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Consulting company. After "senior" my career stalled. An older candidate was brought in and made "lead" immediately on a project that I built from the ground up

Consulting company. After "senior" my career stalled. An older candidate was brought in and made "lead" immediately on a project that I built from the ground up and lead. I was moved to a different project and promised architect. Did architecture. Unofficially given team lead title. Officially, all serious talk of my career is avoided.

gwbas1c 6y ago
IMO: Reflect on why this happened, change jobs, and learn from your experience.
prepend 6y ago
Some consulting companies don’t want senior techies as they are largely doing commodity work that just needs to be minimally competent. Some firms want eminence and want to have a technology competitive advantage so they develop a specialist or senior staff path with pay and equity similar to a partner or director. When I used to work in consulting I would ask about the equity structure. This would quickly reveal if there’s only a partner path or there’s some other thought leader path. Seeing the equity and company would distinguish from firms that said they had thought leaders and who had the title and those who actually had career paths and peers other than partner. It also helped that I figured out that consulting firms are really just engines that create partners. That’s the formula and bad firms fixate on this metric. Good firms distribute and realize that investment in senior staff is important and that just naming someone a principal engineer isn’t as important as compensating them as a principal engineer. Every firm talked about having great people, but only some had action. Kind of like there’s some “technology” companies where the entire C-suite is non-technical and has no tech background. Then there’s others where the c-suite includes tech and the executives were once engineers and whatnot. That shows the nature of the company more than titles.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  Thanks for the advice!
- jaegerpicker 6y ago
  I work at a consulting firm as a Principal Software Engineer. I do a ton of mentoring, application design, interfacing to other departments, and solving the hardest technical problems. It's mostly related to AWS cloud design/deployment as a company but I mostly do application architecture.

gwbas1c 6y ago

IMO: Reflect on why this happened, change jobs, and learn from your experience.

prepend 6y ago

Some consulting companies don’t want senior techies as they are largely doing commodity work that just needs to be minimally competent. Some firms want eminence and want to have a technology competitive advantage so they develop a specialist or senior staff path with pay and equity similar to a partner or director. When I used to work in consulting I would ask about the equity structure. This would quickly reveal if there’s only a partner path or there’s some other thought leader path. Seeing the equity and company would distinguish from firms that said they had thought leaders and who had the title and those who actually had career paths and peers other than partner. It also helped that I figured out that consulting firms are really just engines that create partners. That’s the formula and bad firms fixate on this metric. Good firms distribute and realize that investment in senior staff is important and that just naming someone a principal engineer isn’t as important as compensating them as a principal engineer. Every firm talked about having great people, but only some had action. Kind of like there’s some “technology” companies where the entire C-suite is non-technical and has no tech background. Then there’s others where the c-suite includes tech and the executives were once engineers and whatnot. That shows the nature of the company more than titles.

throw1234651234 6y ago
Thanks for the advice!
jaegerpicker 6y ago
I work at a consulting firm as a Principal Software Engineer. I do a ton of mentoring, application design, interfacing to other departments, and solving the hardest technical problems. It's mostly related to AWS cloud design/deployment as a company but I mostly do application architecture.