167 points by godelmachine 5 days ago | 177 comments
nelblu 5 days ago
OptionOfT 5 days ago
It also made me realize that it is horrible to build software with people who expect short term deliveries like the usual McKinsey engagement. People who expect that the automation of an Excel file takes the same time as getting a BA to do it.
I am now in a full time engineering position. I don't talk to clients anymore.
What I miss the most is coming into contact with people with a huge variety of backgrounds.
Which surprisingly were the people with who I had to spent the most amount of time explaining how software works.
Maybe I'm bad at it? Who knows. But I learned a lot, and I'm happy where I'm at now, so any bitterness would be misplaced.
Not to mention they paid for my GC.
burnte 4 days ago
squiffsquiff 4 days ago
weard_beard 3 days ago
There is real work to be done in the consulting world. Its just that there are perverse incentives to not be the one doing it.
Whether an engagement is successful or goes down in flames isn't obviously apparent until it is nearly completed. Everything feels like a high school class project where the goal is to DO as little as possible and if its successful to grab as much credit as you can, and if it fails, to distance yourself from it.
godelmachine 4 days ago
aswanson 4 days ago
burnte 2 days ago
ambicapter 5 days ago
How is this surprising? I read this as "huge variety of backgrounds", meaning, all kinds of backgrounds which are NOT software. It would make sense to me they don't understand how software works.
1123581321 5 days ago
mtlynch 5 days ago
What does GC mean in this context?
hammock 5 days ago
davidcalloway 4 days ago
bitwize 4 days ago
davidcalloway 4 days ago
pfannkuchen 3 days ago
ainiriand 5 days ago
ljm 5 days ago
If you had to fight fires all hours day, night and weekend to keep on top of it, then so what? That’s the job. Getting heart palpitations because the red circle came up on the Slack icon on your screen? That’s the job.
Even with a clear path to a mid-term or even sustainable solution, it was like you weren’t building software but in a constant race to keep ARR ahead of churn, like in Wallace and Gromit where Gromit is frantically laying down track to keep his train going. Does the software even work? Who cares… it’s the $$$ that count.
I wasn’t really built for that, I felt like I was at odds with my own passion and I didn’t really want to put my name to the work I was doing.
Discordian93 4 days ago
throw4950sh06 4 days ago
ljm 4 days ago
I’d call it product engineering over agency work. Keep an eye out for positions in your typical SaaS setup, as well as financial institutions - not glamorous but better than being an arse on a seat.
Can’t speak for outside of Europe and UK though.
Discordian93 4 days ago
FactKnower69 4 days ago
Same type of person who is completely incapable of understanding that doing more methodical, higher quality work now saves you the time wasted putting out fires later
ned_at_codomain 5 days ago
You can push much, much more volume and absolute impact through by running big merger integrations, digital transformation, and other large scale change projects at big companies.
It is basically a better business to become something like a premium Accenture, a "get stuff done" kind of consultancy. You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.
It's just not that easy to keep people staffed on 5-6 person teams solely on 8-12 week pure strategy engagements.
These kinds of projects are also the first discretionary spending yo get cut when times get tough.
If you're going to be focused on the pure strategy work, you'll probably want to stay really really small. We've seen some of this in investment banking with firms like Allen & Co or Qatalyst. Challenge is that consulting doesn't come with scalable monetization via success fees.
It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.
chasd00 4 days ago
You bill per hour and there’s only so many hours to bill and your rate can only be so high. The only way to scale revenue is headcount so you can bill more hours.
It’s like handling radioactive dynamite but I think a boutique firm specializing in fixed price projects could make a decent amount of money. You have to be really really good though because one bad project contracted at a fixed price could mean lights out.
ghaff 5 days ago
Had a conversation with an ex-Gartner analyst—now at a product company—and his comment is that even at the big analyst firms, comp isn’t great at least below senior management.
cpeterso 4 days ago
Given this is a common business model and has known bad outcomes, what would a Blub programming language and rapid development environment designed to improve the quality and maintainability of an army of rising junior engineers look like? (I originally wrote “productivity”, but reducing billable hours is not a positive outcome for the consultancy. They surely still want to produce quality software like to reduce customer-impacting bugs and negative headlines.)
Go was supposedly designed for a similar audience, inexperienced engineers at Google, but it is pretty low level and still has its own gotchas. I’m imagining some hybrid of Go, Python, and Visual Basic with strong static typing, strong functional orientation with little shared state (to reduce the blast radius of each junior engineer), easy unit and integration testing, excellent post mortem debugging, big ints by default to avoid integer overflow bugs, FFI for integration with clients’ legacy code, and portability to mobile apps, desktop apps, and web front and back end.
Discordian93 4 days ago
mentalgear 5 days ago
As for their supposed value (which comes directly from ex-employees): big consulting firms are essentially hired as a liability shield for the C-suite. Their main job is to back up whatever the CEO already wants to do (usually cost-cutting). This way, executives can claim: a) "McKinsey recommended it, so it must be right," and b) "If it goes wrong, it’s on McKinsey, not us."
throw4950sh06 4 days ago
VHRanger 4 days ago
The word here is not "regulate" it's "enforcement".
People doing illegal things should face personal responsibility on the actions. So do managers who approved it.
The issue with enforcement is the same thing that happened in 2008: enforcing white collar crimes is expensive and high risk for prosecutors who want slam dunks to advance their careers
terminalbraid 5 days ago
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2024/10/18/79...
Is that not an example of accountability directly for the things you're complaining about?
eesmith 5 days ago
Better would be if people faced jail time.
ziptron 4 days ago
FactKnower69 4 days ago
fuzzfactor 4 days ago
Do they still exist?
Then, yes.