On Consulting and Consultants

Nice article.

I've found too many companies lack the ability to setup a proper team in house which uses consultants beneficially to retain their intellectual capital in house.

Fun example:

I've had a recent project where I have been hired as an outsider to develop and run the core of the software to the company. At that time the customer saved money because they were only paying a part of a yearly salary to me.

As the business grew, and fast forward 5 years later, I'm still the core developer. Our relationship has matured to the point where I'm kind of an inside-outsider.

Lately they're doing a lot more work with me. They're growing. The 5 years I've invested and billed honestly through has paid them dividends.

What happens? They want to save money by bringing in a developer in house. Someone's been calculatoring a little much. The most interesting part, they want me to manage (but not manage) that person.

I let them know that I can't run a second off-site daycare because I have to be on call 8 hours a day for someone outside my office. If they choose to transition to an internal team and no longer use my services, I'm happy to do the knowledge transfer and training as they would like, but I can't change my business.

A lot of companies are in this boat -- quite often getting into custom software development, not knowing the first thing about software. I believe this partly happens because there's a lot of business problems people are trying to solve with technology, without understanding how technology is built or maintained.