Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to

Re:Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more tha... by smt88 on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:59AM (#34788651)

It is laughable hubris to think there's a class of people who can come into an industry, learn it in a few months better than the people who have done it for decades, and fix/improve things.

Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.

There's a reason nothing ever permanently changes after mgmt consultants prescribe it.

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Re:Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more tha... by zo1 on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @08:20AM (#34788851)

They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain. Think simple things that we usually rant about in software dev:

No VCS. Badly modeled domain. Code complexity. Denormalized tables galore. Cludged together OTS and custom components. Esoteric language choices. Code rot. Bad branching choices. Monolithic and brittle codebase. No CICD. No testing. No specs. Rotten confluence pages that weren't kept up to date.

And then, the worst: Domain priests that use complicated domain knowledge and rules and self-inflicted complexity to keep the software hostage by telling us we can't fix the above problems. Essentially job security.

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Re:Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more tha... by tomrod on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @08:37AM (#34789029)

Aye, but it is unlikely that a consultant will actually be able to articulate these issues better than someone who has _successfully_ worked in the industry and solved these problems (in contrast to your reverbalization of deadwood as domain priests). Unless, of course, the consultant has worked _successfully_ in the industry for a good length of time. But the class of consultants discussed have not. All squares go this way, all pegs go that way, never shall the twain meet.

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Re:Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more tha... by ren_engineer on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @09:43AM (#34789984)

>They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain

why don't the consultants just cut out the middleman and take over these billion dollar industries if it's so easy? Why bother consulting for tech companies if they can just put them out of business with a direct competitor? Domain expertise apparently doesn't matter, should be easy for these expert managers

The number of companies that have gone bankrupt or been disrupted due to short term optimizations recommended by these management consultant companies is massive

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Re:Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more tha... by teddyh on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @10:35AM (#34790784)

> Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.

No, programmers/engineers/etc. are equally susceptible: https://xkcd.com/1831/

• https://xkcd.com/793/

• https://xkcd.com/1570/

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