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Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, wo

Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?

close04 2y ago
Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties. I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I’ll admit “consulting” is an overloaded term. I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work. I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects. Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to. I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more. That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
gorbachev 2y ago
Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants. If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently. If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project? If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation. But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”. Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently. My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
  - cutemonster 2y ago
    At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why). The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers? This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.

close04 2y ago

Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties. I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.

scarface_74 2y ago
I’ll admit “consulting” is an overloaded term. I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work. I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects. Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to. I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more. That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.

gorbachev 2y ago

Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants. If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently. If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.

scarface_74 2y ago
There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project? If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation. But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”. Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently. My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why). The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
ElevenLathe 2y ago
No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers? This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.