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by ethbr0 1963 days ago
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.
2 comments
eaton 1963 days ago
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.

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ethbr0 1963 days ago
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)

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wainstead 1962 days ago
> 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.

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stevegalla 1963 days ago
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.

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ethbr0 1963 days ago
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.

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