Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's pool of hucksters who work connections well, swoop in to management to fix big entrenched problems, and spend

* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company * 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!) * 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package

My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.

Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.

> My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff.

almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.

point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.

> he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff.

Possibly negotiated in the contract in advance. Interesting idea

Sounds about right. I know someone who's company hired VP that was ex-McKinsey, and then they hired a bunch of ex-McKinsey staff.

* offshore more dev internally * about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource * they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring * with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company

It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.

So basically the stereotype of business degrees trying to wave hands and leave the details for others to figure out after 80% of the budget has been eaten up by $5-700/hr management consultants that can do neither.

I'm a former tech consultant who manages/ed lots of people since then. A few thoughts:

1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.

2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.

3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.

This all reads vaguely like justification people often use for one off anecdotes trying to support a whole system. Obviously sometimes things work out, otherwise the system would completely collapse, it's just a matter of ratio and amount of grifters in the field making our (the "average" HN high level coder) lives miserable through sheer incompetence

I started my career in advisory consulting for a Big 4 firm, which should support the premise of the article - a lot of times you have kids fresh out of college telling you what to do. While I quickly left for a smaller consulting shop that helped grow my technical skills more, I eventually moved out of consulting altogether for the reason you outlined in your comment.

I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.

Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.

I agree mostly with your comment and I've seen all of that too. The one thing I'd say though re

> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us

There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.

You make a good point. It can be generalized to say that a prescribed strategy will be successful proportional to how much of the overall org (internal, partners, etc) is invested in it. If the consultant is a one-man shop throwing out proclamations he will get very little traction. If he is a 10 man team digging into the actual systems he will get more. If he is a 100 man managed services embed he will get the most

Your comment reminds me of Steve Jobs lecture at MIT 1992. The part about consulting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc

This is really good, and matches up with my primary complaint from the execs I've seen hired out of consulting. They tend to be short timers. They often present wildly optimistic 3-5 year growth plans to the board knowing full well they won't be there in 3-5 years. The board almost never ties their compensation to these plans in any way, so the real thing they spend their time doing is hitting whatever short term metric their compensation is tied to, and these metrics are almost never well aligned with the long term interests of the company. I've been in a company that spent years digging out of the mess one of these guys left behind.

Outstanding video. It seems to me that Jobs is saying that having skin in the game is necessary for learning.

> They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months

This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.

This seems an apt description of management consulting trying to find its future.

It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.

The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.

Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.

If it makes you feel better about your negative anecdotes I've had the same general experience. I've seen a lot of Business School -> Consulting -> Executive track guys come through various companies in my career and they've without exception been disasters.

There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.

The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.

The company I’m working for now relies heavily on consulting and it’s awful. Almost complete lack of documentation for critical infrastructure. Minor decisions made that come with major costs like using EFS instead of EBS which skyrockets costs. When there is documentation for something, it’s so useless yet in-depth, like the manager needed to check off a “documentation” bullet point but didn’t read a single line of it.

Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.

Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.

Deep breath

On the other side of this, as a dev, I find not having to live with the long term consequences of tech/product/process decisions a breath of fresh air. No longer need to obsess over every future “what if”…

Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.

Sundar Pichai was working at Google via McKinsey

Given how short employees tend to stay at companies, long term impact seems to be a founder only concern.

As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me.

I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.

Wow. I appreciate the perspective, but it’s hard for me to even understand how a person could operate that way.

I think after enough companies treat you that way, it becomes a lot easier.

I don't work that way, and I've been with my company for about 12 years now I think. But after watching the recent tech layoffs, it's pretty obvious that tech companies aren't thinking about their employees futures, just the present. The ones that don't give a generous severance are the worst, but even with that it can be rather difficult to find a new job... Especially one that you like.

Many, many companies think of employees merely in terms of the money, and not how they're disrupting that person's life. It doesn't surprise me that there are non-managers that think and act the same way towards the company.

Simple. Pivot to thinking of yourself as a corporation of 1, with the goal of maximizing your personal profit for minimal cost.

Would a company cut quality to increase profit? Yes? Then so should you.

Simple - do the same things companies do. Optimize for profit. I honestly could give a rats ass what a companies profits are in 5 years since I won't be there.

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years" - "not here because you 100% won't increase pay commensurate with market rate"

Its relatively simple to see how people could operate that way, because companies don't actually care about employees. They're a line item for profit generation.

Simple.

You look at how companies are operating, how they are treating employees, how they are chasing short-term financial performance over long-term sustainability and simply mirror their behavior on an individual level.

Personally, I am only invested in a company to the degree of making my immediate coworkers happy and making it easier for them to do work. I don't care about the long term (5-10 year timeline) success of the strategic goals for 2 reasons:

1. The company is not invested in me in the long term.

2. I don't have strategic visibility to make improvements anyway, because I am not an executive, so it makes no sense to worry about something I can't control.

Yeah, but this will bite you as well when other people do it and you have to fix it. Or I guess you’ll always go look for low hanging fruit and run away from any responsibility/accountability forever. But even that bites back at some point or another when you run out of luck

Whether or not I do it, I get bit by others doing it.

Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.

> Whether or not I do it, I get bit by others doing it.

You could choose to stop the cycle instead of biting the next person down the line just because you were bitten by someone unrelated.

> Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.

Maybe not directly, but it does play a part. When no one cares about doing things right, even the ones who did care get fatigued and stop. The way to fix the situation is to be better yourself, thus giving others the chance to be at their best.

Ive done it a few times. Simplified everything and moved on to other projects only to see the the project be evolved by other into an unorganized pile of crap. I also got laughed at for not using sime pattern or framework du jour

I mean this is sort of how things already work, so much so that the trope of "the old devs didn't know shit" and memes about needing to replace everything or crapping on legacy code when starting a new job is talked about daily among devs.

I'm not really worried about what other people do because when I have to fix it, I'll be being paid to, and so would the next guy after me.

If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.

That’s fair but seems to me like a chicken and egg problem. Nowadays unless you go build something from scratch it’s all a pile of garbage because no one really cared. The few who did got pushed out or gave up so we as a collective shat where we ate.

> If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.

Sounds like the solution is to look for a good company—they do exist—not sabotage the current one.

Considering how many founders only stayed around until the whole thing is pushed to retail investors, I think long term is relative.

There are many reasons to leave a company. Tech companies are frequently fundamentally unstable operations. In my opinion experience employee churn is more a matter of the environment than the individual and their plans.

I dont think many employee's have this mindset. This mindset would contribute to the issue and would be one that I would have not considered...so I thank you for your transparency.

If everybody defects everybody loses and the world gets a little worse with each cycle.

Sucks to be the guy cooperating in this scenario, but it's the only way to start clawing things back from the brink.

Instantly reminded me of Steve Jobs' quip and rant [1] on consulting and consultants. (skip to 15:20 if link doesn't automatically)

https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=15m20s