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Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.

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Typical consultant mindset. They cant fathom how big IT got into the situation they are in due to legacy software, mergers, and periods of no investment. They only do greenfield projects and have complete disregard for IT’s processes.

What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and help. Oh, and god forbid we add an FTE with domain experience who can help us.

I didn’t sense all of that from the comment, but you’re definitely anti-consultant.

Sometimes consultants are brought in specifically to bypass whatever internal processes are in place. Those internal processes are sometimes the very reason not enough is getting done and external resources are brought in.

I would say that GP comment definitely has a “normal teams are useless until consultants come in” view, which the parent comment also seemed to pick up on. Specifically, this part bugged me:

> They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done.

This makes it seem like the developers just didn’t want to do the work or it was harder than their skill level, which, realistically, isn’t the case.

FWIW I agree that consultants have their place, especially as a way to work outside of the typical system, but I’m not about to ignore that GP practically made it sound like consultants are better than regular developers.

Wow. We were a small, private company. I’m sorry for whatever hurt you.

As someone who works in big consulting I understand the frustration but have to disagree. A lot of the time we have great people doing great work but we can only take it so far. Clients have to both be willing (want to) and able (have people with the appropriate skills required) to change. If we aren't guiding implementation and leave it to the client often times it will just fall in a heap, out be forgotten about

That’s funny. I’ve recently been involved with several projects steered by high-end consulting firms. They were all complete shit shows, most of all the SAP projects.

The problem IMO is, that on the corporate side, you often don’t have any IT knowledge at all. So they hire consultants to ask them what to do and don’t have any way of confirming if what they are being told is sane advice.

I’m also really shocked by what the likes of McKinsey of Accenture get away with regarding the quality of people they send.

Edit: I guess I misunderstood “high-end” and thought of “large” consulting firms, because those are the ones that pretty much always suck. I’ve had wonderful experiences with small consultancies.

I don't think there's a logical inconsistency here. Imagine that the quality of work we can expect from a contractor with no particular investment in your long-term success is a 7. If your internal team can produce a 10 given the time, you'd look at that and think it's not very good. On the other hand, if your internal team can only manage a 4, hey, go with the contractor.

Perhaps a matter of levels. High end consultants usually have some reputation to maintain. Places like IBM and Accenture are just good at navigating large org purchasing, so as the only bidders in many cases, can put out shit.

I've worked on both sides of this divide, and most of it makes sense by just considering Chesterton's fence.

If you work in consulting and you think you deliver good stuff, you are either incredibly lucky (lottery winner level), or you are so incompetent that you dont know you deliver utter crap.

What is your definition of getting the job done? 50% of projects run by consultants fail.

Seriously this level of smug shows how clueless you are.

What’s your source of the 50% fail rate?

I worked in few consulting firms and know the internal stats.

For ERP impelmentations, failure rate is even more than 50%. Gartner says it is 55% to 75%.

For digital transformations I think the stats are closer to 50%, but it more depends on the company and their project scope. Maybe the poster above makes some small landing pages for micro companies.

For greenfield projects made by agencies "it depends" but usually quality is utter crap. The project "works" but no change is possible easily, so at the end of the day the projects are failures.