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Comment by misswaterfairy | Hacker News Reader

This has been my experience as well, though I was somewhat self-taught before seeking the 'paper' qualifications other developers had. Best of both worlds in a way.

I scare the living shit out of consultants, because a lot of them made the mistake of assuming I'm just a dumb firie - the uniform means I don't look like my corporate IT peers at all - but quickly recoil and backtrack when I ask direct technical questions they don't expect and should know the answer to, or call them out on their misleading (if not outright false) statements.

My supervisor loves me, even though he doesn't love the disruption as much, because it leads to better outcomes for the organisation.

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I have a similar effect on consultant. It’s usually more on the “this isn’t that complicated guys”. I’ll riff off a high level list of things that need to be done, tell them I could do it in a day/week/month and then tell them I want a daily audit of their hours billed and progress made (I’m actually a finance guy but a self taught dev). They usually don’t want the micromanagement so instead they’ll take day to rethink it and come back with a “yes actually i think we were over engineering things a bit” but really we both know they were just planning to pad their hours. It’s a silly dance but usually makes a good working relationship that GSD at an acceptable pace.

I hire consultants from a big corporate and I think they’re used to clients having no idea how to ascertain their projects in terms of reasonable effort to accomplish the set goals.

Fascinating, because as a consultant almost always my clients are either the sort to build a vast mess of microservices with eventually consistent enterprise service buses for an internal tool with two dozen users OR they are trying to figure out how to update their one windows server 2016 instance without taking down production.

I'm usually trying to rein in the chaos of an over-engineered mess or explain docker containers and CI servers. Definitely makes for an interesting day switching between the two types of clients!

That being said, I prefer to work with smaller companies. I'm usually the only consultant, and I'm a freelancer not part of a larger consultancy. This probably significantly changes the types of teams I meet.

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