[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.