[Tarragon]

In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it.

The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers.

During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other.

Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process.

It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.

[cestith]

I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.

[Tarragon]

Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting that I never saw.

I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in small contract engineering firms. All of them were less than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers at any one time.