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Comment by einrealist | Hacker News Reader

I often see consultants (or entire teams) which are engaged, but are blocked by the environment they were hired to work in. From another perspective, that may look like that they are doing a bad job. They have to perform, because they are 'the outsiders, the specialists', right? - Bad consultants may just be a sign that your company is dysfunctional.

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When I worked as a consultant, I found often I will be given a lot more freedom and trust as a consultant than most of the staff at the company, despite some of them being clearly capable of doing what I've been hired to do. It's incredibly frustrating and demoralising for the staff, who are usually stuck dealing with legacy, messed up, projects. Whereas the reality is, my experience is much better used cleaning up the mess of the legacy project and trusting your staff to lead the new project.

Going through this now. Trying to build an app on top of the client's service layer that is never up so we can't do end to end testing.

That's a good point, this does happen. But I think those cases are fairly rare and give you an excellent opportunity to raise this issue with management as soon as you become aware of it and then to move on if they do not wish to have the situation improved. Otherwise you'll just end up harming your reputation by trying to solve the unsolvable and ending up getting the blame for it.

Usually it will not take 10', 100's or even 1000's of hours to know which way things will swing in the long run.

Not rare. We're not allowed to use certain tools and services for odd made up reasons. These decisions are made by people that are incredibly distant from the actual production.

An example is that we're not allowed to use crash-analytics tools but we are however allowed to insert Google Analytics.

Yup, I've also seen this happen pretty often. The problem with working as a consultant is that it's difficult (or it's assumed you shouldn't) be in contact with various 'decision makers' of the client. You can of course suggest to the client many times that something is broken, but it rarely gets fixed. Instead the fix is to create various workarounds time after time.

It's very irritating to see so much money lost.

This happens to us. We're not allowed to use certain tools and services for very odd reasons.

at one place in order to hire me my director had agree that I was banned from writing production code ;-(

Which I what happened to my team at a global 500 company brought in to bring order to chaos we couldn't over come the siloed nature and politics of the business.

Funny thing is if we where in house accountancy,legal or hr consultants we could enforce our requirments.

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