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Comment by andi999 | Hacker News Reader

And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.

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As someone who was part of that A team used to sell things, I spent a year jumping between projects fixing the problems the D team caused. Maybe it would’ve been worth it if I got paid more but I doubt it. It was stressful, you never learned much, and ultimately I burned out.

> ultimately I burned out

Can I ask, does that mean you got so worn out so you couldn't work, had to stay at home / away-from-work for some time?

I wonder what happened afterwards. Seems you now work as an independent contractor now? (looking at your external profile, I hope you don't mind)

Honestly, I had quit and wanted to do a startup (not the best way to deal with burnout though). But we were also expecting my son so I took a pretty steady 9-5 job for 18 months.

But after working on the same problem set for that long I got interested again in solving tougher problems and went back out on the consulting scene.

But that job forever changed my views on work life balance so I am now very aggressive with balancing hours for people that report to me even if I don’t balance my own hours.

In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.

You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha

The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.

Technical Sales

Some of the most successful engineers I know, got there by migrating over to engineering sales. I'm almost convinced if you are a moderately skilled software engineer, are very good looking, very charismatic, and have maybe a spoonful of general business knowledge, you can pretty much name your salary. They'll stick you in a suit, fly you around with the bizdev guys, and you only have to do anything if the client brings their tech guys to talk. You'll occasionally do some coding: write a few demos, maybe integrate your company's software with some other company's workflow, but mostly smile and talk about architecture, frameworks, blah blah blah. Nice work if you can get it. I was too much of a cynic and critic to make it in such a role, and I have the looks of a toad, so I never bothered.

How does one get one of these jobs? :-) It sounds lovely. Listen to all kinds of different business ideas and build proofs of concept. Talk to other nerds and hear about their experiences. Travel and get points (this last one, not so much).

Pretty much describes one of my (former) neighbors. She was a programmer who discovered that she could make a ton more money doing sales instead. Then moved up from there into a Sales Management position and never looked back.

I meet all of those qualities, maybe I should take a look at this!

As long as the job can be delivered to a mutually-satisfactory state, then it shouldn't matter if it's done by an A/B/C or D team. A lot of times in software "consulting" firms, the "profit" margin diminishes or is negative the closer you approach the top levels of developer in terms of quality/seniority. So it's in their best interest to get the most out of less-senior developers, otherwise they simply don't turn a profit.

The clients though, they want to pay the consulting firm relatively the same price they would pay for a standalone developer employee, per hour. The entire industry is broken and a lot of it has to do with broken recruiting, the recruiting industry, the "consulting firms" (body-shops) that are just resellers, and onerous employment regulations that make firms prefer outsourcing to shady outfits instead of hiring in-house developers.

"As long as the job can be delivered to a mutually-satisfactory state"

When has that ever happened?

I've personally been part of many, of varying size.

The problem is that during the sales process, the client is led to believe that the "mutually-satisfactory state" that they are paying for is a certain bar of quality and will be built by "the A team".

But then, after many months and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars are already spent, their bar for "mutually-satisfactory state" has been lowered to "I guess we will accept this pile of mediocre shit that the D-team built, because we already wasted months on this and we are desperate for something, and it would be too expensive and just waste more time to try and argue with the consulting firm to fix it".

I spent a long career as a consultant at one of the top "prestigious" firms. Consulting firms almost always prey on this hope that the clients won't complain too much, even though everyone knows the end product that is delivered isn't anywhere close to what was pitched during the sales phase.

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