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Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

One project I was involved with, the value of the consultants was helping the clients work through their own process, because the client didn't fully understand the process themselves.

Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.

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From working with a bunch of ex management consultants, this is their special sauce. They’re often good at first principles thinking, learning a domain rapidly, and they don’t have any emotional connection to things in the business (people, processes, etc).

This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on.

Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.

Agree. The secret sauce is very much in how they’re trained to quickly solve problems and synthesize information. In very short time frames.

In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though.

Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey

It is laughable hubris to think there's a class of people who can come into an industry, learn it in a few months better than the people who have done it for decades, and fix/improve things.

Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.

There's a reason nothing ever permanently changes after mgmt consultants prescribe it.

They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain. Think simple things that we usually rant about in software dev:

No VCS. Badly modeled domain. Code complexity. Denormalized tables galore. Cludged together OTS and custom components. Esoteric language choices. Code rot. Bad branching choices. Monolithic and brittle codebase. No CICD. No testing. No specs. Rotten confluence pages that weren't kept up to date.

And then, the worst: Domain priests that use complicated domain knowledge and rules and self-inflicted complexity to keep the software hostage by telling us we can't fix the above problems. Essentially job security.

Aye, but it is unlikely that a consultant will actually be able to articulate these issues better than someone who has _successfully_ worked in the industry and solved these problems (in contrast to your reverbalization of deadwood as domain priests). Unless, of course, the consultant has worked _successfully_ in the industry for a good length of time. But the class of consultants discussed have not. All squares go this way, all pegs go that way, never shall the twain meet.

>They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain

why don't the consultants just cut out the middleman and take over these billion dollar industries if it's so easy? Why bother consulting for tech companies if they can just put them out of business with a direct competitor? Domain expertise apparently doesn't matter, should be easy for these expert managers

The number of companies that have gone bankrupt or been disrupted due to short term optimizations recommended by these management consultant companies is massive

> Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.

No, programmers/engineers/etc. are equally susceptible: https://xkcd.com/1831/

• https://xkcd.com/793/

• https://xkcd.com/1570/

Nah, their secret sauce is that they are sales behemoths first and foremost. They are adept at convincing any CEO/SVP to ignore any internal advice from the CEO/SVP's technical teams and sign large, binding contracts instead with them. Also used to work at a big 4.

This is the opposite of what I encountered doing consulting, where often the best outcomes were achieved by asking the internal teams what they thought, and then telling the “leaders” who were petrified of accepting such advice without external validation of it.

Consulting companies will gladly bill you for telling you what you already know. This gets them a foot in the door to start the outsourcing process. For the "leaders" the implicit allure is the personal risk mitigation factor for when things go wrong.

Another thing about consultants is if you call up in the middle of the night and need a team in Singapore the next day and stay for two weeks to work on a crisis they’ll do it. FTE’s will laugh or quit.

There are quite a lot of businesses that need to hire consultants to implement the opinions of what to do from their employees. Management to employee communication has broken down to such an extent that the only way to bridge that gap is consultancy. Working out what to do and how to make progress is something consultancy is genuinely good at. The annoying part which only drives a deeper wedge is managements response to this is to have the consultancy implement what they found which just ensures future engagement will be a nightmare.

Its such a common theme in modern businesses.

There is also the opposite. Management often decides what they want first and looks for justifications after the fact, and since their own people who have to deal with the consequences of that decision will not support it, and the data doesn't support it, then they hire consultants until they get one who doesn't care about what's real and gives them the justification to support it.

That is when they roughly know what they want, if they don't they hire an innovation consultant and organise competitions and grands for companies and universities to come up with work.

From my experience that is very very common. Client's hardly ever understand their own processes, everyone knows their little slice of it and where to hand-off work but nobody groks the big picture.

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