13 ms·

Bait-and-switch is consulting 101. Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work. That's wh

by fsloth 5y ago

Bait-and-switch is consulting 101. Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work. That's what you generally get with any big-name consulting firm. This is not necessarily bad! The senior in this case is more like the "brand" of the operation. And - sorry about going now into stereotypes - Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.

warrenm 5y ago
>Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work That's not "Bait-and-switch" That's smart business The "most senior person" (or, more likely, team) is still available - they're just acting as an escalation point, not doing grunt work Same basic concept as having a secretary to do the [necessary] grunt work of any specialized employee/team You don't send Babe Ruth to fetch foul balls, you send Babe Ruth to hit homeruns But without the ball boys going for fouls, Babe Ruth doesn't get to hit as many, or as fast
buran77 5y ago
Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. With IT consulting or MSPs this tends to be a far more extensive practice than in other fields from my experience. Whether the last hop of the outsourcing is in India, Poland, or Spain is not that important if you still get what you expect. The problem is when you get a fraction of what you expected or pay for. Interviews have been used as opportunities for evangelization, attempts to get technical assistance, or extract information about the competition or potential customers since forever. I haven't seen one which was overtly illegal but they're all certainly as shady as they get.
- andi999 5y ago
  And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.
  - buran77 5y ago
    In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.
    - neutronicus 5y ago
      You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - newsclues 5y ago
    The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.
    - thisisnico 5y ago
      Technical Sales
      - ryandrake 5y ago
        Some of the most successful engineers I know, got there by migrating over to engineering sales. I'm almost convinced if you are a moderately skilled software engineer, are very good looking, very charismatic, and have maybe a spoonful of general business knowledge, you can pretty much name your salary. They'll stick you in a suit, fly you around with the bizdev guys, and you only have to do anything if the client brings their tech guys to talk. You'll occasionally do some coding: write a few demos, maybe integrate your company's software with some other company's workflow, but mostly smile and talk about architecture, frameworks, blah blah blah. Nice work if you can get it. I was too much of a cynic and critic to make it in such a role, and I have the looks of a toad, so I never bothered.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lostapathy 5y ago
  I used to work in state government. There was no "gradually switch them out" - we got the D-team as soon as the sale closed and the project started.
  - akamia 5y ago
    That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people. Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      But how much does Boeing pays for the service? Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best. The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now. But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc... In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.
      - ghshephard 5y ago
        I've worked for an organization that had a mixed hardware/software/services components. These were $50mm - $100mm+ contracts running for 5+ years, and the Service Component was just charged out at person years - flat fee, so - a project manager might go for $600k/year, an application engineer for $500k/year, a field-engineer for $300k/year and so on. Each project would then have so many person years at each stage of the project - project manager would be pretty flat at 1 project/manager/year, but in the initial years, it would be 3 application-engineers, 2 field engineers, etc... Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  Not _every_ company does this – the consultancy I work at does not. We never outsource to third parties without the customer being involved, we do not hire [juniors or anyone else] for specific projects.
  - buran77 5y ago
    I imagine you also send your best not worst engineers for a bid or demo. For the rest, as I said it's just far more extensive in IT than in other fields. There will be exceptions. And being able to scale on demand is a big part of providing a service. Otherwise you can't absorb any unexpected spikes in demand from already existing projects, or have to pass on lucrative opportunities, or you pay to keep a buffer of people on payroll.
    - paavohtl 5y ago
      We send the team that would be working on the project, to the extent it's known at that time. But yes, bigger consultancies absolutely do this.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Hiring contractors to work on your house tends to end up the same too. So much of what the early people say just magically disappears when the actual work gets done by a completely different set of people. As an example, when we had our bathroom done, the guy they sent to finish things up couldn't even center and level the towel racks.
  - Helloitzkenny 5y ago
    I saw this first hand while working for a high-end landscaping company. The first team sent out to a job site would be the A-Team and they would do about 50% of the work, whether they were done for the day or off to do another job. The next day (most jobs took 2 days ATL, some took more) another crew of less experienced workers would work the site until finished, then the owner would come inspect. The owner was on the "A-Team" and his work was amazing; I was on the "B-Team" and though I always put 110% into my work when I physically could, I constantly worked with slackers and corner-cutters who also came and went. It made sense the way it was explained to me, which was that the people working odd jobs who don't really care will get bummed out by the B-Team labour and pay, and if they don't they're added to the A-Team after a few months of good work and some more training.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    absolutely; with house builders. Next time around, I'm inclined to manage the build myself.
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      Talk to someone you trust who did the same thing. Managing anything related to construction can ruin marriages, and lives, the whole ordeal could last for years.
  - spfzero 5y ago
    A different flavor of this (in home re-modeling, hardscape etc.), is that the people who come to do the estimate are different than the people who come do the job. They are typically younger and pretty much clueless as to how the work would have to be done. So you can't ask them any detailed questions. All they can do is run the spreadsheet on their laptop and show you pictures of other work their company has done. They were trained on how to make a sale, that's it. Had to go with someone who I had a little trouble communicating with, but at least I could verify he knew what they were doing and understood my concerns about how the work got done.
- rapind 5y ago
  I would do this as a “Sales Engineer”. Not interviews but as sales support to handle any technical questions and win over our client’s internal devs. We didn’t outsource, but it’s really just sales. I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  > Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed. This is just resource efficiency.
  - Hallucinaut 5y ago
    And yet the client cost generally doesn't come down...
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      Presumably you'd pay a lot more to always have the A-team.
    - lamnk 5y ago
      The cost is already estimated with junior-levels in mind. If you want the A-team to be present all the time, say it upfront and surely proposals will be changed.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Ha. I work for an engineering consultancy and I pointed out that we actually do the opposite: bid on a project using a senior engineer rate, then when the project starts, realize that all our senior engineers are booked and only the Principal engineers (who cost about 30% more) are available. I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!
  - madengr 5y ago
    Though they may complete it 30% faster. I’m chuckling now as I watch a current project having all sorts of issues when I (principal engineer) could have had it already done.
- aconsult1 5y ago
  This is only true for large companies that care about nothing but their shareholders and quarterly reports. There's another group of companies that not only care about delivering real value within the budget, but also have fun while doing it. I'm fortunately in a company part of that second group. The reaction we get from clients when we deliver more than they asked for, repeatedly, is priceless.
  - cyanydeez 5y ago
    any company can do this, its just that the more people who feed themselves in the food chain, the more likely it is someone will start a race to the bottom of profit taking.
conductr 5y ago
Along with “land and expand”. Where they use a small project to get over the initial hurdle, foot in the door so to speak. Then, they start trying to rebuild everything your company touches
- leetrout 5y ago
  I like the term “provide and conquer” as well.
  - cmpb 5y ago
    Google turned up very little, please elaborate
    - whoisburbansky 5y ago
      As opposed to “divide and conquer.” Presumably the same idea as “land and expand,” but you conquer the client company by “providing” successively larger projects.
- hinkley 5y ago
  IBM Global Services is particularly known for this. Their flavor involves hiring people with a very high tolerance for complexity, and letting them propose the most complex solution to any problem. Eventually your own people get tired of trying to keep up with even the summaries, and just abdicate. Now that part of the system is only understood by IGS, and the rot begins to spread.
  - tmn007 5y ago
    15 years ago when I was changing jobs one of the roles was Sun Microsystems - which I liked the company but the role was to suggest and be embedded in a company and embed Sun products into every project (and I assume prevent competitors). Did not take it.
ta1234567890 5y ago
Not just consulting, also law firms. Same thing, you might get a partner when they are selling you, then the juniors do the actual work (and unless you are a big company that they actually care about, you’ll probably also get subpar work).
chippy 5y ago
> if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. But how can you tell this is not just bait-and-switch itself? The most senior person with an impressive resume is vetted and proven to deliver value, but how can you know if the actual contractors you are getting from wherever are good?
roenxi 5y ago
That isn't really a bait-and-switch. Years of experience doesn't make people type faster (quite the reverse, really). It is good for making high level decisions that crop up about once a day or once every other day. It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.
- acdha 5y ago
  The problem is that one senior person can’t oversee tons of unmotivated juniors on multiple projects. It’s not that the senior people aren’t typing all of the code, it’s that you’ll never see them again and your “architect”, “tech leads”, etc. will be a couple of people who have a couple years of excreting Java code into legacy apps for a bank. When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > it’s that you’ll never see them again ... > When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ... The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
    - acdha 5y ago
      > The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project. If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.
belter 5y ago
Are we mixing consulting and contracting here? I worked as a consultant for more than 10 years. Every single time customers want to : - Review the Consultant CV - Interview the Consultant - Accept no switch unless for the obvious reasons of sickness or holidays. - And the team that starts is very much the team that finishes the project.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I recently accepted a job at a consulting/contracting firm for a specific contract as a data scientist. I had three separate interviews with the company I'd be working indirectly for, and I wasn't the only one they'd been interviewing. There'll be no switching me out for a junior.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  It's not exactly "consulting vs contracting", its "hiring a single person vs hiring out a project". Many "consulting" shops do what you call "contracting", because "consulting" is a more "elite" word. But a single person can be a "contractor" too. (At big companies and non-IT fields, a contractor is often used for temporary professional employee-type labor for flexibly scaling the labor force that includes employees doing the same job, but a consultant is someone who provides a skill you don't have in house at all.)
whatshisface 5y ago
>Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. The problem is not that America has a monopoly on good coders but that the good coders in any country will not work for the Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type foreign contracting firms.
- atomicnumber3 5y ago
  "Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type" This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    "aw man, Plank is sending us PRs now"
- paxys 5y ago
  I have seen this happen so often. A large company will want to outsource some of their development to India, hire some shady agency to facilitate this, pay half of the going rate for good talent, then come away with the conclusion "Indian developers are terrible".
  - zadokshi 5y ago
    Great point. But also, if that’s what happens, that’s the reputation that develops.
- SamBam 5y ago
  Suppose you were looking for good quality foreign contractors. How would you go about finding them?
  - zadokshi 5y ago
    If they are good, they have already moved to the US or some other higher income country. There’s probably a “good quality foreign contractor” living down the road from you.
soco 5y ago
Benn there, done that, got a t-shirt. Two t-shirts actually. The first year was great, the second year with new developers was okay, the third meh, the fourth was a huge drag. We switched to another eastern-european outsourcer and the story reset: first year great, second year new team and meh, then I left but I doubt it went anywhere but downwards. Moral of the story? Longer term contracts are dangerous for you.
gremloni 5y ago
I disagree on Eastern Europeans being good coders as a bloc. I’ve had some pretty bad security consultants out of Ukraine and really good work coming out of India when I paid what the work was worth.
amcoastal 5y ago
Lots of parallels here as well between research/academia and consulting -- the senior PI is the name on the proposals to get funded but everyone knows the work is done by grad students at exploitative wages to keep research cheap.
xeromal 5y ago
Just wanted to pipe in with my own experience, but I've seen it come from the clients perspective too. Initial phase of the project is very visible and critical to the client and is delivered with the A-team. Client starts to care less as the bottom barrel of features start being implemented and they want to reduce costs. Instead of losing the contract, we start dropping some of the more expensive devs save for 1 or 2 very good ones to keep the project moving and we backfill with more junior to increase their experience. The client starts wanting to reduce the expense even more and we keep the 1 or 2 very good devs/architect and we bring on a few near-shore devs. Project coasts for a year or two until they're done with us or they have another high priority item that kicks the project into overdrive again.
- exikyut 5y ago
  "What's this 'sek-u-rity' thing?" "I don't know. Wow what do all these words in capital letters mean?" "Oh that doesn't matter. As long as you use the same words in the deliverable report, noone will ever double-check the code before the sale."
js4ever 5y ago
True and everyone knows it at some extent. I worked for a large consulting firm in the past for almost a decade. I was the bait, indeed I was nearly not touching the projects at all except if the replacement failed it hard and then my employer would send me few days there to fix the mess. My working time was divided between pre-sales and fireman to save projects from total failure.
- exikyut 5y ago
  It's almost that the more senior you are, the less you get to do the "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" thing.
DantesKite 5y ago
Your last sentence made me wonder if there's a company that vets programmers.
slezakattack 5y ago
I've also seen the bait-and-switch with recruiters. Many years ago when I was young in my career, I decided to respond to a recruiter who worked for a recruiting firm. We had a good talk and there was a company he was working with that I expressed interest in and felt I was qualified for. Nope. He kept pedaling this small, 10-15 person startup to me that I clearly wasn't qualified for and honestly was not interested in as there were some red flags. The commission must've been fat cause he didn't pitch me any other company and kept "circling back" if I changed my mind about them.
drivingmenuts 5y ago
Bait and switch is not necessarily bad? You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?
chaostheory 5y ago
I can vouch for Eastern Euro developers. They do quality work. Their code is clean. I remember even when there was the whole issue with Russia, our developers in Ukraine were still highly productive.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
I first experienced this getting legal work for setting up an LLC which the principal gave me the pitch and then handed the job to his paralegal.
dmacedo 5y ago
I absolutely agree with this, been there first hand on both sides of the aisle. And my experience of those I've worked with, has been that the smaller projects that remove this potential to deceive (not profitable or large enough for bait-and-switch - not enough get-foot-in-door to be worthwhile to take at a loss). And by smaller I mean less than £/€/$ 500k, and not leading to multi-million deal later on. And go away from the RFP process that sucks and is just trying to get the lowest bidder, for a fixed-end-goal, rather than bringing good and experienced people to support your business/organisation/project on achieving something. I'm trying to launch this myself, and I feel you can get the best of both worlds: great talented people who you pay fairly with a scale model for (eventually needed) growth, and some cost control for mid/longer term projects as you can't really have a fixed price. At the same time you have to remove some of the downsides like this lack of transparency (and honesty?), whilst having the needed support in place for projects to succeed!

by fsloth 5y ago

warrenm 5y ago

>Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work That's not "Bait-and-switch" That's smart business The "most senior person" (or, more likely, team) is still available - they're just acting as an escalation point, not doing grunt work Same basic concept as having a secretary to do the [necessary] grunt work of any specialized employee/team You don't send Babe Ruth to fetch foul balls, you send Babe Ruth to hit homeruns But without the ball boys going for fouls, Babe Ruth doesn't get to hit as many, or as fast

buran77 5y ago

Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. With IT consulting or MSPs this tends to be a far more extensive practice than in other fields from my experience. Whether the last hop of the outsourcing is in India, Poland, or Spain is not that important if you still get what you expect. The problem is when you get a fraction of what you expected or pay for. Interviews have been used as opportunities for evangelization, attempts to get technical assistance, or extract information about the competition or potential customers since forever. I haven't seen one which was overtly illegal but they're all certainly as shady as they get.

andi999 5y ago
And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.
- buran77 5y ago
  In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.
  - neutronicus 5y ago
    You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- newsclues 5y ago
  The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.
  - thisisnico 5y ago
    Technical Sales
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      Some of the most successful engineers I know, got there by migrating over to engineering sales. I'm almost convinced if you are a moderately skilled software engineer, are very good looking, very charismatic, and have maybe a spoonful of general business knowledge, you can pretty much name your salary. They'll stick you in a suit, fly you around with the bizdev guys, and you only have to do anything if the client brings their tech guys to talk. You'll occasionally do some coding: write a few demos, maybe integrate your company's software with some other company's workflow, but mostly smile and talk about architecture, frameworks, blah blah blah. Nice work if you can get it. I was too much of a cynic and critic to make it in such a role, and I have the looks of a toad, so I never bothered.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lostapathy 5y ago
I used to work in state government. There was no "gradually switch them out" - we got the D-team as soon as the sale closed and the project started.
- akamia 5y ago
  That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people. Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    But how much does Boeing pays for the service? Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best. The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now. But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc... In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.
    - ghshephard 5y ago
      I've worked for an organization that had a mixed hardware/software/services components. These were $50mm - $100mm+ contracts running for 5+ years, and the Service Component was just charged out at person years - flat fee, so - a project manager might go for $600k/year, an application engineer for $500k/year, a field-engineer for $300k/year and so on. Each project would then have so many person years at each stage of the project - project manager would be pretty flat at 1 project/manager/year, but in the initial years, it would be 3 application-engineers, 2 field engineers, etc... Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.
paavohtl 5y ago
Not _every_ company does this – the consultancy I work at does not. We never outsource to third parties without the customer being involved, we do not hire [juniors or anyone else] for specific projects.
- buran77 5y ago
  I imagine you also send your best not worst engineers for a bid or demo. For the rest, as I said it's just far more extensive in IT than in other fields. There will be exceptions. And being able to scale on demand is a big part of providing a service. Otherwise you can't absorb any unexpected spikes in demand from already existing projects, or have to pass on lucrative opportunities, or you pay to keep a buffer of people on payroll.
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    We send the team that would be working on the project, to the extent it's known at that time. But yes, bigger consultancies absolutely do this.
bcrosby95 5y ago
Hiring contractors to work on your house tends to end up the same too. So much of what the early people say just magically disappears when the actual work gets done by a completely different set of people. As an example, when we had our bathroom done, the guy they sent to finish things up couldn't even center and level the towel racks.
- Helloitzkenny 5y ago
  I saw this first hand while working for a high-end landscaping company. The first team sent out to a job site would be the A-Team and they would do about 50% of the work, whether they were done for the day or off to do another job. The next day (most jobs took 2 days ATL, some took more) another crew of less experienced workers would work the site until finished, then the owner would come inspect. The owner was on the "A-Team" and his work was amazing; I was on the "B-Team" and though I always put 110% into my work when I physically could, I constantly worked with slackers and corner-cutters who also came and went. It made sense the way it was explained to me, which was that the people working odd jobs who don't really care will get bummed out by the B-Team labour and pay, and if they don't they're added to the A-Team after a few months of good work and some more training.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  absolutely; with house builders. Next time around, I'm inclined to manage the build myself.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Talk to someone you trust who did the same thing. Managing anything related to construction can ruin marriages, and lives, the whole ordeal could last for years.
- spfzero 5y ago
  A different flavor of this (in home re-modeling, hardscape etc.), is that the people who come to do the estimate are different than the people who come do the job. They are typically younger and pretty much clueless as to how the work would have to be done. So you can't ask them any detailed questions. All they can do is run the spreadsheet on their laptop and show you pictures of other work their company has done. They were trained on how to make a sale, that's it. Had to go with someone who I had a little trouble communicating with, but at least I could verify he knew what they were doing and understood my concerns about how the work got done.
rapind 5y ago
I would do this as a “Sales Engineer”. Not interviews but as sales support to handle any technical questions and win over our client’s internal devs. We didn’t outsource, but it’s really just sales. I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
> Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed. This is just resource efficiency.
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  And yet the client cost generally doesn't come down...
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    Presumably you'd pay a lot more to always have the A-team.
  - lamnk 5y ago
    The cost is already estimated with junior-levels in mind. If you want the A-team to be present all the time, say it upfront and surely proposals will be changed.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
Ha. I work for an engineering consultancy and I pointed out that we actually do the opposite: bid on a project using a senior engineer rate, then when the project starts, realize that all our senior engineers are booked and only the Principal engineers (who cost about 30% more) are available. I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!
- madengr 5y ago
  Though they may complete it 30% faster. I’m chuckling now as I watch a current project having all sorts of issues when I (principal engineer) could have had it already done.
aconsult1 5y ago
This is only true for large companies that care about nothing but their shareholders and quarterly reports. There's another group of companies that not only care about delivering real value within the budget, but also have fun while doing it. I'm fortunately in a company part of that second group. The reaction we get from clients when we deliver more than they asked for, repeatedly, is priceless.
- cyanydeez 5y ago
  any company can do this, its just that the more people who feed themselves in the food chain, the more likely it is someone will start a race to the bottom of profit taking.

conductr 5y ago

Along with “land and expand”. Where they use a small project to get over the initial hurdle, foot in the door so to speak. Then, they start trying to rebuild everything your company touches

leetrout 5y ago
I like the term “provide and conquer” as well.
- cmpb 5y ago
  Google turned up very little, please elaborate
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    As opposed to “divide and conquer.” Presumably the same idea as “land and expand,” but you conquer the client company by “providing” successively larger projects.
hinkley 5y ago
IBM Global Services is particularly known for this. Their flavor involves hiring people with a very high tolerance for complexity, and letting them propose the most complex solution to any problem. Eventually your own people get tired of trying to keep up with even the summaries, and just abdicate. Now that part of the system is only understood by IGS, and the rot begins to spread.
- tmn007 5y ago
  15 years ago when I was changing jobs one of the roles was Sun Microsystems - which I liked the company but the role was to suggest and be embedded in a company and embed Sun products into every project (and I assume prevent competitors). Did not take it.

ta1234567890 5y ago

Not just consulting, also law firms. Same thing, you might get a partner when they are selling you, then the juniors do the actual work (and unless you are a big company that they actually care about, you’ll probably also get subpar work).

chippy 5y ago

> if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. But how can you tell this is not just bait-and-switch itself? The most senior person with an impressive resume is vetted and proven to deliver value, but how can you know if the actual contractors you are getting from wherever are good?

roenxi 5y ago

That isn't really a bait-and-switch. Years of experience doesn't make people type faster (quite the reverse, really). It is good for making high level decisions that crop up about once a day or once every other day. It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.

acdha 5y ago
The problem is that one senior person can’t oversee tons of unmotivated juniors on multiple projects. It’s not that the senior people aren’t typing all of the code, it’s that you’ll never see them again and your “architect”, “tech leads”, etc. will be a couple of people who have a couple years of excreting Java code into legacy apps for a bank. When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > it’s that you’ll never see them again ... > When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ... The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project. If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.

belter 5y ago

Are we mixing consulting and contracting here? I worked as a consultant for more than 10 years. Every single time customers want to : - Review the Consultant CV - Interview the Consultant - Accept no switch unless for the obvious reasons of sickness or holidays. - And the team that starts is very much the team that finishes the project.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
I recently accepted a job at a consulting/contracting firm for a specific contract as a data scientist. I had three separate interviews with the company I'd be working indirectly for, and I wasn't the only one they'd been interviewing. There'll be no switching me out for a junior.
alisonkisk 5y ago
It's not exactly "consulting vs contracting", its "hiring a single person vs hiring out a project". Many "consulting" shops do what you call "contracting", because "consulting" is a more "elite" word. But a single person can be a "contractor" too. (At big companies and non-IT fields, a contractor is often used for temporary professional employee-type labor for flexibly scaling the labor force that includes employees doing the same job, but a consultant is someone who provides a skill you don't have in house at all.)

whatshisface 5y ago

>Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. The problem is not that America has a monopoly on good coders but that the good coders in any country will not work for the Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type foreign contracting firms.

atomicnumber3 5y ago
"Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type" This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  "aw man, Plank is sending us PRs now"
paxys 5y ago
I have seen this happen so often. A large company will want to outsource some of their development to India, hire some shady agency to facilitate this, pay half of the going rate for good talent, then come away with the conclusion "Indian developers are terrible".
- zadokshi 5y ago
  Great point. But also, if that’s what happens, that’s the reputation that develops.
SamBam 5y ago
Suppose you were looking for good quality foreign contractors. How would you go about finding them?
- zadokshi 5y ago
  If they are good, they have already moved to the US or some other higher income country. There’s probably a “good quality foreign contractor” living down the road from you.

soco 5y ago

Benn there, done that, got a t-shirt. Two t-shirts actually. The first year was great, the second year with new developers was okay, the third meh, the fourth was a huge drag. We switched to another eastern-european outsourcer and the story reset: first year great, second year new team and meh, then I left but I doubt it went anywhere but downwards. Moral of the story? Longer term contracts are dangerous for you.

gremloni 5y ago

I disagree on Eastern Europeans being good coders as a bloc. I’ve had some pretty bad security consultants out of Ukraine and really good work coming out of India when I paid what the work was worth.

amcoastal 5y ago

Lots of parallels here as well between research/academia and consulting -- the senior PI is the name on the proposals to get funded but everyone knows the work is done by grad students at exploitative wages to keep research cheap.

xeromal 5y ago

Just wanted to pipe in with my own experience, but I've seen it come from the clients perspective too. Initial phase of the project is very visible and critical to the client and is delivered with the A-team. Client starts to care less as the bottom barrel of features start being implemented and they want to reduce costs. Instead of losing the contract, we start dropping some of the more expensive devs save for 1 or 2 very good ones to keep the project moving and we backfill with more junior to increase their experience. The client starts wanting to reduce the expense even more and we keep the 1 or 2 very good devs/architect and we bring on a few near-shore devs. Project coasts for a year or two until they're done with us or they have another high priority item that kicks the project into overdrive again.

exikyut 5y ago
"What's this 'sek-u-rity' thing?" "I don't know. Wow what do all these words in capital letters mean?" "Oh that doesn't matter. As long as you use the same words in the deliverable report, noone will ever double-check the code before the sale."

js4ever 5y ago

True and everyone knows it at some extent. I worked for a large consulting firm in the past for almost a decade. I was the bait, indeed I was nearly not touching the projects at all except if the replacement failed it hard and then my employer would send me few days there to fix the mess. My working time was divided between pre-sales and fireman to save projects from total failure.

exikyut 5y ago
It's almost that the more senior you are, the less you get to do the "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" thing.

DantesKite 5y ago

Your last sentence made me wonder if there's a company that vets programmers.

slezakattack 5y ago

I've also seen the bait-and-switch with recruiters. Many years ago when I was young in my career, I decided to respond to a recruiter who worked for a recruiting firm. We had a good talk and there was a company he was working with that I expressed interest in and felt I was qualified for. Nope. He kept pedaling this small, 10-15 person startup to me that I clearly wasn't qualified for and honestly was not interested in as there were some red flags. The commission must've been fat cause he didn't pitch me any other company and kept "circling back" if I changed my mind about them.

drivingmenuts 5y ago

Bait and switch is not necessarily bad? You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?

chaostheory 5y ago

I can vouch for Eastern Euro developers. They do quality work. Their code is clean. I remember even when there was the whole issue with Russia, our developers in Ukraine were still highly productive.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

I first experienced this getting legal work for setting up an LLC which the principal gave me the pitch and then handed the job to his paralegal.

dmacedo 5y ago

I absolutely agree with this, been there first hand on both sides of the aisle. And my experience of those I've worked with, has been that the smaller projects that remove this potential to deceive (not profitable or large enough for bait-and-switch - not enough get-foot-in-door to be worthwhile to take at a loss). And by smaller I mean less than £/€/$ 500k, and not leading to multi-million deal later on. And go away from the RFP process that sucks and is just trying to get the lowest bidder, for a fixed-end-goal, rather than bringing good and experienced people to support your business/organisation/project on achieving something. I'm trying to launch this myself, and I feel you can get the best of both worlds: great talented people who you pay fairly with a scale model for (eventually needed) growth, and some cost control for mid/longer term projects as you can't really have a fixed price. At the same time you have to remove some of the downsides like this lack of transparency (and honesty?), whilst having the needed support in place for projects to succeed!