[cognaitiv]

Not enough people, especially on this site realize this when they generalize about consultants being lazy, stupid, parasitic, etc. - the majority of the folks in SV could never cut it at an elite boutique consultancy. That said, consulting at an elite level doesn’t scale well, the equity multiples aren’t good and the lifestyle is a grind at best and mentally and physically unhealthy at worst.

[makestuff]

Does it pay better than FAANG? I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that for less money than they would make working at the companies they consult for.

[mi100hael]

Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.

Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.

Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.

Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.

Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.

[cognaitiv]

The secondary/tertiary market aspect is spot on, but IMO base and bonus are higher while the equity is trivial or is non-existent.

[rvba]

Consulting is in a weird spot right now. It used to pay well and give good projects that allowed to get experience and nice exit opportunities (aka skip few years of usual career grind).

Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority. Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.

For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding? Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto. There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.

[cognaitiv]

This is the type of uninformed comment I mentioned earlier. The draw of specialized boutique consultancies is the ability to step into challenging situations, take charge, make a big impact and move on to the next engagement once the problem is solved.

You get lots of at bats to do “something big” as opposed to 9-5 keep the lights on work that most engineers do for years in stagnant, highly politicized cultures year after year waiting for their boss to quit to get a promotion. It’s also a good way to level up a stagnant career.

The downsides include always “living in someone else’s house”, having to adapt to the clients tech and culture, having to leave your work behind and start from scratch.

Agreed that these type of shops are in the minority and once they scale, they exit to the big guys who then kill the culture and drive away the talent.

Palantir (from the outside) seems like a good example of this dynamic scaling along with the advantages of maintaining their own stack. Could you imagine what it would be like to be an engineer employed by the customers they serve?

[tomrod]

Cloud migration working as intended then?

[bigDinosaur]

It's a generalisation, and largely true unless you actually grant Accenture and co. 'elite' status.