[akamia]

That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people.

Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.

[GuB-42]

But how much does Boeing pays for the service?

Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best.

The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now.

But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc...

In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.

[ghshephard]

I've worked for an organization that had a mixed hardware/software/services components. These were $50mm - $100mm+ contracts running for 5+ years, and the Service Component was just charged out at person years - flat fee, so - a project manager might go for $600k/year, an application engineer for $500k/year, a field-engineer for $300k/year and so on. Each project would then have so many person years at each stage of the project - project manager would be pretty flat at 1 project/manager/year, but in the initial years, it would be 3 application-engineers, 2 field engineers, etc...

Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best.

I have trouble feeling sorry for the consulting company in that situation. If the budget your client offers is insufficient for the job, demand more or turn it down. Don't lie that you can do it and then bait-and-switch.

[akamia]

It’s been several years since I worked there but if I remember correctly it was a little more complicated because these were basically subcontracts under one larger contract. The company had a huge contract agreeing to purchase some volume of services from the consulting company. For each project a smaller contract would be created to define the terms of the project and the resources would be drawn from the parent contract’s pool of purchased resources.

This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.

[bluetwo]

Is that how we ended up with the MCAS debacle?