[Mountain_Skies]

Though mostly about ladder climbing and relationship drama, the show 'House of Lies' has some really good scenes where the management consultants do actual work, which is pretty much portrayed as doing the things you've listed. Even as a fictional show, it made it easier for me to understand these situations and not get so flustered when encountering them.

[ethbr0]

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate.

Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

[eaton]

Heh. That stuff has always felt like an inexplicably weird trope, like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

After 8 hours in a windowless conference room with a parade of stakeholders, making RACI matrices on a stained whiteboard and scarfing down cafeteria sandwiches during "bio-break," I want to _talk to my wife on the phone then stare blankly at the ceiling_, not go out for a night on the town.

[ethbr0]

laughs Agreed. The most interest thing I tended to do was "What looks like a good restaurant in this area?"

... did get really good at reading between the lines of Yelp / maps reviews. (Objectively, friends have since commented on it)

[wainstead]

> like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

Upvote just for this line of poetry. Mondo 2000, haven’t heard that name in decades.

[stevegalla]

How do tech consultants approach their work?

I am definitely biased by my past experiences with tech consultants. I’m trying to sort out if it’s a service provider issue or if it’s a customer side issue.

From my limited perspective, it seems management consultants are focused on 80/20 solution approaches. While it seems technical consultants are focused on delivering MVPs that don’t seem to map well to the business space.

[ethbr0]

The disincentive that tech consulting has is that jobs (at least in my area) were usually bid at fixed price.

I have no idea if that's the way larger firms do it (would expect not).

Consequently, profit = contract price - consultant hours. Every bad happened from minimizing the latter.

Even if you do straight up billable hours with the client, your time was typically scheduled 1-2 projects in advance. This lead to being prematurely (in terms of things being "done") rolled off a project, onto a new one, and finishing / supporting the first from your hotel after-hours.

This was in a pretty cowboy area. I imagine different parts of technical consulting behave differently.

But yes, MVP quality code seems to be a constant. I saw that delivered from a top-tier technical consulting firm (ML solution) to a T100 customer.