My experience with consultants normally ended up with them asking why they are there and what report should they present to upper management.

I've always used them as "independent 3rd parties" who were listened to.

This sounds a lot like how my kids will listen to a teacher/coach, but not their parents...

Which is similar to how a lot of parents won't listen to their kids but will listen to the coach, teacher, or priest.

Parents can be listening to their kids 99% of the time it will be transparent and uneventful. When there’s confrontation/divergence in opinion, by definition it didn’t work out through the usual channel, and of course a third party weighting in the balance will have visible effects.

My Mother-in-Law was called by a tech support scammer. Her bank was unwilling to accept their charges, and the scammer wanted her to call the bank to tell them to accept them anyway. My Brother-in-Law was telling her "no, this is a scam, do not do this", but she was unwilling to listen. Eventually, he told her to call me, thinking if she wouldn't listen to her son, maybe she'd listen to her son-in-law. Which she did.

"A prophet is not welcome in his hometown"

This has been going on for mellennia, unfortunately.

As a consultant with roots in backend dev, I fully understand the scrutiny that we receive because unfortunately, it is often very warranted... It feels a bit refreshing to read your comment and see someone articulate what I am trying to convey to my clients. I am a tool, and yes, this pun is intended.

Hello

I want to make the move from development into consultancy and would appreciate hearing how you did it.

I cannot DM you, but if you have the time to type a small paragraph, I'm all ears.

If you don't want to make that public, you can directly email me (<HN-username>@gmail.com)

Sure, it is actually not very complicated in my case. I did backend development for a short while during and after university and then moved into IT consulting fairly quickly.

It was a LinkedIn recruiter message which I usually ignore. However, my SO did not (she is in IT as well) and convinced me to join a hiring event. I ended up liking it a lot and went through the hiring process. Soon, I started out on the most junior level and joined my first project with 3 very senior colleagues after a few weeks.

The learning curve was very steep both on the technical level and also regarding the consulting aspect - at first there was nothing I could 'consult' on due to lack of experience. This changed with growing experience, with the guidance of senior colleagues and my private efforts to gain skills and expertise.

Let me know if this was helpful!

This almost reads like my trajectory so far, but I'm at the point where I can't really consult due to the lack of experience, but I did make a good impression so far. Can I ask you, into what efforts should I put my private time? More technical knowledge? Into very fine details, or brief insights into different areas? Any good resources?

Thanks a lot!

Here's my take on this not listening to the "expert":

A few years ago there was a problem with storm-water infiltration into my (elderly at the time) mother's property from her neighbor. I, being a dutiful son and a civil engineer, investigated it and came up with the probable cause, the likely effects of non-action and the most cost-effective solution. I presented it to my mother in the most layman-like terms that I could. She said she'd think about it – meaning she'd refer i.e. defer – to her daughters. In the meantime I had a very layman-like chat with my mother's carer and told her the situation in layman's terms. The carer listened and said that what I said I made total sense to her. Later on, one of my sisters accosted me and stated that it was completely obvious what the problem and the solution was – "even the carer could see it". Human foreheads don't have the real estate for where my eyebrows wanted to ascend.

My advice is to consider whether the message should be separated from the messenger somehow.

All symptoms of the same problem..... you can hire McKinsey to confirm your priors, massage the data to confirm your priors, or anything in between.

If Data Scientists are essentially in-house management consultants, I wonder which is cheaper?

This could be a reason why Data Scientist as a job title exploded in last years, every middle manager could afford one/two/few headcounts of data scientists to produce analysis that advances that middle manager's corporate agenda (more growth, empire building, expansion to certain de-novo areas, etc).

Recent tech layoffs is the other side of that growth, when cheap money is gone and company is forced to stick to core competencies and shutdown growth plans

A consultant with the data to back up their claims!

In the news business, if your story or opinion backs up the preconceived notions of the investigative reporter then you are a 'source' otherwise you are a 'conspiracy theorist'.