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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but no case is made to support the idea that taxpayers are buying generic advice. Let's agree that the service buys a fresh college grad assigned full time. The grad might be a customer contact collecting and organizing customer issues before presenting them to internal subject matter experts, and then presenting those findings back to the client. I'd like to hear evidence to support how the service is fresh college grads simply using what they learnt in college and their chutzpah, which is what the article implies.

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> The grad might be a customer contact collecting and organizing customer issues before presenting them to internal subject matter experts, and then presenting those findings back to the client

This might describe how technical consulting is done at big firms where the output is a product, but when the output is strategic documents... this is grunt work done by the front line analysts with a generic playbook. There is no "behind the scenes" strategy work like there is for dev. Maybe there is a lower analyst or intern that doesn't interface with the customer.

Respectfully do you work in the field, can you talk more to how you are able to do the work all on your own? Or is this an educated guess? If so, I doubt the service contract they were able to write was done by a fresh grad, I guess they are sourcing an internal legal team, and I suspect they have more internal experts to call on. It's common in legal and financial consulting to have junior staff do on-prem time consuming low value work that is a big waste of time for experts, who can be called in to join meetings remotely etc.

FWIW this is the direct opposite of my experience working in both strategy and technical consulting. When it comes to dev work, it often actually was just a 23 year-old new grad writing code with little oversight (when I was 23 I actually wrote a lot of code that was reviewed by no-one, tested by only myself, and is probably still being used across a couple of F500s). Strategy work on the other hand was almost always reviewed and revised by several tiers of higher-up, more experienced consultants before being delivered to the customer.

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