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Having worked with a lot of consultants from the big consultantancy companies I would not say they're good at they're job. It's essentially salesman and confid

by UK-AL 11y ago

Having worked with a lot of consultants from the big consultantancy companies I would not say they're good at they're job. It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people.

enraged_camel 11y ago
>>It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people. Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that there's different types of consulting at different points along the problem-complexity spectrum. At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point is not to hire those who are better than in-house people, but more efficient. For example, your in-house IT guy may have the skills to configure Kerberos, but maybe you'd rather have him work on a more important project (or maybe he is busy fighting fires, as helpdesk people usually are, and doesn't have the time), so you hire an outside contractor to do it, and he or she can get it done a lot faster (and with fewer errors) because they have done it many times before. At the high end (which you don't sound like you have experience with), consultants are highly specialized and they are hired to solve very difficult technical problems that are of great importance to the firm. These problems tend to be well outside the competency of in-house people. For example, imagine a scenario where the firm is the target of a lawsuit and they need to perform e-discovery to gather each and every business record pertaining to the subject matter from a large variety of sources and office locations across the country. There are consulting companies that specialize in this type of complex service, and they charge very high fees for that reason. So yeah, it's not "essentially salesman and confidence skills". It may look like that from the outside, but it just isn't.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc They essentially run dedicated tools against computers and report and summarize? The real technical skills are the people who wrote those tools. I was thinking of applying but the recruitment process says they look for social skills, and not hard core techies. That put me off. I.e they rather get history graduates , with social skills and teach them how to use the tools than say super skilled computer science graduate without salesmanship skills. That says to me that technical skills arnt that important, its the sales part that is is important. I know people that did apply, and after talking to them, its mostly writing SQL scripts, bash/powershell scripts, running dedicated forensics tools I.e not 'really' hard technical skills Most of the value added for them comes from proposals, reports(templates) and presenting it.
  - douche 11y ago
    History graduates have social skills? This is news to me, as a history major turned software engineer. Doing history is almost as antisocial as coding.
    - UK-AL 11y ago
      Or any other non related degree. Important part is that people skills trump technical knowledge. Technical side is running premade tools and SQL. If you can present, sell and write good reports they'll teach you how to run the tools.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc The big 4 accounting firms work in the middle of the complexity spectrum, and sometimes even towards the lower end. There's two ways this is apparent: 1. They are able to use dedicated tools other people have written. Those tools exist because the problems they solve have been faced with many other companies before, and someone sat down and developed a product for it. 2. They employ a lot of juniors (which is why they are big), and are able to offload a lot of the routine tasks in a project to those juniors (called "leverage" in professional services). Unless you're very high up in your organization yourself (e.g. C-level), it's likely that those juniors are the "consultants" you see. The types of tasks you describe (writing simple scripts and creating PowerPoint presentations) are exactly the types of things a junior would be charged with. In contrast, high-end consultancies tend to be small, and they consist almost entirely of highly skilled and experienced people, who are often times partners or equivalent. They often have to write their own tools and develop their own processes and best practices due to the relatively unique nature of the issues they tackle. Don't get me wrong: all good consultants are also very good salespeople. They have to be, since consulting is a very people-oriented business. But to say that consulting is about sales and confidence is a gross oversimplification.
    - UK-AL 11y ago
      Boutique consultancies and the big consultancies tend be very different things. Boutique consultancies tend to be a few skilled people who have known each other for years who decide start their own thing togother. They probably used to be in-house people who specialised in ERP, security, databases or whatever then started their own company. They have probably have doing it for years, and have geniune interest in the subject. I have respect for that. In fact I've worked for companies like that. But as programmer writing those tools you talk about, and for deep technical problems the consultants can't solve. The consultants would then try sell and use those tools along with consutlancy services. However when people think of consultancies they usually think of mckinseys, accentures, PWCs of the world. They grab prestigious graduates, teach them how do routine work on training courses, then hire them out for a lot of money. I don't get that. I highly doubt these guys could compete with an in-house guy who has been doing that stuff for years.

by UK-AL 11y ago

enraged_camel 11y ago

>>It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people. Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that there's different types of consulting at different points along the problem-complexity spectrum. At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point is not to hire those who are better than in-house people, but more efficient. For example, your in-house IT guy may have the skills to configure Kerberos, but maybe you'd rather have him work on a more important project (or maybe he is busy fighting fires, as helpdesk people usually are, and doesn't have the time), so you hire an outside contractor to do it, and he or she can get it done a lot faster (and with fewer errors) because they have done it many times before. At the high end (which you don't sound like you have experience with), consultants are highly specialized and they are hired to solve very difficult technical problems that are of great importance to the firm. These problems tend to be well outside the competency of in-house people. For example, imagine a scenario where the firm is the target of a lawsuit and they need to perform e-discovery to gather each and every business record pertaining to the subject matter from a large variety of sources and office locations across the country. There are consulting companies that specialize in this type of complex service, and they charge very high fees for that reason. So yeah, it's not "essentially salesman and confidence skills". It may look like that from the outside, but it just isn't.

UK-AL 11y ago
I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc They essentially run dedicated tools against computers and report and summarize? The real technical skills are the people who wrote those tools. I was thinking of applying but the recruitment process says they look for social skills, and not hard core techies. That put me off. I.e they rather get history graduates , with social skills and teach them how to use the tools than say super skilled computer science graduate without salesmanship skills. That says to me that technical skills arnt that important, its the sales part that is is important. I know people that did apply, and after talking to them, its mostly writing SQL scripts, bash/powershell scripts, running dedicated forensics tools I.e not 'really' hard technical skills Most of the value added for them comes from proposals, reports(templates) and presenting it.
- douche 11y ago
  History graduates have social skills? This is news to me, as a history major turned software engineer. Doing history is almost as antisocial as coding.
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    Or any other non related degree. Important part is that people skills trump technical knowledge. Technical side is running premade tools and SQL. If you can present, sell and write good reports they'll teach you how to run the tools.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc The big 4 accounting firms work in the middle of the complexity spectrum, and sometimes even towards the lower end. There's two ways this is apparent: 1. They are able to use dedicated tools other people have written. Those tools exist because the problems they solve have been faced with many other companies before, and someone sat down and developed a product for it. 2. They employ a lot of juniors (which is why they are big), and are able to offload a lot of the routine tasks in a project to those juniors (called "leverage" in professional services). Unless you're very high up in your organization yourself (e.g. C-level), it's likely that those juniors are the "consultants" you see. The types of tasks you describe (writing simple scripts and creating PowerPoint presentations) are exactly the types of things a junior would be charged with. In contrast, high-end consultancies tend to be small, and they consist almost entirely of highly skilled and experienced people, who are often times partners or equivalent. They often have to write their own tools and develop their own processes and best practices due to the relatively unique nature of the issues they tackle. Don't get me wrong: all good consultants are also very good salespeople. They have to be, since consulting is a very people-oriented business. But to say that consulting is about sales and confidence is a gross oversimplification.
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    Boutique consultancies and the big consultancies tend be very different things. Boutique consultancies tend to be a few skilled people who have known each other for years who decide start their own thing togother. They probably used to be in-house people who specialised in ERP, security, databases or whatever then started their own company. They have probably have doing it for years, and have geniune interest in the subject. I have respect for that. In fact I've worked for companies like that. But as programmer writing those tools you talk about, and for deep technical problems the consultants can't solve. The consultants would then try sell and use those tools along with consutlancy services. However when people think of consultancies they usually think of mckinseys, accentures, PWCs of the world. They grab prestigious graduates, teach them how do routine work on training courses, then hire them out for a lot of money. I don't get that. I highly doubt these guys could compete with an in-house guy who has been doing that stuff for years.