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Here in Mexico we have an opposite view of this: The majority of developers have spent their professional life doing "consulting" jobs in outsourcing firms. Few

• barbarbar 5y ago
  Very interesting and unexpected points. Thank you for sharing that view.
• marsdepinski 5y ago
  That's outsourcing, not consulting.
  • askonomm 5y ago
    That's outsourcing for the employer, but consulting for the employee. If I consult for a US company while being in South America, I'm still a consultant. They are the ones outsourcing.
    • drw85 5y ago
      I don't think that's true. You're a freelancer, that works for a US company. A consultant is an advisor, that should have some specific technical or domain knowledge to advise people with. In reality, everyone can call themself a consultant and i bet you can charge better money calling yourself consultant, even if you don't possess any specific knowledge and just work as a regular dev.
      • TremendousJudge 5y ago
        No, there are non-US companies that sell consulting services to US companies. If you are employed by one of these companies, you work as a consultant for a US company (usually as part of a team with several compatriots), and you are not a freelancer since you are employed by your company. If the contract finishes and you're left without a project, you're still employed and drawing a paycheck, and it's your company that finds you a new project to work on.
  • MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
    Right, but nobody hires code monkeys for their bargain outsourcing sweatshop. They hire "experts" with "years of experience" for "consulting" to produce "custom solutions."
    • fsloth 5y ago
      There is a category of consulting agencies that actually specialize in high quality developers, charge accordingly, and incentivize talent to stay by giving them a solid percentage cut of the customer fees.
      • rgoulter 5y ago
        I've seen a summary of consultancy business model described in three buckets. https://commoncog.com/blog/you-cant-ignore-business-models-in-your-career/#the-joys-and-limitations-of-working-for-a-consultancy https://commoncog.com/blog/you-cant-ignore-business-models-i...
  • stadium 5y ago
    Consulting is outsourcing
    • fsloth 5y ago
      There is "cheap outsourcing" though and actually hiring a deeply talented expert for that one thing you need done, and done right preferably. And anything in between.
• ern 5y ago
  The article specifically excludes outsourced development from its definition of consulting: I’m not talking about becoming one of those contractors who are billed out by their companies as “consultants” but are really just serial hired hands. I’m referring to a true consultant role, where you are paid to bring expertise, give advice, and drive technical change.*
  • ThePadawan 5y ago
    Yeaaaah, I have never once heard anyone use the word "consultant" to mean the latter.
    • scrollaway 5y ago
      Clearly multiple people in this thread and the original article itself. Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places?
      • ThePadawan 5y ago
        I've spoken to multiple consultancies to try and figure out if the career path would work out for me. All of them made it clear that their MO is to provide asses in seats to build software quickly, then hand it over to the customer to whatever they liked with it - generally hire a bunch of outsourced developers to keep it barely alive, maybe add a feature or two per year. Now TBF this is Switzerland, where salaries are always very high, but employee stock options etc. are pretty much unknown (outside of Google). Generally that means that companies are already spending shitloads of cash on software developers, so they might as well hire them as employees, not contractors.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      When a major company "brings in consultants" they generally mean exactly calling up one of the major consulting firms and bringing in a bunch of outsourced short-term people (those "hired hands") and not e.g. freelance experts; and while these "hired hands" contractors are quite different in practice from "proper consultants" as the article describes, they usually are advertised as the same thing.
• 01100011 5y ago
  I'll second this. US SWE who spent a good portion of his career either doing consulting or working for a consulting company. It left me unable to care about the products of the companies I eventually settled down and started to work for. I have a very problem-centric attitude where I need to be fed well defined tasks and can't seem to care about the overall product, with it's various problems and features. Don't get me wrong, I think consulting is a good thing for people to do, but don't let it distort your thinking. It's also easy to start to see everything in your life in terms of your hourly rate, and you start making weird choices regarding how you spend your time. In response to the other replies, I'll say 'consulting' entails both work for hire(I was a core member of the platform team in a major media device company for 6 years) and full project design('We have a rough idea and we need to to architect, code, test, deploy and sometimes maintain a system'). It is not just working at a body shop doing shit work for hourly pay(although sometimes it is, depending on the economy).
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    I'm a consultant right now after doing software engineering for almost two decades. I owned a lot of my code before which got me to appreciate caring for maintainability. I generally work as an advisor rather than a coder but if I do end up coding, one of my primary goals when working for a client is ensuring the code is high quality, maintainable, self-documenting and that any workarounds and cut corners are clearly marked as such and highlighted to the client. You can just do this because you want to be proud of your work. Because you don't want to hate your life. Because you didn't spend 18 years of your life learning to end up writing unreliable diarrheas just to save yourself 30 mins a week. And those dev shops in eastern Europe / asia are not consultancies. They're freelancing agencies with a sales pitch. Consulting implies expertise.
• kgeist 5y ago
  >Here in Mexico we have an opposite view of this: The majority of developers have spent their professional life doing "consulting" jobs There's a saying here in Russia: Can't code? Consult. Can't consult? Manage.
  • drw85 5y ago
    Love this saying and from my experience, a lot of people actually do exactly this. I've worked with many managers that used to be bad developers. Most of them were bad managers aswell. I've also worked with a few managers that were still very good coders, they tended to be much more hands on and productive with their managing aswell.
    • jld89 5y ago
      What makes a good manager for you?
      • drw85 5y ago
        Someone that actually manages things and takes away a lot of the communication between devs and users/customers. Someone that has a broad overview of things and keeps things in line between devs in different teams, QA etc. Someone that tackles existing or future problems hands on, by clearly communicating them and prioritising and assigning them to the right people. Someone that makes sure, that requirements/backlog etc. are always in a workable shape. Most managers that i work with lack in one or multiple of these areas. Some managers i worked with do none of these and just report numbers and budgets, while avoiding to do anything useful towards the actual project/product.
  • illuminati1911 5y ago
    I guess in this saying what "consulting" means is some vague "Agile, SAFe" BS consulting. What is being talked here is a software consultants who actually create software.
• wsc981 5y ago
  Based on my own experience as both an employee (~10 years) and consultant (~5 years) in The Netherlands, I'd say in The Netherlands generally the more experienced, more skilled workers tend to go into consulting. Most consultants I worked with did deliver better results and seemed to be slacking less. I attribute this to the following with regards to work culture in The Netherlands: - developers mostly interested in job security or promoting into higher roles within a company stay employees - developers who feel that as an employee they are underpaid with regards to their skills and abilities, these developers tend to move into consulting as it gives them more control over their income, since as a consultant they choose their own rates - these kinds of developers are likely not interested into management roles as well (or they might opt into consulting as PM, SCRUM master perhaps)
  • jb1991 5y ago
    From what I can tell, consulting rates in the Netherlands are significantly higher indeed compared to employees. At least 50% more on average.
    • inediblePotato 5y ago
      Freelance consultant in NL here. The consulting-firm rates can be much higher, but usually freelance consulting is much cheaper than employees. One of the reasons I went into this is I was working in both academia and in companies at the level where I was hiring for projects, and the ridiculous money that just gets eaten by overhead and middle management is absurd. If you hire a PhD and pay them close to ~40keur/year (NL is comparatively higher salaries for PhD than other places), you need about ~100k per year for that person. University bench fees, or corporate overhead, computing resources, insurance, pension. If you go up from PhD for 1 FTE senior engineer in a company it gets worse, they get ~60k before income tax, it costs closer to ~200k for 1 FTE (this is a real recent example for a project I am involved in). On top of that you need to give them a contract, so if you hire a lemon (which will happen at some point), you are stuck with them at least for a year. For me, and I think for some experienced project leaders, it makes much more sense to hire someone as a contractor per month, if they keep delivering, then keep them, if not, don't. If you keep them, maybe you pay 80k for the year. Another aspect is that the cost of a external person is just a cost, like buying computing resources/equipment for a project, it can be easier/simpler to factor into a project (as its not a continuing cost commitment) and depending on the arrangement, can be deducted from the companies VAT. Freelance consultants do their own admin, handle their own expenses, work from home (though so does everyone at the moment) so the hiring company just pays directly for results. To a new manager/project leader, prospectively, it can seem like a higher cost up front but that's only if you compare 80k to 40k which isn't fair or what you will see when you look retrospectively at the project cost. Consulting firms lose most of this benefit because they still have all those extra costs/commitments involved. Business is strange.
• itsoktocry 5y ago
  >The majority of developers have spent their professional life doing "consulting" jobs in outsourcing firms I think the issue here is your correct use of quotes on consulting. Contracting is not consulting; the latter you're usually getting paid a premium for your expertise, not as a cog in the wheel of code production.