They are like moles, they start with one or two and then they multiply until they are everywhere. They don't do much but you can't get rid of them.

Having worked there in the past this can be the view from the outside.

My anecdotal evidence is that those small starter teams do deliver alot of value, of which the client likes and wants more of. However the client does not have the resources to do this themselves (Likely the reason ACN are there to start).

Then from here it's self-fulfilling, more people leads to more projects leads more resources.

And usually, the client has money for TVCs but not enough internal resources due to dysfunctional management hierarchies.

Those same hierarchies will then inevitably fail to make proper use of the contractors, just as they failed to make use of their employees, leading to seemingly "useless" TVCs "bloating" the org. Symptom rather than cause of the client's failings.

The consulting playbook for these companies is bring in a rockstar team at or below cost for an initial project. Blow the client's mind with velocity and quality, then scope out of a bunch of follow on work using the highest margin, cheapest offshore resources they can find.

I worked in boutique tech services for a long time and have overlapped with Accenture a few times. You are correct. Some of the smartest and most effective people work in consulting. The kind of people who can swoop in to a random company, size up their operations in a few weeks and spit out an actionable plan that really works. None of those kind of people work at Accenture. They employ the "1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriters" approach to problem solving. Even before their big push offshore they used to land hundreds of liberal arts grads into a tech enterprise and ask them to just figure stuff out and bill as many hours as possible.

Not enough people, especially on this site realize this when they generalize about consultants being lazy, stupid, parasitic, etc. - the majority of the folks in SV could never cut it at an elite boutique consultancy. That said, consulting at an elite level doesn’t scale well, the equity multiples aren’t good and the lifestyle is a grind at best and mentally and physically unhealthy at worst.

It's a generalisation, and largely true unless you actually grant Accenture and co. 'elite' status.

Does it pay better than FAANG? I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that for less money than they would make working at the companies they consult for.

Consulting is in a weird spot right now. It used to pay well and give good projects that allowed to get experience and nice exit opportunities (aka skip few years of usual career grind).

Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority. Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.

For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding? Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto. There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.

Cloud migration working as intended then?

This is the type of uninformed comment I mentioned earlier. The draw of specialized boutique consultancies is the ability to step into challenging situations, take charge, make a big impact and move on to the next engagement once the problem is solved.

You get lots of at bats to do “something big” as opposed to 9-5 keep the lights on work that most engineers do for years in stagnant, highly politicized cultures year after year waiting for their boss to quit to get a promotion. It’s also a good way to level up a stagnant career.

The downsides include always “living in someone else’s house”, having to adapt to the clients tech and culture, having to leave your work behind and start from scratch.

Agreed that these type of shops are in the minority and once they scale, they exit to the big guys who then kill the culture and drive away the talent.

Palantir (from the outside) seems like a good example of this dynamic scaling along with the advantages of maintaining their own stack. Could you imagine what it would be like to be an engineer employed by the customers they serve?

Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.

Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.

Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.

Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.

Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.

The secondary/tertiary market aspect is spot on, but IMO base and bonus are higher while the equity is trivial or is non-existent.

>Some of the smartest and most effective people work in consulting. The kind of people who can swoop in to a random company, size up their operations in a few weeks and spit out an actionable plan that really works.

This is a seriously underrated comment. While having sometimes dismal reputations, IT MSPs and (SWE, DevOps) staffing firms often having legitimate rockstars. Some of the best, most efficient engineers I have worked with were employed by these types of companies. This involves delivering solutions on time to the customer while retaining soft skills, often while being the enemy of the incumbent engineers.

Yep this has been my experience as well. Especially with Accenture. That said, someone quoted above, they have 700k+ employees. Im sure there is a ton of bad apples to go around. I have spent 20 years + in Financial Services and was always impressed with some of the teams involved in the M&A side of Accenture. They were very talented and dedicated to the cause.

typically, those 1000 monkeys are led by a few really excellent technical people. and don't forget the account managers who know exactly how to manipulate the client...

Fivehundredrr