[misthop]

Number 1: You are outside the company hierarchy

This talks about not getting stuck in the politics of the company and having the authority/right to instigate change. It can be equally validly read as:

Number 1: If your company is hiring consultants that are outside the hierarchy you have a potentially toxic political business culture and should look for a new job

[dx034]

Number 1 annoyed me most when I was in consulting and was one of the main reasons I quit. You can always give recommendations but have no leverage whatsoever if all advise is ignored and the work you did for months just lands in some archive. And even if that's clear from the start (and the work is just to tick some boxes), you might not be able to afford to lose that client by refusing the work. Working for months knowing that the output will be looked at once and discarded was too frustrating to me, no matter the perks and other advantages the job had.

All of that can happen as an employee, but usually you have some leverage via management or your internal network to either get results into action or stop projects if it's clear they don't make sense (one of the reasons they're then given to consultants instead if management insists they're done).

[cableshaft]

Basically the same thing has happened to me at two different corporations as an employee, I worked on big projects for months that never saw the light of day, although I didn't know that would be the case ahead of time.

In one case the lead developer quit and the manager suddenly decided to scrap the project and hire a consultant firm to do the rest. In another I worked for six months on a project that would be 'the future of the department' they were going to sell to major companies, got it to a UAT state, showed it to the client, and the client dragged their feet on signing contracts for it for months, then they decided they were going to replicate it in-house, an oh, could you share all your business logic with us so we don't have to recreate it from scratch (thankfully our company told them to get fucked on that request).

It did seem nuts we were doing work without a signed contract, but apparently that's just how the healthcare industry works, if you waited until the contracts were signed you'd miss the open enrollment window for some of these, the most important time of the year for these things to be working, so the corporation I worked for (a large corporation) decided they needed to get a several month head start without a signed contract, and were overconfident it would eventually be signed.

That same corporation also had a project for some grand overhaul of their systems (and intended to unify several departments that all had their own systems, since they were originally bought and merged companies). We were one of the departments that were supposed to merge with that new software, and I know it still wasn't ready six years later (might have been scrapped, but I'm not sure).

[kthejoker2]

Aa an ex consultant I (re?)discovered a paradox

If a company is competent they don't need consultants

If a company is incompetent they can't use consultants

Yet consultants exist ...

[SenHeng]

> Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

If we instead use a scale from 0 to 100, and we understand that all companies are somewhere in between, then the paradox ceases to exist.

[Foobar8568]

Or you will be fast out project if you ever side with the wrong "persons"(oh and don't forget the regular 6months reorg ).

Overall it's a positive thing indeed, but as consultant/contractor, you will never be immune to politics and company hierarchy.