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by rvba
1185 days ago
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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. |
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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?