[DrScientist]

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch.

During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

[decimalenough]

From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team.

This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the deal entirely.

[pram]

No joke: I worked at an MSP and we onboarded a huge client, we were supposed to handle their network provisioning/problems through a dedicated service desk ticketing system.

After the B team set everything up, they didn't even get the Z team. A few months in, it turned out NO ONE was logging into their ticketing system at all, so there were hundreds of tickets their engineers had created with no acknowledgement. Just lol.

[latchkey]

Not a single engineer spoke up to say something?

[LudwigNagasena]

But why would you go a WITCH company if skill was paramount and you were ready to pay above market rate? You may come into a McDonalds and ask for the best coffee they have and be able to pay above market rate, but they wouldn't be able to help you even if they wanted because that's not their specialization.

[jeltz]

But what is their specialization? Because as far as I know they do a McDonald's quality job but charge wat more than a McDonald's rate.

The only use I have is so that cowardly executives can do what they already had planned to do but now can point to a bunch of paper that nobody will actually read in detail.

[arethuza]

Or A subcontracts to B who subcontracts with C and A tries to keep all of this secret until team C end up being involved in a war...

[dwattttt]

You have to keep a close leash on your contractors: https://www.loweringthebar.net/2019/10/fourth-level-subcontr...

EDIT: I am _very_ sad that link rendering truncated "murder plot" from that

[trollbridge]

Yep. War is one of those things where it doesn't matter how much subcontractor B is yelling at subcontractors C on the phone and telling them to lie about their names.

I used to tell the prime contractor to just be honest. They couldn't even do that. Most of my business now comes from clients of A who have been burned badly and now physically meet the person who will actually be doing the work.

[icedchai]

My friend is working with a $WITCH (from the customer side, not $WITCH side) and quality / skill is nowhere to be found.

[rhetocj23]

That’s exactly how it works.

[thelastgallon]

I've learnt this truth recently with most professions. Consultations with attorney based on rave reviews, after signing up, get assigned a random attorney from the firm. One attorney instantly sold my case to another attorney! Just started talking to chiropractor (i know! same as astrology), same trick!

I haven't seen this yet in doctors offices. I see a doctor at an office specialized in an area (say gastrointestinal), they wouldn't switch and need the consent of the doctor to switch to another doctor in the same practice.

[dmd]

Chiropractor is NOT the same as astrology. Astrology isn’t noted for causing permanent spinal cord damage and quadriplegia.

[tpoacher]

unless the stars lead you to a chiropractor

[dmd]

galaxy spine thinking

[trollbridge]

The quality of chiropractors varies so wildly that I would refuse to be treated by a new chiropractor that got bait-and-switched like that.

[LambdaComplex]

Chiropractic, as a field, was created by someone who was adamant that he got the idea from a ghost during a seance. He then claimed to cure someone's deafness via spinal manipulation.

Just go to a massage therapist or a physical therapist (depending on your actual needs).

[coldpie]

Skip all the fluff and try being treated by a doctor instead! That's what they're there for.

[jimnotgym]

In my experience, doctors will always treat a sore neck or back with pain killers or anti-inflammatories.

[BobaFloutist]

Perhaps a pt

[cjbgkagh]

While I’m not a big fan of chiropractors there it’s important context that few understand. In the US medical malpractice is deviation from the standard treatments, and the standard treatments are heavily influenced by insurance companies which creates a substantial misalignment of interests and often leads to very poor outcomes. Similar to how researchers should be paid to teach and not research because paying them to research pollutes the research with a misalignment of interests. With chiropractors their version of teaching is spinal readjustment, while they’re paid for doing that they can explore other things. Obviously not the best way to organize society but it’s an emergent behavior and a product of history. I did get my PRP treatment done by an enterprising chiropractor long before it became a standard of care, I had researched prolotherapy which was having great success in France for a long time but was unable to find a MD in the US that would do it for me. I had a serious injury that wouldn’t heal for 8 years, 3 months later it was gone.

Take for example in Germany a huge percentage of doctors are into homeopathy and other alternative treatments. I think this is a byproduct of the germ vs terrain school of thought and the revolution of microscopes, antibiotics, and the fact that the Allies won WW2 meant that germ theory won and terrain theory largely was brushed aside. Though not all German doctors are willing to give it up yet. Terrain theory is not always wrong, Japan figured out that lack of B1 was killing a large number of their sailors and fixed that with diet.

My focus is on genetics and dysautonomia, which if you do not have the statistical tools we have today will often look like subtle imbalances caused by environmental factors supporting the Terrain theory. A substantial percentage (~5%) of the population has some level of undiagnosed dysautonomia, probably due to an undiagnosed inherited genetic anxiety disorder. These are exasperated by environmental factors. There is an assumption that humans are generally healthy unless perturbed but for this subset of the population they really should be medicated and stay medicated. The problem is the lack of skill in systems engineering and statistics means doctors are usually unable to find the right medications (they tend to prefer stronger ligands and I think weaker ligands should be preferred) or the right dosing (I think patients should generally be in charge of their dosing and take medication based on how they feel once educated on how the feedback loops work).

The fact that some subsection of medical science can know the right answers but medical science as an institution does not, it has evolved in the past and it will continue to evolve, should indicate that what is currently believed is not based entirely in scientific discovery but massively influenced by schools of thoughts, artifacts of history, fashions, and luminaries. Much like humanities, individuals can inhibit exploration of alternative ideas and science can’t progress past them until they’re out of the way.

[ajfkeufh]

I see you contracted with tptacek's Latacora too.

[anonzzzies]

Especially when the teams are bigger, you have some A person who works with 100 teams who pops in when you are really fed up to calm you and who is 'definitely on top of your project' and the rest are all juniors (and now less juniors with AI). One of my clients paid 500k for a project and asked us to vet the quality; they believed they were paying 15 people for the past months; when we went on zoom to talk to the team, after many camera/connection issues, we got the 15 people. So we asked to interview them all. Only one of them knew technical details about the project, the rest did not. The one guy that does know is the tech lead my client originally hired and seems he works part time on the project, or at least reads the tasks. Looking at the vast amounts of (bad) code, our suspicion is that there are 5 or so people using codex/claude code to paste in the tasks, wait for the code, go to some 'fake QA process' and then commit and deploy. This happened before AI definitely, but probably then it would be actually 15 people hammering code, but juniors instead of the seniors you are paying for.

[anonymars]

This one aged well

https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2000-01-01

[recursive]

The url looked like it has a default date or sentinel value. But it seems that was actually published the morning of Y2K.

[jacquesm]

That's the whole game. Meet the partner, get the juniors, pay for the partner. And if you're really unlucky you can spend your time educating the juniors.

[harperlee]

Less cynically: there is only one partner; the team, if it works, manages to leverage the partner to ~5x - 10x.

And no, you don’t pay partner rates. The client generally knows that to do commercial pressure you need to get info about team size, put it in the contract, and then negotiate on blended rate so it is close to what the market pays for the junior.

[DrScientist]

To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms.

So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1]

[1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exactly the same way by the consultancy....

[rcxdude]

When I did engineering consultancy, the team was usually thrown together from whoever was available. Usually they knew each other at least a little but it wasn't exactly the same team on each project. But yeah, the team involved in the sale and the team involved in the execution often had very little overlap (though, sometimes it was the B-team selling something unachievable to the customer and then handing it over to the A-team, which has more or less the same effect as far as the client's concerned. The swapping isn't necessarily a deliberate act of subterfuge but more a consequence of how people's time was managed: clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead).

[pards]

> clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead

This is an important reality in consulting. The consultancy cannot keep their best people sitting idle while the clients spend months completing the paperwork.

And it's not just a billability issue. The A team people don't like being underutilized and will find seek employment if they're kept idle too long.

That said, savvy clients will include "named key resources" in the contract to ensure continuity between the sales team and the project team.

[tstrimple]

Most consultancies will push back very hard on having named resources in contracts. It’s gives the contractors too much leverage over the company. From what I have seen it can work out quite well for the client and consultants though.

[trollbridge]

I've never understood the "can't resource internally with perms" argument. Hire people to do the job, and then lay them off when the project is over. These projects often last for years and frequently go over budget.

[DrScientist]

How difficult expensive that is depends on the country you are in - not all countries have a fire-at-will type legal system.

Also having frequent rounds of firings impacts company culture - making it much more transactional ( everyone for themselves ) - some companies value their employees and culture and the collaboration and long term thinking that can bring.

One option that's increasingly common is hiring people on fix term contracts - however that does create a sort of divide.

[heyjamesknight]

Layoffs have a significant morale impact for the rest of the company that lasts months or even years afterwards. You should not hire FTEs you intend to fire.

[Gigachad]

I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.

[xmcqdpt2]

In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms.

To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!

[ceridwyn]

That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.

[array_key_first]

Ahh, accountability engineering! The hidden engineering discipline!

[codebje]

The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.

[atmosx]

At the government level, it’s mostly driven by ideology. I never came across a situation where a service improved after being "liberalized". Never. Not once. It is always end up in a combo of: poorer quality and (much) higher cost.

I’ve seen too many cases where people suffer the consequences of their own ideas being implemented (large or lower scale), convinced that if we just turn this knob a little more, it’ll finally work. Because of that, I don’t spend much energy on them anymore.

[collingreen]

What does liberalized mean here? Also if you have time which ideology was holding the government/deloitte back here? I'm not sure what the message is here but I'm willing to with some more concrete.

[Gigachad]

The Liberals are a party in Australia famous for selling off everything the government has and replacing everyone with contractors only for it all to eventually be bought back and people rehired later.

[tstrimple]

Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ultimate responsibility for all the technical stuff makes 70% of what I do as a consultant working for the state.

This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k.

The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.

[about3fitty]

As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway.

At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure.

Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs.

Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year.

It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system.

But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.

[hopelite]

Usually it’s not the amount of work, it’s whether that work is necessary at all and a question of quality because the interests are largely aligned when they should be in tension and some opposition. Bad things happen when the interests of all parties are in one direction, usually due to a lack of real consequences.

In government you have to remember that it’s people playing with other people’s money, thinking all along that it’s their money, i.e., a sense of entitlement. So you end up with many of the same kinds and types of deep problems that you see in things like investment frauds, trust fund babies, spoiled children, and drug addicts. It’s probably not a coincidence that those often heavily overlap, including among bureaucrats and people dependent of government money.

We are talking about a militating of resources and from that comes a whole cascading effect, e.g., the children of someone who has actually produced something well through the effective and productive allocation of resources, resource maxing, so to say; will produce far better progeny than someone whose efforts have never led to anything productive as a bureaucrat that simply brushes one billion dollar failure after another under the rug while coping with ever more vociferously proclamations of how important and good of a job he does.

A good case in point is how America is $38 trillion in realized national debt, all while the “boomer generation” is at the same time declaring how wonderful things are, regardless of the political party. Those two things cannot be reconciled and will not perdure.

[port11]

I've worked for a Big 3 and can't say this happens that much.

What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”.

They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.

[incomingpain]

When I worked for an MSP this happened so much. I was booked 4-6 weeks out. But an emergency got me deployed asap.

I'd get them up and running and then put together a plan to fix them up, but then some junior got assigned that job. The client then gets mad at me for not helping them anymore.

[belter]

I have heard this before, but my experience when working as Consultant, is that Customers will do a lot of diligence before accepting a substitute. Maybe these are Contractors and not Consultants? ;-)

[DrScientist]

The above is really aimed at large consultancy firms, implementing large projects.

If it's a small firm or a 1 person contract then sure.

[jeena]

Normally you just have a few team A people and they are needed for the next client.