high consultant horse.
I thought the secret to being a consultant was to get a client to feed you a number, you do an analysis, and then feed that number back to them in a report :)
Seriously though, what you wrote is a great operating principle.
Maybe in tech,but that is not the case in other businesses, I would argue that big consulting firms, like McKinsey, do exactly the opposite. It seems a winning strategy.
If your job is to create or be a "politically acceptable" pretext for an unavoidable decision, then you will have adversaries who will want to discredit you. This means that in order to be effective you have to engage in debates and conflicts.
What I love the most about being in a consultance-esque role:
-Networking. I talk to more people daily than my CS colleagues do in a week.
-I still have time to program in the evening. A lot of work I do is kind of "shallow", talking about tech instead of making it. At 6PM my brain is still capable of a few hours of programming. When I get maybe get a good 4, 5 hours of coding out of my brain per day. I used to use these ours at my job, now I use these hours building my own thing with a few friends
I did a consulting stint in the CNCF and cloud native space for a while(5 yrs). My company was aquired and things really started to be about butts in seats and being billable all the time.
I had a manager I could reach out to but I maybe talked with them once or twice a year. While being able to continue personal development sounds nice on paper, and believe me, the company touted training time and ability to disconnect from customers, I never found the chance to pursue those goals. It was all about being onsite with the customer to bring in those $$ as billable time.
I loved my customers and consider many good friends to this day. However, the toil continued to burn in, not to mention the 100% travel; my personal life began to take a hit.
I got out of consulting and work as an engineer now. It was a valuable experience, and I worked with some really cool customers. But my personal life comes first and I now expect a certain level of support from my workplace now.
I do miss the network I made as a consultant, and a certain amount of travel is nice. Being able to drive innovation through digital transformation in a 60+ yr old organization leaves a good feeling of purpose. I wish there was some sort of happpy medium.
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 secure life, over any of the benefits this consultant has.
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 client.
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).
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.
These effects are both industry- and location-specific though. The tech sector has obviously done better than most in recent times.
Even in tech, here in the UK the government decided to push through some tax reforms aimed squarely at extracting more money from freelancers and contractors. The change in the rules had some unfortunate and possibly unintended side effects: many large clients got nervous about new potential liabilities and simply shut down those kinds of outsourced work altogether around the same time, which actually created downward pressure on rates for a while. I know several people who had been independents for a long time but went permanent instead as a result of this new environment, though it seems like the situation has started to stabilise now and a more "normal" market is operating again.
They cut the salary of all FTE employees in the company where I was contracting, in response to the lockdowns.
They even asked me to do the same and I refused. They needed me so they complied but I started looking around anyway for peace of mind in case they axed me - and found a better job.
It was pretty hard to deal with my sudden leave knowledge-wise so once the previous management got axed a few months later and replaced with new bots I went to offer my services at double my previous rate.
Instead of worrying about the type of position you're in, you should worry about getting as much money as you can and being useful to the company you're working for.
Which reminds me of the scene several years ago. They gather us in a big room, thanking us for our great contribution, everyone is getting fired.
I can't remember what I said, but something really funny and my friends consultants can't hold the laugh in.
Our Indian colleagues are screwed because their visas depended on them being employed.
We just went to another client, great company, our rates got bumped up.
Really sad situation.
On the other hand, sometimes when they want to save money, they would fire me, usually because I am most expensive of all. But then again, more often then this, they would keep me last, because I can do most work.
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.
Completely was the case with me. A large client cut my hours for about six months and now they are roaring to better than pre pandemic levels. Sadly they were acquired by another company during that time and a lot of people were let go due to the slow down and acquisition.
If I were an employee I mostly likely would have been let go.
> 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.
You probably should have savings as well, if someone isn't good with their finances then it probably isn't an ideal career for them. Customers can smell the desperation for work a mile off.
Absolutely. Personally I try to keep any savings and investments as a 1 way street. I treat it as an untouchable deposit-only fund unless something really bad happens or I make an explicit decision to do something big with it (like retire or temporarily go off the grid for a few years).
To me security is being able to live without taking out those funds during my working years but knowing they exist if I really need them.
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.
I've done both sides of the coin as well and Ian's points definitely resonate. There are downsides (IMO) though :-
1. Pressure to do things quickly, which you may not fully understand. Consultancy sales don't always sell entirely realistic things, and being asked to deliver what they sold can be .... stressful.
2. If you're a one-person band, you're not just a consultant, you're sales+marketing+accountancy+delivery.
3. You often don't get to see how things develop in the longer term. This was partly down to the industry I was in (pentesting) but holds true for a lot of consultancy
> 2. If you're a one-person band, you're not just a consultant, you're sales+marketing+accountancy+delivery.
That's the boat I'm in! Multiple hats — all of equal importance. No sales and marketing? Say bye to generating any revenue. No accounting? Say bye to collecting payment. And delivery — at the end of the day, your delivery more or less dictates whether that customer returns.
A colleague of mine and I used to work loooong hours as software developers. I met him a few years after he'd left for greener pastures.He was looking fit and bouncing around in an Hawaiian shirt. I asked him the secret of his happiness.
He said "I love consulting. Documents don't crash"!
That phrase still rings in my head when I'm swearing at the next obscure bug!
Off topic but for those curious: the blog is named after a chess tactic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug (Also called an intermezzo or an intermediate/in between move.)
As a chess nerd, I perked up after reading the domain. I figured it was maybe something about being a super GM’s second or something along those lines but nope.
I quit my job few months back. CEO was just starting to project so much negativity on my path that I had it. “I fuked his wife and I left” Totally kidding, I was thinking about the Step Brothers scene lol. Anyway humor aside, I been struggling in what to do, and what path to take. Been registering bunch of domains, thinking on creating some micro startups. But whenever I want to dive into my projects, I just lose interest. Maybe it is the midlife crisis, maybe the pandemic. I blame myself. I really like the consultation idea. I love to automate things. ReverseE software. Some of the comments here are pumping hype into my vision. What really motivates you?
I've never worked as a consultant, but I look at that profession as the one that should bring new knowledge to someone that needs it. If done properly this is great :)
A 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).
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.
The former is an activity and the latter is a business relationship, so they're orthogonal. Many consultants are contractors but not all are. Many contractors sell consultancy but not all do.
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,...
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.
You got the types of consulting right, but the terminology wrong. Yes, one type of consulting is lending your expertise, another type is lending a pair of hands. Either of these types of consulting work can occur under "contracting", "freelancing", or other types of business relationships. Often a "pair of hands" consult is hired "until further notice", so it's not always contracting.
> "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.
Not at all. Contracting, in itself, is just the business agreement but most of the time contractors are experts and have plenty of autonomy.
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 over-communication with the client throughout the engagement is often the difference between joyous interactions and the various horror stories that become commonplace.
Consulting can be spectacular IF the contracts are time and materials AND consultants over-communicate with clients.
Many good consultancies prefer fixed price for fixed scope because the margins are higher. You are of course owning the risk, but if you know how to write a contract and manage a customer, fixed price work is much more profitable and even easier to deliver.
Certainly, the upside is larger - cannot argue. The challenge, in my mind, with respect to software is the unforeseen, not-entirely-in-your-control challenge of integration, bug-fixing, etc. I'd much rather have delivered 95% of the scoped work, tell the client essentially, "we can do X, but it could require some non-trivial expenditure on your part or, since we've done a great job setting priorities to date, maybe that feature is not mission critical." Time and materials gives both parties some agency.
Of course, if your powers of predictions are infallible, then perhaps you're better off with fixed scope! (My powers of prediction are infallible too...until they aren't!)
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.
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[ 758 ms ] story [ 565 ms ] threadThis talks about not getting stuck in the politics of the company and having the authority/right to instigate change. It can be equally validly read as:
Number 1: If your company is hiring consultants that are outside the hierarchy you have a potentially toxic political business culture and should look for a new job
Overall it's a positive thing indeed, but as consultant/contractor, you will never be immune to politics and company hierarchy.
All of that can happen as an employee, but usually you have some leverage via management or your internal network to either get results into action or stop projects if it's clear they don't make sense (one of the reasons they're then given to consultants instead if management insists they're done).
In one case the lead developer quit and the manager suddenly decided to scrap the project and hire a consultant firm to do the rest. In another I worked for six months on a project that would be 'the future of the department' they were going to sell to major companies, got it to a UAT state, showed it to the client, and the client dragged their feet on signing contracts for it for months, then they decided they were going to replicate it in-house, an oh, could you share all your business logic with us so we don't have to recreate it from scratch (thankfully our company told them to get fucked on that request).
It did seem nuts we were doing work without a signed contract, but apparently that's just how the healthcare industry works, if you waited until the contracts were signed you'd miss the open enrollment window for some of these, the most important time of the year for these things to be working, so the corporation I worked for (a large corporation) decided they needed to get a several month head start without a signed contract, and were overconfident it would eventually be signed.
That same corporation also had a project for some grand overhaul of their systems (and intended to unify several departments that all had their own systems, since they were originally bought and merged companies). We were one of the departments that were supposed to merge with that new software, and I know it still wasn't ready six years later (might have been scrapped, but I'm not sure).
If a company is competent they don't need consultants
If a company is incompetent they can't use consultants
Yet consultants exist ...
If we instead use a scale from 0 to 100, and we understand that all companies are somewhere in between, then the paradox ceases to exist.
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 area. I wonder (genuinely, not sarcastically) how many proponents of consulting are in this boat.
Probably varies a lot by locale btw, if you can rely on state schooling and have a strong social security net it's very different.
Work for a consulting company.
Company have sales, accounting and a lawyer.
I have all the benefits described in the article.
Businesses usually have a handful of preferred suppliers they source consultant from, as well as black lists.
One thing a consultant has to figure out is how the procurement works in places they want to join. Some things are surprisingly public, like many tendering websites. You do not have to answer to a tender directly, but you can always check who is winning and who is likely to need more people aboard and apply using that knowledge.
If you are working through one boutique consultancy you aren’t actually doing too badly. Sometimes you’ll be working through a system integrator, through a boutique consultancy, and through a staffing agency. And to some degree they are all delivering some value, simply because working with big corporates is so painful and getting direct relationships is so difficult.
At least that was my experience. So you can have the best of both worlds, or the worst...
But yes, I still only have a very good salary, not what HN would expect for "real contractors" but it is stable and worry free and I have good colleagues.
There is a vast array of options to get weaker even if you have the right mindset.
As far as gig workers, they do get something in return for the instability, which is (in theory) higher hourly pay and more flexible achedules. If they aren't getting this, they aren't really gig workers and should be labelled as employees, but if they are, they get a benefit for the risk they take.
Personally I think that many gig workers should be simply classified as normal employees.
Another issue is that gig workers and consultants don't pay for unemployment insurance at all, so they're actually not paying the same contributions as others.
Gig workers who not earning enough would be better off with a permie low paid job, if they were able to get one. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not useful enough to society to contribute and live in some places - I think the solution is to send them somewhere else where they can be useful and find a job.
That would include such socially useless people like school teachers and nurses, I guess.
That can be the chance to learn something or build some other passive income stream.
I think the main problem is that most people, once they can charge 1000£ per day, they go and blow a lot of it on expensive holidays and an expensive lifestyle.
100% this. Doing a career retrospective as a long time consultant was very sobering: lots of 404s.
I'm more than happy to forget the nth API or crappy frontend I had to work on to buy my house.
I would like to add, that for people with little professional experience, working in a consultancy can accelerate the rate at which work experience is gained (by working on different projects, perhaps at different clients and with different technologies). This also expects a lot of commitment and willingness to learn (as pointed out in the article).
As an added benefit, one has the chance to look at the inner workings of a lot of different companies if one doesn't want to stay in consulting forever.
The only way to be a consultant and not working for free is to be self employed and using some time between projects to learn.
I've owned many projects that have had large impacts. I guess it just depends on how you go about it. So yeah, my experience doesn't align with Mr. Jobs at all.
worth noting that this OP seems like he is still an employee AT a consultancy, so in effect having the 'best of both worlds' - a secure income + wide exposure to client projects. Presumably, there will be internal politics within the consultancy, particularly if he wants to move up in status or responsibility.
I would add that senior roles in consultancies of this type inevitably become sales roles - responsibility shifts from delivery (individual contributor does this) to customer acquisition (partner does this), which will come with this its own set of pro's and cons.
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. And they need someone to blame, so just take it.
If you succeed, spread the praise. You worked with them, it was the right decision that they hired you, so they did great. And you just humble helped them to unlock the potential they already had.
Thing is, in scenario 1, if you deflect blame, they will not hire you again. And they will badmouth you if somebody asks. You you take the blame, they might not hire you again, but they will respect you when somebody asks about you.
In scenario 2, if you take all the praise, they will not feel good about themselves, and will not WOM (word of mouth) you. If you spread the praise, they will feel good about themselves, talk about their success and will so WOM you.
A thankless job. I love it.
I’ve had a previous engagement for about 1.5y with this type of culture, and it made me miserable.
The thing is that people on the other side should either recognize what you're doing or appreciate you relieving the tension in their internal politics enough that your emotional labor is rewarded with a positive atmosphere.
If that doesn't happen then you can only hope they're paying well. Doing this comes naturally to me though and I struggle in environments where you need to be a self-promoter so maybe it's a "horses for courses" situation.
I'd say it goes beyond consulting, too, and that knowing how to "take the blame and distribute the praise" is a superpower. Especially that first part. Knowing to take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control, puts you on a different level to many people who will simply try to dodge it as much as possible.
As a consultants, clients aren't (generally) stupid and can smell the bullshit. What they'll see, if you do this right, is someone who is effective and professional. This inspires trust and gets you re-hired.
If this sort of thing makes you miserable, IMO then yeah it's not for you. Personally, I'd advise introspection: Why does it make you miserable, exactly?
Although this might sometimes be a good idea for diplomatic reasons, it feels just as wrong and "bullshitty" as accepting praise for things that are outside your control. And it might lead to a loss of respect by people who see through this fake humility.
1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chances of it happening and ultimately, having a plan for it.
2. As a consultant, you're sometimes hired so bigger clients can externalize blame. It makes no difference to you, doesn't matter, it's not like they're hampering your career opportunities or something. They love that they have someone to blame for shit instead of blaming the actual people responsible. Yes, it's entirely bullshitty in this case. But it gets you re-hired :)
2. Yes, that's what I meant by "for diplomatic reasons" :-)
Just think about how a hiring decision is made in first place.
Someone in a company needs something get done and they are going to do it with someone else's money. Their interests are structured in a way to produce KPI specific to their job and their risks are loss of reputation.
It's extremely profitable(in a sense of career KPI) to get someone from outside get things done with the money of the company as long as the outsider transfers the success to you and assumes any blame for any failure. The only catch is, the consultant needs to have a track record that makes the successful outcome plausible at least on surface because the person who hired the consultant must be able to defend the hiring decision.
You know the “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM”? It's the same idea. With a plausible hire, the success is owned by the person who managed the process and the failure is on the person or company that executed the task.
Not sure why this is controversial, but I saw agency funded projects if they fail the companies have to repay the funding. Employees are usually protected but if a consultant was on board who would take the responsibility for that failure, I would expect at least some of the companies with legal departments to try to get the money from that consultant.
In consulting there are always functional and non-functional criteria for a relationship- on both sides. Sometimes/often invented after the fact, after parties have gotten to know one another. Engagements will be described to others against that criteria. The listener can glean and infer what they are able to.
And sometimes for the careful listener, there will be some barely detectable tepidity in an endorsement.
As far as hoarding credit for a success, certainly a lot of people make that work for them but I'd like to think the other way is more sustainable. Maybe I'm fooling myself though?
Edited for spelling
On the other hand, there is real value unlocked by simply getting information from team A to team B in a dysfunctional organization that is totally unable to do it themselves; and most large organizations are dysfunctional in this sense.
At first I really didn't understand why these global companies shelled out this much money for consultants until I understood that more often than not it is the lines of communication these consultants open up.
They make it possible for information to flow from one stratified silo into another. For IT to talk to marketing and marketing to talk to product. And so on.
Not that I really enjoy the political side and the PowerPoint side of the job, but at least I understood some things better.
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.
And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013:56...
Don't know if its derived from the verse you mention.
They mean the same thing, of course.
> 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.
Seriously though, what you wrote is a great operating principle.
If your job is to create or be a "politically acceptable" pretext for an unavoidable decision, then you will have adversaries who will want to discredit you. This means that in order to be effective you have to engage in debates and conflicts.
-Networking. I talk to more people daily than my CS colleagues do in a week. -I still have time to program in the evening. A lot of work I do is kind of "shallow", talking about tech instead of making it. At 6PM my brain is still capable of a few hours of programming. When I get maybe get a good 4, 5 hours of coding out of my brain per day. I used to use these ours at my job, now I use these hours building my own thing with a few friends
I had a manager I could reach out to but I maybe talked with them once or twice a year. While being able to continue personal development sounds nice on paper, and believe me, the company touted training time and ability to disconnect from customers, I never found the chance to pursue those goals. It was all about being onsite with the customer to bring in those $$ as billable time.
I loved my customers and consider many good friends to this day. However, the toil continued to burn in, not to mention the 100% travel; my personal life began to take a hit.
I got out of consulting and work as an engineer now. It was a valuable experience, and I worked with some really cool customers. But my personal life comes first and I now expect a certain level of support from my workplace now.
I do miss the network I made as a consultant, and a certain amount of travel is nice. Being able to drive innovation through digital transformation in a 60+ yr old organization leaves a good feeling of purpose. I wish there was some sort of happpy medium.
I'm happy I'm not a consultant. I value job security, and therefore a financially secure life, over any of the benefits this consultant has.
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).
Even in tech, here in the UK the government decided to push through some tax reforms aimed squarely at extracting more money from freelancers and contractors. The change in the rules had some unfortunate and possibly unintended side effects: many large clients got nervous about new potential liabilities and simply shut down those kinds of outsourced work altogether around the same time, which actually created downward pressure on rates for a while. I know several people who had been independents for a long time but went permanent instead as a result of this new environment, though it seems like the situation has started to stabilise now and a more "normal" market is operating again.
They even asked me to do the same and I refused. They needed me so they complied but I started looking around anyway for peace of mind in case they axed me - and found a better job.
It was pretty hard to deal with my sudden leave knowledge-wise so once the previous management got axed a few months later and replaced with new bots I went to offer my services at double my previous rate.
Instead of worrying about the type of position you're in, you should worry about getting as much money as you can and being useful to the company you're working for.
- Most of the consultants had new gigs within weeks.
- It was the permanents with 6+ years at ACME corp on their resume that had a harsh time finding work even months later.
So take it with a grain of salt, it highly depends on context, but true job security is mostly an illusion.
I can't remember what I said, but something really funny and my friends consultants can't hold the laugh in.
Our Indian colleagues are screwed because their visas depended on them being employed.
We just went to another client, great company, our rates got bumped up.
Really sad situation.
On the other hand, sometimes when they want to save money, they would fire me, usually because I am most expensive of all. But then again, more often then this, they would keep me last, because I can do most work.
If I were an employee I mostly likely would have been let go.
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.
Absolutely. Personally I try to keep any savings and investments as a 1 way street. I treat it as an untouchable deposit-only fund unless something really bad happens or I make an explicit decision to do something big with it (like retire or temporarily go off the grid for a few years).
To me security is being able to live without taking out those funds during my working years but knowing they exist if I really need them.
As a consultant you can have two or three clients in different sectors and diversify.
You will be sorely disappointed if you think getting paid w2 vs 1099 (in the us) gives you job security.
Job security is your drive, skill, and luck living in an area that has work for you. (If you live in the us consider yourself lucky - in tech)
That said, you can be axed as a FTE as well when things go south.
1. Pressure to do things quickly, which you may not fully understand. Consultancy sales don't always sell entirely realistic things, and being asked to deliver what they sold can be .... stressful.
2. If you're a one-person band, you're not just a consultant, you're sales+marketing+accountancy+delivery.
3. You often don't get to see how things develop in the longer term. This was partly down to the industry I was in (pentesting) but holds true for a lot of consultancy
That's the boat I'm in! Multiple hats — all of equal importance. No sales and marketing? Say bye to generating any revenue. No accounting? Say bye to collecting payment. And delivery — at the end of the day, your delivery more or less dictates whether that customer returns.
He said "I love consulting. Documents don't crash"!
That phrase still rings in my head when I'm swearing at the next obscure bug!
As a chess nerd, I perked up after reading the domain. I figured it was maybe something about being a super GM’s second or something along those lines but nope.
6. You can have your own schedule instead of constant 9-5
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?
The former is an activity and the latter is a business relationship, so they're orthogonal. Many consultants are contractors but not all are. Many contractors sell consultancy but not all do.
Even so, I try to ensure that my contracting engagements demonstrate my value as a consultant.
Not at all. Contracting, in itself, is just the business agreement but most of the time contractors are experts and have plenty of autonomy.
The very opposite of grunt work.
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 over-communication with the client throughout the engagement is often the difference between joyous interactions and the various horror stories that become commonplace.
Consulting can be spectacular IF the contracts are time and materials AND consultants over-communicate with clients.
Of course, if your powers of predictions are infallible, then perhaps you're better off with fixed scope! (My powers of prediction are infallible too...until they aren't!)
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.
In general I won't and I've found the more the client demands it the more I should be worried.