Category: Software Industry

Pros and cons of working at a consulting company

It seems like we get lots of questions on the subreddit r/cscareerquestions about working at a consulting company. I worked at a small company that did a mix of staff augmentation, application development, devops, and agile process consulting. Here are some thoughts on the pros and cons.

Pros

  • Work on lots of projects and technologies 
  • Willingness to train you on the job
  • Teams rotate frequently – get to know lots of people 
  • Don’t have to worry about legacy code as much
  • No Oncall rotation 

Cons

  • Don’t run code in production 
  • Travel a lot
  • Don’t own your code or service 
  • Experience is shallow and short term

I worked at a software consulting company for about four years right after college. I had the choice between the consulting company that did work in the cloud or a company that made a medical software system, I went for the cloud. The company had around 100 employees with some shifts up and down. As far as work, we did the whole gamut from staff augmentation, agile training, ‘digital transformation’, migrated people to the cloud, built platforms as a service, and more. 

During my consulting days, I worked on a ton of projects for different companies, wrote code in different languages, and traveled a bit. For the first two years I worked on a variety of java projects for a cable company. We did around 90% of our business with that company at the time. Working with cable company employees is kind of a drag, they were focused more on ‘resting and vesting’ and frequently missed deadlines. 

My next project was with a new client in Boston and we started flying in. I was tapped for staff augmentation to help the client create a devops team. They ran their own datacenter and mainly had system administrators. I worked with this team on typical infrastructure automation as we set up a Platform as a service for the companies projects on AWS. I learned a lot at this client, managed to insult one of their directors and almost got fired, and that I didn’t particularly enjoy devops. 

Next I worked on a few Machine Learning proof of concept projects for a client and became a certified kubernetes administrator. My former employer invested heavily into Kubernetes and it paid off with press and connections. My last year I spent as a team lead running development of an internal project that we hoped to resell to clients. That project is what finally motivated me to find a new job.

I worked around 40 hours a week except when I was onsite with a client when it was more like 60 hours. Getting onsite with clients is actually pretty exciting, and I didn’t have to do it too often. I traveled around once a month for one of the years at this job. 

Pros

Work on lots of projects and technologies 

I worked at a consulting firm early in my career and getting experience with lots of technologies and experiencing different company cultures really helped. I have a much better idea of the industry after working with 10 companies in 4 years than if I had worked at one company for that time. 

Willingness to train you on the job

My employer was extremely willing to train people on the job. Part of our business model was billing out cheap junior developers with just enough supervision to get things done. The company paid for me to get certifications in Cassandra and Kubernetes. 

Teams rotate frequently – get to know lots of people 

My longest project lasted 9 months. In consulting once a project ends, the team disbands and you start up on a new project with a new team. Over time you get to work with almost everyone in the company directly. You will also work with lots of different clients and need to build rapport and a good working relationship quickly.

Don’t have to worry about legacy code as much

I didn’t work with a lot of legacy code as a consultant. We were mainly brought in to help launch new projects. A six month project really doesn’t generate that much legacy code. Then once times up, you move on to another project. 

No Oncall rotation 

As a consultant I never had an oncall rotation. We didn’t have any services of our own. 

Cons 

Don’t run code in production 

One of my greatest frustrations as a consultant was that I didn’t get any experience running code in production during that job. We wrote the code then handed everything off to our clients operations teams. I think this made it harder for me to find a new job. Since I started running my own code in production I have learned a ton.

Travel a lot

I didn’t have to travel that much as a consultant. My best year I did around 10k miles. Of course as you move up the ladder, you will end up traveling more. 

Don’t own your code or service 

As a consultant you are working for another company. Their teams will own the code. Their Product department makes the calls. You will often just get the requirements and be shaking your head at how wrong they are. Decisions will be made by the client that you don’t like. But the client will get what they want 99% of the time. 

Experience is shallow and short term

The flip side of working on such short projects an so many different technologies is that you never get to master any of them. One project is in react the next project is in Angular, the next project is devops, with totally different tooling to learn for each of them. Consulting is not great for building deep knowledge as a software engineer. 

Everyone uses (failing) software all the time.

Because you use it all the time at least one piece of software is broken for you at all times.

I stopped using Facebook after my freshman year of college, but recently got pulled back in by a Facebook group. As a result I now have the pleasure of enjoying a 10+ second loading phase every time I open the homepage. 

Recently, I tried to buy a CODE mechanical keyboard on the wasdkeyboards.com website. But every time I submitted my order it failed. I tried different browsers. I had to look into the console to find out that a http request was failing to find a paypal advertising domain that my PiHole blocks on the network. To buy my keyboard I had to tether wifi from my smartphone. A non-technical user wouldn’t have been able to find out why the order failed because there was no error message. There was a spinning symbol that just disappeared after a while without a message to the user. 

Everyone uses software all the time now. We have smartphones, smart TVs, smart refrigerators and smart homes. If you use 100 programs a day, 99% uptime means one program is down for every person. If every application manages 99.9% uptime, one out of a hundred people is experiencing software brokenness everyday. 

Then realize that billions of people have smartphones now. 

99.99% * 1,000,000,000 = 100,000. 

If your software has a billion users and works 99.99% of the time, its down for 100,000 people all the time. 

Software updates are a liability for customers

Software Updates are a liability for customers. Imagine a business, say a restaurant, which uses some POS (point of sale) software to run its business. Every time the software is updated the business’s employees have to relearn some of the software. That costs money. They would rather buy software that never needs to be updated.

You might say “Well, what if there are security vulnerabilities”. Fixing those vulnerabilities still costs money. Customers will have to update their software which costs money even if there is no functional change. Its essentially saying, “Hey, Customers, we shipped you a defective product, please spend money to get the update which fixes this vulnerability”. 

Many companies have moved to SAAS (software as a service) which solves the problem of getting customers to install updates by forcing them to. Now, instead of customers constantly digging in their heels and refusing to update anything, we can ship them updates constantly. 

Customers hate software updates. They are slow, buttons move around, and people lose the fluid mastery that they painstakingly learned. Software should empower customers, every time you ship an update that breaks fluid mastery, customers are kicked off of Olympus. 

Software as a Service benefits both companies and consumers

I was surfing reddit this week and I saw a great comment from u/Swordbow. 

“Thus as the obligation stretches across time, the cash flow must stretch across time.” 

–Quote from u/Swordbow on reddit

Computer software isn’t like classical machinery in that bugs and vulnerabilities can be discovered after release that destroy the security of the application. A year after release you might have to perform an urgent patch to protect your customers from hacking. If your company goes bankrupt during that year, customers are in a very bad situation. Software needs to be maintained and unlike typical machinery it has to be maintained by the creators not the end users. 

Selling new releases of software is hard. Programs can be copied at zero marginal cost and don’t really wear out. Getting customers to buy a new version every year is a lot harder than getting customers to pay a monthly subscription. With Software as a Service instead of getting paid when you sell a new version of your software, you get paid as long as customers use your software. And you don’t have to worry about dealing with upgrades. 

Companies can reduce consumer surplus by switching to a SAAS model that requires customers to pay as long as they use the software. With SAAS all customers pay for every update. 

Rework book review

I read REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson the founders of basecamp. The book is a series of short 200-500 word ‘sections’ that elaborate on a point. No wasted space or pages full of empty words where the point has already been made. As a result the book flows incredibly well. It is a quick and light read. The ideas in the book are commonsense lessons learned from running a successful small business. A lot of the ideas are shared with agile and the ‘lean startup’ schools of thought. But REWORK is a superior book to the ‘The Lean Startup’. Comparing the two books its clear Hansson and Fried understand the space better. 

A few points from the book stuck with me so I will go over them. 

Don’t write it down

The top customer complaints will come up so often you will never be able to forget them. You shouldn’t need a long list of customer issues, if you are listening to your customers regularly you won’t be able to ignore the top issues. If you get ten customer complaints each day and five of them are the same issue, you know what to work on. 

The myth of the overnight sensation

“And on the rare occasion that instant success does come along, it usually doesn’t last —there’s no foundation there to support it.” — page 196.

I liked this phrasing of the overnight sensation. These days social media constantly spams us with success stories and lavish lifestyles we could be living. But if you are relying on luck to succeed it might not come a second time, and then you don’t have anything left. 

Don’t scar on the first cut

Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. You create a policy to make a common problem easier to solve. Without a policy you have to rely on judgement and escalating up the chain of command. That is expensive, but having a policy takes all the flexibility out of the situation. Don’t create policies unless its obvious that the issue is common and thinking about it is wasting people’s limited time. 

Four letter words

Don’t use the words “Easy”,  “Fast”, etc. Things are rarely done fast or easily. If they could be we would have done it already. Using those words implies things that we probably don’t know. 

Inspiration is perishable

If you want to do something, you have got to do it now. You can’t do it later because you won’t be inspired to do it later.