It’s great to be a consultant

https://zwischenzugs.com/2022/01/17/why-its-great-to-be-a-consultant/

by ingve • 5 years ago

222 178 5 years ago

misthop• 5 years ago

Number 1: You are outside the company hierarchy

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

Foobar8568• 5 years ago

Or you will be fast out project if you ever side with the wrong "persons"(oh and don't forget the regular 6months reorg ).

Overall it's a positive thing indeed, but as consultant/contractor, you will never be immune to politics and company hierarchy.

dx0342• 5 years ago

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).

cableshaft• 5 years ago

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).

kthejoker2• 5 years ago

Aa an ex consultant I (re?)discovered a paradox

If a company is competent they don't need consultants

If a company is incompetent they can't use consultants

Yet consultants exist ...

SenHeng3• 5 years ago

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

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.

Copenjin• 5 years ago

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.

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

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.

skinkestek• 5 years ago

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.

sam_lowry_• 5 years ago

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.

ahartmetz2• 5 years ago

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).

haspok• 5 years ago

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...

ciphol• 5 years ago

TLDR suffering builds character?

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

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.

garrickvanburen3• 5 years ago

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.

ahartmetz2• 5 years ago

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...

varispeed• 5 years ago

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.

danjac3• 5 years ago

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).

brtkdotse• 5 years ago

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.

sudosysgen2• 5 years ago

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.

arbitrary_name2• 5 years ago

You could work for a consulting company, collect a regular and stable paycheck, and still get the same experience.

jokethrowaway6• 5 years ago

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.

GiorgioG3• 5 years ago

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!

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

It is not like employees stick around that long either anyway.

GiorgioG3• 5 years ago

Employees usually stick around longer than 6-18 months (that was my typical engagement length range when I was consulting.)

dx0342• 5 years ago

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.

GiorgioG3• 5 years ago

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.

karaterobot2• 5 years ago

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.

jokethrowaway6• 5 years ago

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.

elb2020• 5 years ago

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.

lorenzfx• 5 years ago

This very much mirrors my experience.

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.

itsmemattchung2• 5 years ago

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.

buzzwords• 5 years ago

Not quite the same thing, but I'll be joining a consultancy firm soon hoping I'll get more exposure to different techs.

o_m• 5 years ago

About point 2, when you factor in all the free time you have spend on learning new stuff, then the salary isn't really that great.

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.

jstx1• 5 years ago

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

nightski• 5 years ago

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.

NikolaeVarius2• 5 years ago

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

hunglee2• 5 years ago

excellent post

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.

franze• 5 years ago

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. 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.

stuckkeys2• 5 years ago

Damn. This was very poetic. Great response. True diplomat.

stingraycharles• 5 years ago

Would you say that this approach to management, blame-culture, is unavoidable as a consultant?

I’ve had a previous engagement for about 1.5y with this type of culture, and it made me miserable.

jrumbut2• 5 years ago

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.

scrollaway3• 5 years ago

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?

punnerud• 5 years ago

Can we say that public praise is often inverse proportional with money earned in the long run? You often can't have both.

IggleSniggle• 5 years ago

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.

throw1234651234• 5 years ago

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.

heavenlyblue• 5 years ago

For the sake of numbers, how much do you earn?

dsaadas• 5 years ago

200-250 on average, bigger when working fulltime (average around 28-30h a week)

mrtksn• 5 years ago

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.

Cederfjard• 5 years ago

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.

andi999• 5 years ago

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.

jonahbenton• 5 years ago

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.

jrumbut2• 5 years ago

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?

leeter2• 5 years ago

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.

mjburgess• 5 years ago

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

belter2• 5 years ago

Another classic Weinberg...

kelvin02• 5 years ago

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.

everdrive• 5 years ago

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

vladvasiliu• 5 years ago

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.

wink• 5 years ago

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.

hungryforcodes• 5 years ago

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.

Ostrogodsky• 5 years ago

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.

yobbo• 5 years ago

Partly true.

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.

adflux• 5 years ago

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

mrichman• 5 years ago

I looked at his employer's job openings. Lost me at "online personality assessment".

crawl_soever• 5 years ago

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.

noud• 5 years ago

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.

trhoad• 5 years ago

Very true. It doesn't matter how interesting and varied the work could be if there isn't any work.

agentwiggles• 5 years ago

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.

Silhouette2• 5 years ago

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.

ramblerman• 5 years ago

Counter anecdote, I've seen a company go belly up entirely and

- 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.

desireco42• 5 years ago

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.

kerneloftruth2• 5 years ago

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.

dnndev2• 5 years ago

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.

nickjj2• 5 years ago

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.

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

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.

dnndev2• 5 years ago

I feel much more job security as a consultant than I ever did as an employee. The minute your not making money for a company your let go.

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)

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

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.

jokethrowaway6• 5 years ago

I think your reasoning makes sense - unless you're a developer in high demand.

That said, you can be axed as a FTE as well when things go south.

raesene9• 5 years ago

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

itsmemattchung2• 5 years ago

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.

sriram_malhar• 5 years ago

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!

ssiddharth• 5 years ago

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.

stuckkeys2• 5 years ago

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?

taubek• 5 years ago

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 :)

firechickenbird• 5 years ago

5. you always get paid for working overtime

6. You can have your own schedule instead of constant 9-5

henrik_w• 5 years ago

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).

etripe• 5 years ago

That's true in the US. For many in Europe, it's the other way around.

immutology2• 5 years ago

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?

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

Is this "consulting" or "contracting"?

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.

jpitz• 5 years ago

They're not always synonymous. Much of the time it's a little of column A, little of column B.

Even so, I try to ensure that my contracting engagements demonstrate my value as a consultant.

kerneloftruth2• 5 years ago

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,...

wrnr• 5 years ago

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.

immutology2• 5 years ago

I find this intriguing. Care to elaborate on it?

baobabKoodaa• 5 years ago

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.

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

I end up doing both.

goodpoint• 5 years ago

"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 very opposite of grunt work.

evancoop2• 5 years ago

I 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 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.

benjaminwootton2• 5 years ago

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.

evancoop2• 5 years ago

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!)

ejb999• 5 years ago

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.

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

I've done a couple of fixed price jobs but they were very small (a couple of weeks work) and with a client I trusted.

In general I won't and I've found the more the client demands it the more I should be worried.

mettamage3• 5 years ago

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 that companies like EY, Accenture, Deloitte and PWC don't encourage this. I also feel that McKinsey, BCG and Bain don't fully encourage this. So which companies are good to work for?

I am not looking to become a consultant per se. I simply know that I step outside of boundaries by default [1]. I am clueless in this, I need a career coach. I don't know how to find a good career coach.

What I have liked to do in the past (personal/professional): pentesting, Python, C++, JavaScript, data scraping, building web apps, data analysis, improving business processes, trading (signal trading), investing (value investing) and playing poker (standard math of hand ranges, pot odds, fold equity, etc.).

[1] Example: at one company I was a programmer and I saw an approach to improve their business model. This has helped the company to generate 10% more revenue. As a result they get pissed because I am not programming enough.

_57jb• 5 years ago

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.

isoprophlex• 5 years ago

I think I'm helping and being brutally honest when in reality it comes off condescending or arrogant.
honesty without kindness is cruelty

That is so very spot on. I strongly identify with this, great quote.

mettamage3• 5 years ago

Thanks, this helps.

eastbayjake2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't characterize great consultants as "not worrying" about politics or history -- a large part of the job is change management, not just finding the "right" answer but helping ensure it is actually acted on and has impact.

But McKinsey does include "maintain an independent perspective" as one of our core values, and entrepreneurship (i.e. not just "staying in your box") is a common expectation across all our people whether they do strategy work or help clients build software. If you're interested in learning more, we're hiring: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs/jobs/seniorsoft...

mettamage3• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, I am not a senior software engineer. I have 2 years of experience in different stacks and a master CS. As far as I understand it, that makes me medior at best.

GaylordTuring• 5 years ago

Number four, you meet lots of people, sounds like a downside to me :) Each to his own I guess.

chasd00• 5 years ago

I work for a very very large firm. Consulting will always be a relationship business first and everything else second. All the really valuable things I’ve worked in all start with “well I know someone in DC that has done X and I know a guy out in Seattle that has a team that does Y, let’s get a call together and talk about solving Z.

Dave3of5• 5 years ago

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 right slow down for even a year and you can be left behind in consulting. At least as a permie I can catch up at my own pace

* You get more exposure - For the types of companies that hire consultants this is a downside. The exposure you be getting is to toxic workplaces. They even admit this in the JD "the customers we work with will use legacy practices and technologies. "

* You meet lots of people - I already have plenty people in my life this isn't a positive for most programmers it's a negative.

You know who's the first to be fired when times are a bit more rough...

jasonkester• 5 years ago

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 where the "learning new things" comes is. Fast, and on the fly.

NikolaeVarius2• 5 years ago

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

sails2• 5 years ago

When you transition and you leave your old perm role, offer them your time via consulting to keep the lights on in whatever you were involved in (they will likely want this if you were any good...) but ensure you do two things:

1. plan for rate increases that very meaningfully increase as time goes on

2. keep an eye on when they transition from "glad not to have lost you" to "taking you for granted" and when this happens, it is time to move on and fire them as a client

* both of these presume you are successful in finding, pleasing and retaining new clients

belter2• 5 years ago

Don't become a Consultant before reading Weinberg: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/174075.Gerald_M_Weinbe...

For example the "Orange Juice Test" is a classic, I have used multiple times. Either as Consultant or a customer of services as many of us are daily.

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

Travel killed it for me. I worked on a niche product and that meant I had to go where the work was. My kids were young so I took a financial hit and switched to selling my own products.

yawnxyz• 5 years ago

Being a good consultant is so incredibly difficult. You have to do the work, but in the other hours you have to do the client management, marketing, accounting, etc. etc.

It's thankless and it's tough. Unless of course you've built a network of well-to-do companies over the years that you could tap into and pay you for various services. Then you can just rely on your network.

cm20122• 5 years ago

If you're good at it and have a good network, consulting is always better than FTE work. You make more money, grow your network faster, have more flexibility, etc. I was a consultant for 5 years and now run an agency, and I currently have ~50 consultants I work with across various projects.

That "if" is big though. If you're not good at it, you won't keep clients. If you don't have a good network, you'll be stuck with low end SMB clients that aren't lucrative.

vasili111• 5 years ago

How to grow network when you do not have it? Any advices to person who wants to get in to consultancy and do not knows where to start?

dboreham• 5 years ago

If you are willing to invest your time, open source projects can be a low barrier to entry route. Show up, work on a project for free, now you have a network. Probably you don't actually have to work for free either because there are some open source projects with funding.

cm20122• 5 years ago

Your first network is co-workers, so being hired at a big or venture backed company with well connected co-workers is a good start. If you get a job doing consulting at a consulting company, you'll meet new companies all the time in a risk free way.

Your second network is physical events - meet-ups, conferences. Note, these should be technical for your field of expertise, not like a business networking meet-up, which suck.

Third is your online presence - the open source communities you submit to, twitter connections you've replied intelligently to, etc.

tiffanyh2• 5 years ago

Counter argument for those who think consulting is "great" (because it's not - at least from a business owners perspective).

TLDR: consulting has huge variable costs, you have to float A LOT of money, no reoccurring revenue, difficult to differentiate since people are your "product".

- the business model of consulting is extremely grinding, difficult and exhausting for business owners

- your "product" is your people, which causes all kinds of business problems

- the only way to scale revenue is to hire more people

- more people means you need more billable hours, which means you need more customers in an industry that DOES NOT HAVE REOCCURRING revenue. As such, if you try to sell your consultancy - you get extremely low multiples on revenue.

- cash flow becomes a MASSIVE PROBLEM because there are hard costs to pre-sales actives to win business, and even after business is won, you have to float your staff salaries typically 45-90 days until billing kicks in. (think about that for a moment, if you have 10 employees who you pay $120k/year/each, if 90 days is the float time, that $300k in cash reserves you need just because of float (3 months * $10k/mo * 10 employees)

- when you're not billable, that's literally costing you money in order to pay your staff. You can QUICKLY become unprofitable in a matter of just a few months.

- You're margin is inverse rated to billable time. E.g. if you are marking up your staff's salaries by 30%, that means to breakeven - that staff needs to be billable 70% of the year. (And that is assuming $0 presales/marketing/etc costs)

Again, consulting is a brutal business to be in.

sails2• 5 years ago

Great summary. Consulting not a great business to build to sell.

Curious how these businesses possibly survive a slower market?

Only thing I can imagine is the job market slows proportionally and your people/staff won't have better options.

tiffanyh2• 5 years ago

For tech consulting, there was a lot of layoff unless a services contract committed contractual spend. Keep in mind, staff augmentation / time & materials is a very common contractual model - which has no committed spend.

Also, another point I didn't mention above is Marketing Agencies and Lawyers. These business are fundamentally "consulting". The massive difference is that (a) these industries found ways that allowed them to capture more revenue than just billing time, e.g. lawyers can get a % of a cash settlement case, or marketing agencies can get a % of ad spend from a company, and (b) they found ways to help with the cash flow float by creating "retainer" vehicles.

reilly3000• 4 years ago

This. Also it creates perverse incentives, where consultants are expected to be constantly selling new work, yet taking their sweet time to deliver. After running a small consultancy for several years, I'm never going back there, nor to a place where I am a "resource".

wojciii• 5 years ago

I like being a consultant.

Prior to becoming one I discovered that .. I get bored easily and shitty management makes me change jobs (unless I get fired first for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time).

I work for a consulting company. They pay could be better but at least I get paid for the time that I spend instead of expected to put a "reasonable" amount of time per week no matter what the problem that I need to solve is.

Now I ask for a new assignment after a year or two and avoid having to look for work.

There seems to be a continuous need for people who can write embedded software..

nunez• 5 years ago

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. Those projects are usually very large.)

The disadvantage of being a consultant to large companies is that you're usually not working at the cutting edge, though this depends on the context for your presence. You're more likely to go deep (i.e. tweaking kernels, re-compiling source for major OSS products, etc.) if you're with $CLOUD_PROVIDER working with a client spending millions/year with them than if you're with a boutique consulting shop doing high-level strategy for which technical implementation is a minor factor. This is usually patched by your consulting company's bench time policy.

A consulting company is only as good as the consultants they employ. Good consulting companies hire opportunistically (i.e. ahead of their sales pipeline) and budget large bench times. In other words, their profit models plan for their consultants to spend, say, 30% of the year unassigned so that they can train/work on personal projects/breathe/etc.

Not-so-good consulting companies (IMO) (or very sales-driven consulting companies) hire just-in-time and expect their consultants to be staffed more than 85% of the year, with any training done after-hours or during the weekend. These outfits typically operate closer to agencies or contingent labor shops where profit is directly proportional to the number of people they staff, but some newer consulting companies start off like this (because it's easier) but never aim for the former model (because it's more expensive).

AitchEmArsey4• 5 years ago

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.

karaterobot2• 5 years ago

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.

2ion• 5 years ago

From my personal experience, the best time I had as a consultant was when the client paid their bill :>

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

5. Because you are external to the company you are not obligated to do all the various socializing things companies force on their employees.

chadlavi• 5 years ago

On the other hand, you also have to constantly arrange your next gig, take care of your own insurance, do your complex taxes... in the US it seems very scary, like jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Great, as long as you make the jump every time.

jokethrowaway6• 5 years ago

I disagree being a consultant is that much different. You can have the same attitude as a permie.

What are they going to do? Fire you? Cool story, worst case scenario you'll get a pay rise in another company with a similar setup.

The real difference is that you can skip on paying social contributions, be more tax efficient, work more (you can ignore holidays if you feel like it) and charge more.

It’s great to be a consultant

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