| I've been on both sides of the table for both full-time and consultants. The first rule of humans is that they vary widely within categories (even if there are statistically significant differences in population average), so I urge people to take all of the anecdotes on this page with many grains of salt. That said, here are some of my own, condensed across experiences: - An executive wanted to use ML, couldn't get enough political capital to build a full-time team (and didn't have the knowledge to interview candidates anyway). A very small consulting firm, sourced from high personal trust networks, got an MVP going. That led to a FT team getting built. Code was a mess but started the flywheel and after several years everyone agrees it was a great ROI - A large company had a tiny team using a technology that would be standard for FAANG but they had no support or training. Zero progress for about a year. Not important enough to throw huge money at but that link in the chain was becoming a bottleneck for the core product. A consultant came in explicitly as a multi-week trainer, and but the team just never got up to speed. Consultant's code examples grew until they were just direct bugfixes, and though nobody was happy, at least the crisis was resolved. - A product finally reaches product market fit. Executives decide to hire only after the team is drowning in tech debt. But it has to be full time, and it has to be junior. It takes months, then requires training. Tech debt is twice as bad as the original crisis level when the new hire becomes value positive. For some bizarre reason he leaves after exactly 2 years. Many consultants have a branding problem: Their biggest victories are fixing a disaster that their clients would rather not talk about publicly. Hard to put on a billboard, if you ever want work from that client again! |