Re:NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup
by awsthro00945 on Friday July 09, 2021 @08:16PM
(#27789899)
The problem is that during the sales process, the client is led to believe that the "mutually-satisfactory state" that they are paying for is a certain bar of quality and will be built by "the A team".
But then, after many months and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars are already spent, their bar for "mutually-satisfactory state" has been lowered to "I guess we will accept this pile of mediocre shit that the D-team built, because we already wasted months on this and we are desperate for something, and it would be too expensive and just waste more time to try and argue with the consulting firm to fix it".
I spent a long career as a consultant at one of the top "prestigious" firms. Consulting firms almost always prey on this hope that the clients won't complain too much, even though everyone knows the end product that is delivered isn't anywhere close to what was pitched during the sales phase.
The clients though, they want to pay the consulting firm relatively the same price they would pay for a standalone developer employee, per hour. The entire industry is broken and a lot of it has to do with broken recruiting, the recruiting industry, the "consulting firms" (body-shops) that are just resellers, and onerous employment regulations that make firms prefer outsourcing to shady outfits instead of hiring in-house developers.