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To this day, I'm still not quite clear about what a consultant actually does. I mean, beyond some vague idea ("goes to some company, talks with people, gives so

• dleslie 9y ago
  Having been in a position where a consultant was foisted upon me by management, at several different companies, near as I can tell they are paid huge sums to restate what the team already knows and has been saying needs to be done. Only they provide it with an approach and language which management can understand.
  • taway20171214 9y ago
    that's a management consultant, and the reason they're hired is to provide cover and credibility for both management and your technology team. i.e., "the expensive consultant said it was okay, so don't fire anyone in management, or our technology team, if it goes sideways." in other words, they're actually helping you do your job because they can compare your recommendation to other companies and teams in the industry and make sure everyone is doing things sanely. in your case, you were smart, and made the right recommendation, so they agreed with you. good job, you're competent, and aren't putting an established company into a risky situation like you would at a startup, which generally does not hire consultants, because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. you probably didn't see it that way, i'm guessing.
    • ZenoArrow 9y ago
      The issue you're overlooking is that these management consultants are being paid large fees for information that a company can get for free just by listening to their existing employees. However, that's not a slight on the management consultants themselves (nice work if you can get it), but is a slight on companies that don't trust that their employees can give them sound advice. Problems at the ground level are going to become apparent earliest to those working at that level, if you ignore that feedback you're potentially throwing away valuable information.
      • Kinrany 9y ago
        How do the companies know that they can trust their employees?
        • ZenoArrow 9y ago
          They must trust them enough to employ them. Even if they don't think any single person they employ has "all the answers", if you listen to feedback from your employees you can get a sense of trends. Furthermore, these observations should be something verifiable. You're asking for concrete feedback on issues, not vague comments about what's wrong.
        • pjc50 9y ago
          How do they know they can trust the consultant? (More seriously, being unable to trust your employees to give useful feedback is a sign that your culture is a disaster)
          • jwhitlark 9y ago
            They diff the output of the consultant against that of the employee. Trust, but verify.
        • JohnnyHero 9y ago
          You are asking this as if the trust question relates to honesty of the employee. Trust in this scenario is NOT a question of "are they going to lie and steal and cheat! The trust in question here is whether or not the employee/s are sophisticated enough in their understanding of the organizations "big picture directives" to contribute the correct feedback to the questions in need of answers. It is the rare employee whose feedback takes into consideration the big picture because they rarely are exposed to all the information that upper management is. Either management (or a consultant if need be) has to pull in the data/answers and then prioritize the problems relative to the bigger picture. This is a perspective that the production line worker rarely considers when answering questions. Even the biggest brains in any organization can be blinded by the problems that immediately affect them as opposed to the issues that are central to the organizations overall health and strategic goals.
    • putnam 9y ago
      Does something like that exist for software consulting?
      • dejv 9y ago
        Yes, I am not sure how common are those gigs, but I did quite a few projects in development agency. It was usually in situations when projects went bad, I had to examine code structure and timelines to see why it went this way.
      • jaggederest 9y ago
        I have done similar work. I was hired to come in and assess the software that they were developing - they were working with some contractors, some vendors, and a smattering of other people, and wanted to know if their current method was working, how to address some concerns they had, and whether their current vendor was doing a good job. I discussed it extensively with them, looked over the code and repositories, their current deployment, their backlog, looked at their priorities and basically told them "They seem like they are doing a good job, with the caveat that using contractors and vendors means you will never develop those skills in house, so I would hire at least one competent programmer internally to work with the vendors/contractors you hire, in order to develop that expertise, if you intend to use custom software as a core part of your business on a continuing basis". This was conveyed via a written report with citations and via a meeting with the C-level executives of the company. For this review and strategic suggestions they paid me about $1200 for an afternoon's work. That doesn't count time that went into acquiring the gig, scheduling, following up, or billing, just billable hours.
        • other_herbert 9y ago
          It's the sanity check that some managers/ higher up people want... Expert = someone who doesn't work here (from a non dev upper management perspective)
    • deleted 9y ago
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  • jghn 9y ago
    Beyond what taway20171214 said, don't discount the value of "language which management can understand". As I've moved up the ladder I've learned how extremely valuable this skill is and how woefully bad I am at it.
    • putnam 9y ago
      What do you do now?
      • jghn 9y ago
        Right now I'm in that limbo zone between coder who manages and manager who codes
    • ZenoArrow 9y ago
      In my experience, "language that management can understand" just means focusing on answering the following questions: 1. What's the proposed issue/improvement? 2. What are the recommended options? 3. How much time will it take to get done? In other words, all you really need to communicate is why we're doing it, and when it will be done. In my experience, they're not interested in challenges faced in implementation. Keep things simple, and deliver on time, and you'll be speaking the "language which management can understand". That's basically all there is to it.
      • twobyfour 9y ago
        Depends on how high up the ladder the management is you're talking to. Your line manager may be interested in a technical issue / improvement and understand its value without further explanation -- for instance, we're using a brute force algorithm that takes exponential time to foo the bar in the Baz module. It's got test coverage and the problem has a known logarithmic solution, so we could rewrite that in a week to be more efficient, and still be confident it's accurate. Your department head may be willing to consider fixing a problem that affects efficiency or security or expected timelines -- we've identified the likely cause of at least one class of those outage events you've raised concerns about. If you want to fix it immediately, we would have to push back delivery of the Quux feature by a week while we rewrite a portion of the Baz application, but other risks are minimal. The C-suite is mostly interested in problems/solutions framed as "how does this save us money" or "how does this make us money" -- we intend to invest a week in technical maintenance work that will allow us to save 25% of our monthly hosting costs by scaling back hardware requirements, and reduce the frequency of outage events that we have to pay out for on under our SLAs by 75%. That would cost $10,000 in developer time and delay our product schedule by a small though measurable amount, but I estimate it would save us an average of $48,000/year in costs.
  • raldu 9y ago
    In the case you mentioned, that's basically "credibility." Although a lame story, Let's say you are responsible for initiating and managing a new software project in your company with complex bureaucracy and management. You have found that it is highly feasible to work with Agile methodology instead of Waterfall. But Waterfall has been how the things had always been done, yet you know that the team is ready for Agile and project is an exact type of work that would benefit from some "lean" approaches. Worse still, management won't listen, also because "The Board" won't listen. What you do is that you go to that well-known, highly-paid consultant, discuss the situation and he basically says, "OK, You are right. Also this and that." Then in your presentation to the board while pitching Agile, you say, "Agile is the way to go. I asked Patrick Kalzumeus, and he said it was a good idea." And that's it. That "credibility" is one of many ways how a business consultant may "add value" to a highly organized company.
    • drdeadringer 9y ago
      How do employees gain credibility that management and "The Board" will listen to, or is this question a dream?
      • jwhitlark 9y ago
        I think it's more about getting a credible outside second opinion. for the same reasons you get a second opinion in medicine. It's less a judgement about a single source, than the requirement to have multiple sources.
      • popinman322 9y ago
        Probably by assessing and presenting the cost/benefit analysis to management in a reliable, high quality, easy-to-understand way.
    • dleslie 9y ago
      Sounds like a situation where there exists a fundamental absence of trust in the abilities of the team. That's... Probably not a good thing.
• mathgeek 9y ago
  Consulting is a bit too broad of a concept to provide a "what does a consultant actually do" definition. Anything that people will pay you to tell them or do for them without making you their direct employee is, technically speaking, consulting them. For example: reviewing someone's database configuration and providing general recommendations for improvement is consultation, but so is directly modifying those settings for them and not actually telling them what changed. The expectations and deliverables are set by agreement between the consultant and the consultee.
• sixdimensional 9y ago
  Limiting what we think a consultant is to technology is too narrow. There is a long history of consultative practice in organizational development and the best consultants are invaluable. For some further research, read up on "process consulting"[1], for example. True consulting is almost like being a psychologist for an organization. Technology consulting varies, but true technology consultants are not technology specific, they are more like experts in knowing how organizations use systems and technology and assisting organizations with technology selection, architecture, hiring, training, organizational development, change, politics, psychology and/or complex situations that require additional outside expertise or brainpower. I think a good example where technology and business consulting intersect is data warehouse consulting. If you have or want an enterprise data warehouse, you need likely need dimensional modeling. Dimensional modeling is a technique not a specific technology, many organizations don't have specialists with that knowledge. The best data warehousing consultants I have seen will come in when requested, determine the organizational situation through observation, propose a conceptual solution in concert with the organization, designed to fit the way the organization works, help with training staff on necessary techniques (such as dimensional modeling, if the organization chose to adapt it), and act as an expert for tough questions during implementation and after. Assist the organization with identifying data warehouse technology solution options that fit the need and budget, staff and skills, data migration, etc. as needed and desired by the org. I think one key difference between a consultant and a contractor is, a consultant is more like an architect/engineer advisor "thinker and recommender", but a contractor is often more like the engineer/builder "thinker and do-er". Both are external experience for hire. Of course you get blends/crossover people who are both. I also think consulting is more prevalent when there are a smaller pool of people with knowledge and experience that needs to be shared. Scarcity of skill creates demand that requires compensation due to competition for that limited resource. Skills wise, I think you need a mix of soft skills and specialized knowledge in such an area, combined with the ability to communicate, market, network and run a business. Education -wise, I have a degree in information systems and one in organizational studies. I think combining organizational studies plus any specialty area is a great combination. You can also achieve this through an MBA+specialty area. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_consultant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_consultant
• lbotos 9y ago
  Depends on what they are consulting on. I know that places I've worked have had management consultants, who came in, worked with our teams for a few sessions, and wrote us up some recommendations as to how we could better work together. We also hired DB Performance consultants, who came in and helped us optimize some gnarly queries and do a DB "Double check" to verify that the path we were on was good. Another time we hired a pricing consultant, who helped us come up with a strategy to change our pricing and avoid pitfalls. Basically, They are subject matter experts who may come in and actually be on-demand teachers in my experience.
• deleted 9y ago
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• miketery 9y ago
  The two things I found (can be positive or negative), is that the consultant isn't tied to the familial expectation of employees at a company giving them more freedom, and they typically don't have much stake (except fees). This means that given the right consultant and party seeking services, the consultant may provide contrarian point of views that don't hold as much baggage. Probably most important is the the company externalizes the decision so there is less internal responsibility.
  • putnam 9y ago
    Were you the consultant in this case?
  • user5994461 9y ago
    Consultants don't provide contrarian point of views, they provide the point of view that the client wants to hear. If a client is uncertain about something and feels risks, you could be contrarian but otherwise no.
• mbrameld 9y ago
  I think a consultant in this context means a programmer with valuable experience in a particular domain. In Patrick's case it's sales funnel optimization. I do a lot of fisheries data work. The work done is usually based around a deliverable, and that can be anything from a written recommendation to a turn-key, green field system. You're a contractor with some specialized experience that somebody values more highly than software development alone.
  • putnam 9y ago
    What is the value of the deliverable? Can you easily leverage your value?
  • epicide 9y ago
    This exactly describes my position as a software consultant. > can be anything from a written recommendation to a turn-key, green field system. Sometimes, we are there: - to propose a set of tools or architecture. - to migrate legacy systems. - as staff aug (AKA "butts in seats"). - to do green field development. Usually, it's some combination. > contractor with some specialized experience that somebody values more highly than software development alone. At least in our group, we definitely distinguish ourselves as different from contractors. At our core, we can do the contract work (and often do), but we also help out with the business side of things. Basically, we are contractors who know how to interface the technical side of things with the core business. Oftentimes, we end up at a client who knows they want to build a system to help them do a thing, but that's step 10. They might know steps 1-3, but need our help figuring out and accomplishing steps 4-7 (e.g. defining actual requirements, organizing a good dev team, etc.). EDIT: formatting.
• user5994461 9y ago
  A consultant do the exact same work that you do, except he's paid a multiple of you and doesn't get company benefits.
  • putnam 9y ago
    Can a consultant do any kind/type of work?
    • blhack 9y ago
      Yes. "Consultant" seems to be essentially synonymous with "contractor" or "freelancer". They come in to do a specific job, then leave.
      • k__ 9y ago
        Consultant is simply perceived higher value than freelancer or contractor. Since I started selling myself as a "Mobile Consultant" I made significantly more money than selling myself as a "Front-End Developer", "Freelance Developer" or such. Seemingly it's all in the wording these days.
        • oblio 9y ago
          It was always in the wording :)
          • user5994461 9y ago
            "Freelance" is the offshore developers on elance.com working for a dollar an hour and the students working after class for free who are desperate to get experience. "contractor" is the replacement status for permanent employees. They are outside of normal payroll and company benefits, they usually do 1 to 6 months repeatable contracts. "consultants" is the experienced people who need to be called by up-the-chain to perform important matters and take critical decisions.
            • 9y ago
• pjmlp 9y ago
  Depends, there are many ways of doing consultancy. I do enterprise software consultancy, which means that those big companies that don't think twice about buying Oracle or Visual Studio Ultimate, hire companies like my employer to come in and develop software for them, instead of having an internal R&D department. Usually because for those companies software is a by product, something that they need for their real business, the one that they earn money with. Then you have business consultants, than come in, evaluate the current set of working processes and provide optimization guidelines based on a specific set of targets. There are other variations.
  • putnam 9y ago
    What's preventing a software developer from doing enterprise software consulting?
    • epicide 9y ago
      Pretty much nothing except what tools/companies they're working with. You're a software consultant working with an enterprise company? Congrats, you're an enterprise software consultant.
• ericabiz 9y ago
  I'm pretty well-qualified to answer this question :) I've done several marketing consulting gigs, including working with Patrick 6 years ago at WP Engine, where we were both consultants! I am in the middle of another marketing consulting gig right now with a SaaS company. I was hired to help them drastically reduce their sales cycle. They sell to enterprise companies and the sales cycle takes forever. I'm working on a new front-end website for them, with better copy, more testimonials, white papers/case studies, and a live demo of their product. (Today, potential customers have to request a demo--having people be able to see the product for themselves should shave at least a week off the sales cycle.) I have both a technical background and a marketing background, so I can write both copy and code, though I'm stronger on the marketing side these days. When I worked with Patrick at WP Engine, I was also lead on deploying a new front-end website, with a better tagline. My most important contribution there, though, was that I came up with the "10 sites for $99" pricing structure, which is a huge component of what made them so successful. I am also working on a better pricing structure with my current consulting gig. I spoke more about what I do for SaaS companies in this talk at Microconf: https://vimeo.com/72456666 https://vimeo.com/72456666 (Notably, I did this talk, and it was posted here on HN, several months before pg wrote his "Do things that don't scale" blog post.)
• bagacrap 9y ago
  You tell whoever hired you whatever they want to hear, and if their/your plan goes wrong they get to blame the consultant. If things go well, they take the credit. It's a win win because the consultant gets paid either way.
• dejv 9y ago
  Back at university I had a chance to attend a guest lecture given by chairman of huge public telco company and he stated something like "you are not paying consultants to bring new ideas, but to let them sign your ideas so in case something went wrong you have somebody to blame". Of course, this was different type of consulting than what Patio11 did, but there are a lot of different kind of consultants.
• SonicSoul 9y ago
  my friend just transitioned and his way was actually quite ingenious. He worked with someone who went to a different company, and that person tried to bring him on as full time role. He interviewed and got the offer but instead of taking it, he proposed that he will develop this whole thing on his own time for $x. Since he had enough good reputation for delivering he got the contract and the company even worked with him on setting up the payment via intermediary consulting firm until he had his own system setup for that (this will vary from company to company depending on their list of approved vendors etc). They initially let him work out of their space but he eventually rented a co-working office. It's been over a year and the relationship is working out, and he's hired a team in Argentina that he manages and keeps taking on more work. The pre-requisite here was that he had good reputation in his old co, but I would guess that having people like/respect your work is a good indicator of if you should start consulting in the first place.
• patio11 9y ago
  My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat. “How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.” I write proposal. You should: 1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving over the course of a month. This will push people at purchasing the product in 2 of the emails. 2) You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here’s a decision tree. 3) You should email people within 80% of their monthly quota offering a discount to move to the next higher plan. 4) You should email your entire userbase and upgrade as many as possible to annual billing for a 10% discount to the cost of their current plan. You can tell your engineering team to do this for you, but there is 0% chance they schedule this because it is boring scutwork and they’d rather do those features you have scheduled this quarter. Or you can have me just do it. I need a commit bit and probably two weeks. It will cost you $30k per week. Probabalistically this makes you $2 million in next 12 months but your results are your results; you keep all the upside and my invoice is due regardless.
  • andrethegiant 9y ago
    That's a good example of a marketing consultant, but what about an engineering consultant? Would talking tech stack pros/cons pull in a similar rate?
    • patio11 9y ago
      It is weird how I get persistently drummed out of engineering because when I write cron jobs, SQL queries, and React dashboards I make special effort to connect them to business outcomes. Businesses, to a first approximation, don’t care about their tech stack except to the extent that it drives business outcomes. Can you articulate those pros/cons in a way a business cares about? Can you impact your deliverables to reduced costs or (much better) increased revenue? Then you, too, can look forward to a bright future where HN tells you you’re not really an engineer anymore because your rates are too high.
• mcrad 9y ago
  Obviously it varies, but usually there is an element of papering over management problems, under the guise of actually fixing anything. Watch House of Lies on Showtime...
• fnl 9y ago
  Consulting refers to advising the executive branch of a company. So one key ingredient it requires is experience (that the client company lacks), and the ability to communicate (in business/cash-flow terms) why the advice you are giving is superior to the company's current strategy. Obviously, it is necessary that you then can "make it happen", too. The "advice giving" typically happens before you are hired to get the "foot in the door", while the implementation is what you get paid for. I think the German term is more precise: "Unternehmensberater", that is, "company advisor". Anything lesser is just work-for-hire, with a cute title.
  • barry-cotter 9y ago
    English has a word for Unternehmensberater, it’s strategy consulting. The very highly paid temporary experts are operational consultants. The ones in the middle are management consultants. The top global management consultancy firms are McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.
    • fnl 9y ago
      Yeah, there is a bunch of "xyz consultant" titles floating around in English. Executive, corporate, or financial consultant are some more. For the English titles, the distinction seems to be that the "management consultant" is the (more wages-level payed) work-for-hire guy.
    • rurban 9y ago
      In germany the better term and profession (for the tax office) is "system software consultant". Because this is a free profession, in contrast to other consultants who are non-free trade "gewerbe" with additional mandatory taxes and what else. E.g. application SW consultant, strategy consultant or just consultant is non-free.
• bmitch3020 9y ago
  The simplest answer I like is: Employee: Does what the boss says, and works when the boss wants them to work. Contractor: Does what the client asks them to do, but has the flexibility to do it on their own schedule and according to their own way. In the US, the IRS may want to reclassify you as an employee if you dictate too much of how the work is done. Consultant: They review what the client is doing and recommends what they should be doing, often performing that work too. The key difference to me is the client accepts they may not be the most knowledgeable in what change they want to make. To give examples for programmers: Employee: works on a app in the office from 9-5 adding the features requested. Contractor: adds requested features to the app. Consultant: reviews the app and proposes some features to add.
• osrec 9y ago
  In my experience, the answer is pretty much anything they can get paid for. For example, we hired a big 4 consulting firm to help us do some software testing. They were not great, but did something (I'm not sure what exactly, but they did produce some reports). We hired the same big 4 firm to come up with an algorithm for reducing financial risk weighted assets, and guess what, some guys from the testing team turned up! I was surprised, as there was no obvious crossover (and the lack of knowledge showed)! Anyway, the partner convinced us they'd do a good job so we played along for a bit. During this exercise, the guys did everything from manually typing in data to making a few spreadsheets to providing some opinion on financial rules and methodology. In the end, it was obvious they'd do almost anything (short of cleaning the toilets) to increase their billable hours. So you right to be confused, as the definition is flaky at best! Also, most consultants add very little value (especially big 4 firms), but every so often you do meet a superstar that's worth every penny.
• notyourday 9y ago
  Provide cover for the executives to do things that may not be liked by employees be that because employees suggested ( but were not convincing enough) those changes early on and the leadership wants to save face, be that because the existing processes used do not work for the next stage of the company but cannot be changed due to how those changes would affect existing business lines or be that because the employees aren't really qualified to perform those changes. The most important part to realize is that a consultant is a vendor and as such certain policies that the company has may not apply.
• baby 9y ago
  I'm a cryptography/security consultant, here's the kind of things I do. Hope that helps :) * I get on calls with potential clients to see if we can solve one of their needs. Their needs can be broad: auditing code or specific implementations; reading and vetting pages of protocol design; advising on third party products or libraries; documenting the risk of the latest X attack... Sometimes I can do it, sometimes someone else should do it, sometimes no-one can do it. * If nobody can do it but it's an interesting problem and it's relatively reasonable to tackle I (or someone else) will spend X weeks researching the subject so that we can provide the service in the future. We've done this with ethereum smart contracts recently for example (it's been pretty fruitful and I'll be giving a talk at Black Hat Asia in a few months on the subject). * When the job starts, I'll be talking to the client to make sure we're on the same page, see what kind of claims they want to make, what they're more scared of, etc... This helps a lot, but of course the client is not always right or not always aware of what might go wrong. Most often companies do not even have a threat model and have no idea what they should really defend against. * Most of my engagement are remote, but depending on the field you might have to go on-site. In any case, you always try to be close to the client so that you can get responses relatively fast (consulting is expensive, you don't want to lose your time trying to find answers they can provide). (Unfortunately it is not always possible as some of them are really busy or just do not want to spend the time answering questions.) * Whatever the type of job is, you always spend a few days internalizing everything you're reading or hearing (I call that drowning). You try to get an idea of what the product/protocol/solution/app is (if it's your first time working on it), you read papers or articles about it if you're rusty/missing some pieces, you go through the codebase and ask questions to see what is what and what is where. * Then you dig in, you do what you're best at. In security/cryptography we try to break things, find gotchas, discover flaws :) * Eventually, you need to provide some product to the client. It is often some document or a presentation (or both) of your findings. You want your client to understand what you did, like really, this is after all the product they're paying for. You also want to give out recommendations on how they can fix things, sometimes you will want to fix things yourself as well. It all depends on what you can do or what the client wants you to do (if you agree). Anyway, these are my 2 cents. It's a field that mingles expertise with client satisfaction. You need to know something that can help one or several of their problems, and then you need to do your best to convey your explanations. (I just wrote this huge comment because I felt inspired after reading a large 2000 day-old tptacek comment.)