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> I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve t

> I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate. When I started, I was constantly being blocked; I'm going on a bit of a tangent here but this statement highlights some big problems in our industry. To me, being hired as a contractor/consultant means being hired to a job which satisfies some very specific requirements, not to be a butt in a seat on retainer to perform any immediate task which happens to come up. As a contractor/consultant it seems the best approach would be to demand specific, well defined interfaces and use cases and to provide a solution which adheres to those interfaces and satisfies those use cases. If done right, your solution should be verifiable with acceptance testing. If the solution you provide meets those requirements you've fulfilled your end of the contract. The client is free to do whatever they'd like with that solution based on other criteria not in the contract. Based off your work, they're free to hire you for more work or not. All this to say, don't get down on yourself. It sounds like there's an expectation mismatch between you and your client. It sounds like what you were expecting is closer to what I've described and what the client was expecting was another body to be on retainer for an hourly rate.

username90 7y ago
You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then leave. Take management consultants, their main job is mostly to go in and fix other managers messes and possible educate them so it wont happen again or get them replaced. Software consultants can often have very similar roles, a company have a problem with producing software, they take in a consultant to fix the issue because they themselves don't know how, the consultant comes in and fixes the issue and in the best case educates your workers so they can handle these issues themselves in the future. This is what a company typically wants when they hire a consultant to fix a problem, not a person who only solves already well defined problems. Example: You have a new cloud based solution but prod is often broken, you hire a consultant to flesh out your deployment strategy to make it more robust, he comes in, creates a basic deployment strategy and shows your team how it works and how to add more tests to it, then he leaves. Production failures go down and your team is now stronger as a result. This is an ideal software consultant. Of course you also have "consultants" who are just normal employees with less legal rights, those are more like what you are talking about.

username90 7y ago

You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then leave. Take management consultants, their main job is mostly to go in and fix other managers messes and possible educate them so it wont happen again or get them replaced. Software consultants can often have very similar roles, a company have a problem with producing software, they take in a consultant to fix the issue because they themselves don't know how, the consultant comes in and fixes the issue and in the best case educates your workers so they can handle these issues themselves in the future. This is what a company typically wants when they hire a consultant to fix a problem, not a person who only solves already well defined problems. Example: You have a new cloud based solution but prod is often broken, you hire a consultant to flesh out your deployment strategy to make it more robust, he comes in, creates a basic deployment strategy and shows your team how it works and how to add more tests to it, then he leaves. Production failures go down and your team is now stronger as a result. This is an ideal software consultant. Of course you also have "consultants" who are just normal employees with less legal rights, those are more like what you are talking about.