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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is pretty spot on. I didn't work for one of the big consultancies, but it was pretty much the same playbook in the three different places I worked. As one of the underlings, I always tried to do good work for clients, but in the end I don't think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as much as they did. It's a weird world, where the value you provide is one of the following:

1. Using up someone's budget, because they don't get to keep it and want to look like they're doing something with it.

2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.

3. Being sent in to die on a doomed project, so you can take the blame for it.

Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The paycheck is nice, but there are other places to get one just like it.

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>I don't think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as much as they did.

Do understand that, most businesses have zero way to actually hire competent employees outside of their areas of expertise. So if a bread factory wants a CRM spun up to manage their sales and orders, they don't know where to start in terms of finding that sort of talent, and a consultant is a far, far safer option for realizing their goals. The realization of a goal holds nontrivial value, which is what a consulting firm is billing them for.

Could they do it cheaper? Yes, absolutely, but, they'd also need to get lucky, and, understandably, luck isn't really something most successful businesses are willing to leverage.

That’s the difference between management consulting and technical/expert consulting. Expert consulting is for spinning up CRMs or installing SAP, management consulting is far more vague and strategy level.

Some of the big firms have started mixing the terms up because they can charge more that way.

Call it "transformation" and you can sell both.

They go hand in hand. Having the ability to provide a team to execute on the plan the management consultants sell is a powerful business model.

this.

same for machine producing industry and software...

> 2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.

I was once a contractor at a company that had been acquired twice. The Finance lead all off a sudden had a big team of people, and he lacked the imagination to use them effectively. His team were a waste of space. His solution was to hire a consultancy to 'benchmark' the size of the Finance team. Guess what they found...all of the acquired people had to go!

I felt he lacked the backbone to just make a decision himself.

Seems like definitely a CYA move. Some things seem intuitively 'right' but following that intuition isn't always necessarily the best move. But right or wrong, many folks want a CYA card, and hiring external consulting group is usually it.

I think I just realized why an org I worked for would never hire a consultancy to do that: our peer organizations would find that we're much smaller than we should be.

>Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The paycheck is nice, but there are other places to get one just like it.

Can't tell you how much motivation was lost after seeing my billed rate to a client vs. what the consultancy was paying me. They should bill higher than what they pay me for sure, but 6 times my rate? I was only doing the bare minimum after seeing that.

This is why consulting companies are basically organized blight - you hire them to do work but 80% of the money goes to the customer facing/relationship management side of the business and the workers get fuck all done because they’re just following dumb orders half-interestedly, as opposed to a good team of workers who, if properly managed, might actually get something great done.

It's amazing how much money there is to be made in simply using up someone's budget in a way that's "good enough" so they can keep that money next year.

I've always (only half-jokingly) offered clients like this the opportunity to buy Gift-Cards (in $10,000 denominations) - I'll issue them in this financial year to soak up budget under-run, and they can spend them (or not) whenever the need arises.

WARNING: May not be SoX-compliant

be sure to add a vig for that service!

> WARNING: May not be SoX-compliant

So much of modern life is people just going through the motions to make the budget soaking legitimate instead of plain fraud.

We have millions of work hours spent each year on little more than theater.

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