Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

There are different types of consultants. The bad rap consultants get is based on the stereotype are that they are expensive and deliver a poor-quality job. And this stereotype exists for a reason. Most consultants ARE bad, and deliver poor work.

I am a consultant. And my firm focuses on clients where we have short engagements and focus on specialty work that you can't easily hire for.

The type of work I do doesn't get you cut, because you're in and out and try to deliver a great value to your clients, and you keep them for years in repeat engagements because you do it and can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

As for the former type of consultant, you'll get cut, and you'll get cut so fast your head will spin. And the reason you'll get cut is because your client wishes it could just hire employees, but sometimes they can't and they find consultants instead.

View on HN

"There are two types of consultant and I'm the good type." - Every consultant I've ever met.

We're not bad at our jobs. We're bad at finding jobs. It's a fit thing. If you want the real two types: It's specialists and jacks-of-all-trades. Specialists are pointless to hire because yeah, they should just be employees. That's why I'm a jack of all trades, the good type of consultant.

The same goes for employee candidates. There are two types of candidates, and I'm the one you want to hire. :)

That's just hiring in general: most developers produce total crap.

Your experience is with companies that needed a consultant though, right? There's a selection bias there. This is part of why I'm looking for a job (and am that type of candidate!) and no longer consulting. I want to work somewhere that doesn't need to hire a consultant.

I’m very much a specialist consultant - I specialize in “cloud application modernization”. Which basically means I do application development and “DevOps” using AWS technologies. But I’ve been doing your standard enterprise app dev/architecture for decades and I’ve used every type of backend language and database imaginable. Within the context of cloud, I am considered a generalist with a few specialities.

> Specialists are pointless to hire because yeah, they should just be employees

My job as both a consultant and before that at my last two full time jobs is to “put myself out of a job”. I focus on training my coworkers (when I was working full time as a non consultant) and now my clients to not need me. I did so twice before working as a full time consultant.

I absolutely refuse to do a staff augmentation type project and focus on projects where the company needs to leverage my specific skillset. I am engaged with the customer from pre-sales, architecture proposal, SOWs, through delivery. I haven’t done a project in any of my consulting projects where I haven’t started with an empty git repo.

I’ll be the first to admit that I suck at “staff augmentation”. Either I’m good at my job, or I’ve managed to fool a very large cloud provider and our customers that I’m good enough not to get fired.

I was also a dev lead in a previous life who was forced to work with contractors. I would never do so again. I’ll work with my team. But I know without a doubt that my team knows our specialty better than anyone else in the world.

It's mostly a tongue-in-cheek comment there at the end. Of course specialist consultants are appropriate in some cases. I do like the "automating the gig out of existence" approach.

Not just automating - training. If you make yourself irreplaceable, you also can’t be promoted or transferred to new projects.

It also doesn’t look good when you get ready to talk about your achievements.

Some people thought it was heartless when Netflix laid off some of their employees who were responsible for the original migration to AWS once it was complete.

They don’t seem to realize how good it looks on your resume or at an interview to say “I was on a team in charge of the largest cloud migration in history and once it was successful. They didn’t need me.”

Yeah it sounds good but you are still moving, wasting time interviewing and currently unemployed

Have you heard about Netflix’s severance package?

I have personal experience successfully interviewing at a major cloud provider in the consulting department. That hypothetical former Netflix employee would have no problem finding a job quickly making a lot more than I make doing similar work at the same company.

I'd put the division somewhere between individual consultants and consulting firms - the former often end up creating the latter and it goes downhill from there. Much has been written on it.

Your final statement seems a bit contradictory to me. If the client can't hire employees for certain work, doesn't that increase their reliance on consultants (and reduce the chance you'll get cut)?

Only if your work is so important they can't afford to let it go undone.

If a company has to cut costs they cut the positions they can do without, and in those positions consultants are cut out first.

Of course if you aren't easily replaceable or they actually need you then they won't cut you, but even then, if it really comes down to it consultants get cut before employees that are equally as important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com