Wow, this is a pretty good summary of what I saw during my 15 or so years at "design services" companies. One way around some of these issues is to pay employe

Wow, this is a pretty good summary of what I saw during my 15 or so years at "design services" companies. One way around some of these issues is to pay employees by the hour. At the places I worked, there was a large pool of folks who loved that arrangement because of the ability to work in bursts and take more time off in between. The problem then became scaling beyond that pool of labor (many of whom were independent contractors with other commitments). This math is also why, for years, I've recommended people avoid investing in companies like Palantir. Sure, they can be successful companies, but they'll never achieve the sort of hypergrowth that companies like Google or Meta can due to the scaling issues. Overall, I loved my time in the services industry. It had the dynamic quality of being a consultant (except for one 5 year long, mostly continuous project where I was staff augmentation for a large company) but someone else handled the sales and negotiations for me.