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While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

DrScientist 1y ago
To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms. So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1] [1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exactly the same way by the consultancy....
- Gigachad 1y ago
  I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.
  - codebje 1y ago
    The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.
  - atmosx 1y ago
    At the government level, it’s mostly driven by ideology. I never came across a situation where a service improved after being "liberalized". Never. Not once. It is always end up in a combo of: poorer quality and (much) higher cost. I’ve seen too many cases where people suffer the consequences of their own ideas being implemented (large or lower scale), convinced that if we just turn this knob a little more, it’ll finally work. Because of that, I don’t spend much energy on them anymore.
    - collingreen 1y ago
      What does liberalized mean here? Also if you have time which ideology was holding the government/deloitte back here? I'm not sure what the message is here but I'm willing to with some more concrete.
      - Gigachad 1y ago
        The Liberals are a party in Australia famous for selling off everything the government has and replacing everyone with contractors only for it all to eventually be bought back and people rehired later.
  - xmcqdpt2 1y ago
    In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms. To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!
    - ceridwyn 1y ago
      That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.
      - array_key_first 1y ago
        Ahh, accountability engineering! The hidden engineering discipline!
  - hopelite 1y ago
    Usually it’s not the amount of work, it’s whether that work is necessary at all and a question of quality because the interests are largely aligned when they should be in tension and some opposition. Bad things happen when the interests of all parties are in one direction, usually due to a lack of real consequences. In government you have to remember that it’s people playing with other people’s money, thinking all along that it’s their money, i.e., a sense of entitlement. So you end up with many of the same kinds and types of deep problems that you see in things like investment frauds, trust fund babies, spoiled children, and drug addicts. It’s probably not a coincidence that those often heavily overlap, including among bureaucrats and people dependent of government money. We are talking about a militating of resources and from that comes a whole cascading effect, e.g., the children of someone who has actually produced something well through the effective and productive allocation of resources, resource maxing, so to say; will produce far better progeny than someone whose efforts have never led to anything productive as a bureaucrat that simply brushes one billion dollar failure after another under the rug while coping with ever more vociferously proclamations of how important and good of a job he does. A good case in point is how America is $38 trillion in realized national debt, all while the “boomer generation” is at the same time declaring how wonderful things are, regardless of the political party. Those two things cannot be reconciled and will not perdure.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ultimate responsibility for all the technical stuff makes 70% of what I do as a consultant working for the state. This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k. The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.
    - about3fitty 1y ago
      As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway. At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure. Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs. Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year. It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system. But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  When I did engineering consultancy, the team was usually thrown together from whoever was available. Usually they knew each other at least a little but it wasn't exactly the same team on each project. But yeah, the team involved in the sale and the team involved in the execution often had very little overlap (though, sometimes it was the B-team selling something unachievable to the customer and then handing it over to the A-team, which has more or less the same effect as far as the client's concerned. The swapping isn't necessarily a deliberate act of subterfuge but more a consequence of how people's time was managed: clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead).
  - pards 1y ago
    > clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead This is an important reality in consulting. The consultancy cannot keep their best people sitting idle while the clients spend months completing the paperwork. And it's not just a billability issue. The A team people don't like being underutilized and will find seek employment if they're kept idle too long. That said, savvy clients will include "named key resources" in the contract to ensure continuity between the sales team and the project team.
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      Most consultancies will push back very hard on having named resources in contracts. It’s gives the contractors too much leverage over the company. From what I have seen it can work out quite well for the client and consultants though.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  I've never understood the "can't resource internally with perms" argument. Hire people to do the job, and then lay them off when the project is over. These projects often last for years and frequently go over budget.
  - heyjamesknight 1y ago
    Layoffs have a significant morale impact for the rest of the company that lasts months or even years afterwards. You should not hire FTEs you intend to fire.
  - DrScientist 1y ago
    How difficult expensive that is depends on the country you are in - not all countries have a fire-at-will type legal system. Also having frequent rounds of firings impacts company culture - making it much more transactional ( everyone for themselves ) - some companies value their employees and culture and the collaboration and long term thinking that can bring. One option that's increasingly common is hiring people on fix term contracts - however that does create a sort of divide.
decimalenough 1y ago
From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team. This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the deal entirely.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  That’s exactly how it works.
  - thelastgallon 1y ago
    I've learnt this truth recently with most professions. Consultations with attorney based on rave reviews, after signing up, get assigned a random attorney from the firm. One attorney instantly sold my case to another attorney! Just started talking to chiropractor (i know! same as astrology), same trick! I haven't seen this yet in doctors offices. I see a doctor at an office specialized in an area (say gastrointestinal), they wouldn't switch and need the consent of the doctor to switch to another doctor in the same practice.
    - dmd 1y ago
      Chiropractor is NOT the same as astrology. Astrology isn’t noted for causing permanent spinal cord damage and quadriplegia.
      - tpoacher 1y ago
        unless the stars lead you to a chiropractor
        dmd 1y ago
        galaxy spine thinking
belter 1y ago
I have heard this before, but my experience when working as Consultant, is that Customers will do a lot of diligence before accepting a substitute. Maybe these are Contractors and not Consultants? ;-)
- DrScientist 1y ago
  The above is really aimed at large consultancy firms, implementing large projects. If it's a small firm or a 1 person contract then sure.
jacquesm 1y ago
That's the whole game. Meet the partner, get the juniors, pay for the partner. And if you're really unlucky you can spend your time educating the juniors.
- harperlee 1y ago
  Less cynically: there is only one partner; the team, if it works, manages to leverage the partner to ~5x - 10x. And no, you don’t pay partner rates. The client generally knows that to do commercial pressure you need to get info about team size, put it in the contract, and then negotiate on blended rate so it is close to what the market pays for the junior.
jeena 1y ago
Normally you just have a few team A people and they are needed for the next client.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anonzzzies 1y ago
Especially when the teams are bigger, you have some A person who works with 100 teams who pops in when you are really fed up to calm you and who is 'definitely on top of your project' and the rest are all juniors (and now less juniors with AI). One of my clients paid 500k for a project and asked us to vet the quality; they believed they were paying 15 people for the past months; when we went on zoom to talk to the team, after many camera/connection issues, we got the 15 people. So we asked to interview them all. Only one of them knew technical details about the project, the rest did not. The one guy that does know is the tech lead my client originally hired and seems he works part time on the project, or at least reads the tasks. Looking at the vast amounts of (bad) code, our suspicion is that there are 5 or so people using codex/claude code to paste in the tasks, wait for the code, go to some 'fake QA process' and then commit and deploy. This happened before AI definitely, but probably then it would be actually 15 people hammering code, but juniors instead of the seniors you are paying for.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
anonymars 1y ago
This one aged well https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2000-01-01 https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2000-01-01
- recursive 1y ago
  The url looked like it has a default date or sentinel value. But it seems that was actually published the morning of Y2K.
incomingpain 1y ago
When I worked for an MSP this happened so much. I was booked 4-6 weeks out. But an emergency got me deployed asap. I'd get them up and running and then put together a plan to fix them up, but then some junior got assigned that job. The client then gets mad at me for not helping them anymore.
port11 1y ago
I've worked for a Big 3 and can't say this happens that much. What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”. They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.

DrScientist 1y ago

To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms. So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1] [1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exactly the same way by the consultancy....

Gigachad 1y ago
I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.
- codebje 1y ago
  The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.
- atmosx 1y ago
  At the government level, it’s mostly driven by ideology. I never came across a situation where a service improved after being "liberalized". Never. Not once. It is always end up in a combo of: poorer quality and (much) higher cost. I’ve seen too many cases where people suffer the consequences of their own ideas being implemented (large or lower scale), convinced that if we just turn this knob a little more, it’ll finally work. Because of that, I don’t spend much energy on them anymore.
  - collingreen 1y ago
    What does liberalized mean here? Also if you have time which ideology was holding the government/deloitte back here? I'm not sure what the message is here but I'm willing to with some more concrete.
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      The Liberals are a party in Australia famous for selling off everything the government has and replacing everyone with contractors only for it all to eventually be bought back and people rehired later.
- xmcqdpt2 1y ago
  In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms. To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!
  - ceridwyn 1y ago
    That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.
    - array_key_first 1y ago
      Ahh, accountability engineering! The hidden engineering discipline!
- hopelite 1y ago
  Usually it’s not the amount of work, it’s whether that work is necessary at all and a question of quality because the interests are largely aligned when they should be in tension and some opposition. Bad things happen when the interests of all parties are in one direction, usually due to a lack of real consequences. In government you have to remember that it’s people playing with other people’s money, thinking all along that it’s their money, i.e., a sense of entitlement. So you end up with many of the same kinds and types of deep problems that you see in things like investment frauds, trust fund babies, spoiled children, and drug addicts. It’s probably not a coincidence that those often heavily overlap, including among bureaucrats and people dependent of government money. We are talking about a militating of resources and from that comes a whole cascading effect, e.g., the children of someone who has actually produced something well through the effective and productive allocation of resources, resource maxing, so to say; will produce far better progeny than someone whose efforts have never led to anything productive as a bureaucrat that simply brushes one billion dollar failure after another under the rug while coping with ever more vociferously proclamations of how important and good of a job he does. A good case in point is how America is $38 trillion in realized national debt, all while the “boomer generation” is at the same time declaring how wonderful things are, regardless of the political party. Those two things cannot be reconciled and will not perdure.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ultimate responsibility for all the technical stuff makes 70% of what I do as a consultant working for the state. This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k. The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.
  - about3fitty 1y ago
    As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway. At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure. Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs. Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year. It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system. But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.
rcxdude 1y ago
When I did engineering consultancy, the team was usually thrown together from whoever was available. Usually they knew each other at least a little but it wasn't exactly the same team on each project. But yeah, the team involved in the sale and the team involved in the execution often had very little overlap (though, sometimes it was the B-team selling something unachievable to the customer and then handing it over to the A-team, which has more or less the same effect as far as the client's concerned. The swapping isn't necessarily a deliberate act of subterfuge but more a consequence of how people's time was managed: clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead).
- pards 1y ago
  > clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead This is an important reality in consulting. The consultancy cannot keep their best people sitting idle while the clients spend months completing the paperwork. And it's not just a billability issue. The A team people don't like being underutilized and will find seek employment if they're kept idle too long. That said, savvy clients will include "named key resources" in the contract to ensure continuity between the sales team and the project team.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Most consultancies will push back very hard on having named resources in contracts. It’s gives the contractors too much leverage over the company. From what I have seen it can work out quite well for the client and consultants though.
trollbridge 1y ago
I've never understood the "can't resource internally with perms" argument. Hire people to do the job, and then lay them off when the project is over. These projects often last for years and frequently go over budget.
- heyjamesknight 1y ago
  Layoffs have a significant morale impact for the rest of the company that lasts months or even years afterwards. You should not hire FTEs you intend to fire.
- DrScientist 1y ago
  How difficult expensive that is depends on the country you are in - not all countries have a fire-at-will type legal system. Also having frequent rounds of firings impacts company culture - making it much more transactional ( everyone for themselves ) - some companies value their employees and culture and the collaboration and long term thinking that can bring. One option that's increasingly common is hiring people on fix term contracts - however that does create a sort of divide.

decimalenough 1y ago

From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team. This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the deal entirely.

rhetocj23 1y ago
That’s exactly how it works.
- thelastgallon 1y ago
  I've learnt this truth recently with most professions. Consultations with attorney based on rave reviews, after signing up, get assigned a random attorney from the firm. One attorney instantly sold my case to another attorney! Just started talking to chiropractor (i know! same as astrology), same trick! I haven't seen this yet in doctors offices. I see a doctor at an office specialized in an area (say gastrointestinal), they wouldn't switch and need the consent of the doctor to switch to another doctor in the same practice.
  - dmd 1y ago
    Chiropractor is NOT the same as astrology. Astrology isn’t noted for causing permanent spinal cord damage and quadriplegia.
    - tpoacher 1y ago
      unless the stars lead you to a chiropractor
      - dmd 1y ago
        galaxy spine thinking

belter 1y ago

I have heard this before, but my experience when working as Consultant, is that Customers will do a lot of diligence before accepting a substitute. Maybe these are Contractors and not Consultants? ;-)

DrScientist 1y ago
The above is really aimed at large consultancy firms, implementing large projects. If it's a small firm or a 1 person contract then sure.

jacquesm 1y ago

That's the whole game. Meet the partner, get the juniors, pay for the partner. And if you're really unlucky you can spend your time educating the juniors.

harperlee 1y ago
Less cynically: there is only one partner; the team, if it works, manages to leverage the partner to ~5x - 10x. And no, you don’t pay partner rates. The client generally knows that to do commercial pressure you need to get info about team size, put it in the contract, and then negotiate on blended rate so it is close to what the market pays for the junior.

jeena 1y ago

Normally you just have a few team A people and they are needed for the next client.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

anonzzzies 1y ago

Especially when the teams are bigger, you have some A person who works with 100 teams who pops in when you are really fed up to calm you and who is 'definitely on top of your project' and the rest are all juniors (and now less juniors with AI). One of my clients paid 500k for a project and asked us to vet the quality; they believed they were paying 15 people for the past months; when we went on zoom to talk to the team, after many camera/connection issues, we got the 15 people. So we asked to interview them all. Only one of them knew technical details about the project, the rest did not. The one guy that does know is the tech lead my client originally hired and seems he works part time on the project, or at least reads the tasks. Looking at the vast amounts of (bad) code, our suspicion is that there are 5 or so people using codex/claude code to paste in the tasks, wait for the code, go to some 'fake QA process' and then commit and deploy. This happened before AI definitely, but probably then it would be actually 15 people hammering code, but juniors instead of the seniors you are paying for.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

anonymars 1y ago

This one aged well https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2000-01-01 https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2000-01-01

recursive 1y ago
The url looked like it has a default date or sentinel value. But it seems that was actually published the morning of Y2K.

incomingpain 1y ago

When I worked for an MSP this happened so much. I was booked 4-6 weeks out. But an emergency got me deployed asap. I'd get them up and running and then put together a plan to fix them up, but then some junior got assigned that job. The client then gets mad at me for not helping them anymore.

port11 1y ago

I've worked for a Big 3 and can't say this happens that much. What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”. They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.