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The hindsight bias makes this a little unfair.

To my mind consultants have carved out a niche whereby through experience, research, and by the virtue of having already visited everybody's offices, they can tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry. Sometimes this plain means what everyone else is doing, hence the UBS Mortgage Backed Security advice.




So you are saying that if you hire them, they will learn everything about your business and then sell it to the next client?


Kind of. There are conflict rules so consultants don't share specifics about clients. We tend to share general trends and stick to long term relations. I've seen situations where the partner has been consulting for a client for longer than most CxOs tenure.

It's still less of an issue of a competitor poaching your key people. And by not hiring consultants, you do risk getting behind on a lot of practices.


I just went through this with some super green Ivy school minted Deloitte hires that clearly were making things up as they went as someone in our industry can tell BS when they see it.


So why didn’t your company fire those unexperienced expensive consultants and hire good ones?

Undeserved respect for brands is where the problem is, in my opinion.


So why didn’t your company fire those unexperienced expensive consultants and hire good ones?

Consulting deals are sold on the golf course, noone at that level cares what actually happens as long as the slides produced justify what they wanted to do anyway. Individual consultants just go through the motions to make it look semi-plausible.


This exactly, we had no say in the matter just that consultants were coming in and we had to help them get up to speed with our tech stack and get out of our way.




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