It’s great to be a consultant
zwischenzugs.com
zwischenzugs.com
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.
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.
* 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...
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.
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
It all just depends on where the client culture fits on the "move fast and break things" spectrum.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> honesty without kindness is cruelty
That is so very spot on. I strongly identify with this, great quote.
If I wanted to go through the song and dance of buttering everyone up so they will do what I say, why bother coming up with a good idea as well? I'd just say the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, that might be why the ideas that get acted upon tend to be so bad. What's the point of the quality of the idea has no impact in it's odds for adoption?
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...
Software Engineer may be a better fit, you'll need to select your preferred region but here's a representative US role in client consulting: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs/jobs/softwareen...
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 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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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..
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
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.
> Probably you don't actually have to work for free either because there are some open source projects with funding.
It's not so easy to get that funding. Even founders of projects can't get adequate funding. A one-off "drive-by" contributor will not typically be compensated at all.
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.
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 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.
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!
6. You can have your own schedule instead of constant 9-5
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.
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.