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Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus. Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money. They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower). While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s. I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated. I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.

xeromal 2y ago
Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase. If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that. Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.
  - xeromal 2y ago
    I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol. I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!
  - jghn 2y ago
    This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc. It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?
jghn 2y ago
How much unbilled time do you have? If you're expected to bill 40 hours/week, right of the top that means you have a more than 40 hour work week because by definition you can't be going to the bathroom or eating lunch. Then if you ever have an unbilled meeting or something, that adds even more. Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.
- cableshaft 2y ago
  I always report more than 40 hours a week for my internal company tracking (because there's usually a couple of internal firm meetings during the week), but it's never usually more than 45 hours. We've been pretty meeting-lite lately so I'm usually just reporting 42 hour weeks lately. That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm getting done what they're wanting to get done when they're wanting it to be done, I just bill 8 hours for the day and it's not a big deal (obviously it isn't, they've been willing to pay for me for almost three years at this point on two different projects and I get glowing reviews whenever I request feedback from them to pass along to my boss). I work 8:30 to 5:30 so that includes an extra hour for lunch, by the way, so that's not counted, no. But I'm at home, so it doesn't feel like work anyway, just an hour to relax, have a sandwich, let the dogs out, and maybe throw a recipe in the slow cooker for dinner. I'm actually in the middle of a 3.5 week break because I had so much built up time at the end of the year. I knew my client does a two week furlough for consultants at the end of the year so I was already planning for that, and also was planning a week for a wedding trip for a wedding ceremony/reception that had to be cancelled because a recent hurricane pretty much destroyed the town it was going to be held in. And I took a week off for vacation earlier this year.
  - jghn 2y ago
    Got it, that makes sense. And yeah, one place I worked tracked time in 30 min increments for instance and stuff like bathroom breaks were just lost in the noise of that. Current place is at the minute level, so stuff like that doesn't get tracked as billed time.

xeromal 2y ago

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

cableshaft 2y ago
Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase. If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that. Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.
- xeromal 2y ago
  I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol. I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!
- jghn 2y ago
  This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc. It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?

jghn 2y ago

How much unbilled time do you have? If you're expected to bill 40 hours/week, right of the top that means you have a more than 40 hour work week because by definition you can't be going to the bathroom or eating lunch. Then if you ever have an unbilled meeting or something, that adds even more. Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.

cableshaft 2y ago
I always report more than 40 hours a week for my internal company tracking (because there's usually a couple of internal firm meetings during the week), but it's never usually more than 45 hours. We've been pretty meeting-lite lately so I'm usually just reporting 42 hour weeks lately. That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm getting done what they're wanting to get done when they're wanting it to be done, I just bill 8 hours for the day and it's not a big deal (obviously it isn't, they've been willing to pay for me for almost three years at this point on two different projects and I get glowing reviews whenever I request feedback from them to pass along to my boss). I work 8:30 to 5:30 so that includes an extra hour for lunch, by the way, so that's not counted, no. But I'm at home, so it doesn't feel like work anyway, just an hour to relax, have a sandwich, let the dogs out, and maybe throw a recipe in the slow cooker for dinner. I'm actually in the middle of a 3.5 week break because I had so much built up time at the end of the year. I knew my client does a two week furlough for consultants at the end of the year so I was already planning for that, and also was planning a week for a wedding trip for a wedding ceremony/reception that had to be cancelled because a recent hurricane pretty much destroyed the town it was going to be held in. And I took a week off for vacation earlier this year.
- jghn 2y ago
  Got it, that makes sense. And yeah, one place I worked tracked time in 30 min increments for instance and stuff like bathroom breaks were just lost in the noise of that. Current place is at the minute level, so stuff like that doesn't get tracked as billed time.