This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
As a buyer, I would rather work with an agency or a consultancy, given enough budget. The advantages are:
- I don't have to source, manage and pay individual contractors.
- If a team member isn't right then the agency will switch them out quickly.
- There is one throat to choke.
- There should be at least some institutional knowledge in the agency.
- The agency will provide oversight, be it from leadership or a billable PM resource.
I have built a few products for startups and my own projects over the last few years, and even with a budget as small as $50-$100k I would rather work with an "agency" with a thin layer of management even though I am very technical. It is much easier to manage and less risky than betting on 1-n individuals.
> This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
Judging by all of the comments from people saying this matched their experience working either inside or with agencies, I don’t think it’s inaccurate.
> What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
I think you’re talking about something else. I’m not talking about a sales process being done ethically.
If I was talking about ethical sales with aligned incentives, I wouldn’t have used the word “grift”. That was, literally, my whole point in using that word. :)
I’m specifically talking about the huge incentive that exists to unnecessarily balloon the hours as much as possible.
It’s simple, really: As a solo dev with a mostly full pipeline (assuming this for simplicity) your incentive is to finish work efficiently so you can impress the customer, build trust, and build a reputation to overcome the challenges of being solo. If you sandbag your efforts and deliver inefficiently, they have nobody to blame but you. You also burn your chance of a good referral. It’s bad all around.
As an agency, the situation changes. You now can scale up to as many people as you can convince to work with your agency, but now you need to force them into as many projects as possible. You’re no longer limited by the number of hours you have in a week because you’re selling other people’s hours. Hiring inefficient people will actually get you more profit.
When the client catches on, you can remove the inefficient people and apologize for the “bad apples”. You temporarily assign some superstars to the team to impress the client until they’re not looking again and then you slowly go back to the inefficient people when they’re not paying attention again.
Like I said in my post, not every agency does this. However, as someone who has done a lot of hiring of contractors and agencies I can say it’s almost like most of them are operating out of a hidden playbook. The headcount always gets inflated over time (including their assigned project managers who they require to work alongside our internal project managers) and the revolving door where the good devs get pulled off to other projects and then they try to substitute lesser devs.
It’s gotten bad enough that we have a framework for bullet points to negotiate away from agency contract proposals. We reserve the right to aggressively dismiss anyone they assign who isn’t doing work up to par. Agencies hate it, but it’s a necessity these days (at least until an agency has proven themselves)
What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
As a buyer, I would rather work with an agency or a consultancy, given enough budget. The advantages are:
- I don't have to source, manage and pay individual contractors. - If a team member isn't right then the agency will switch them out quickly. - There is one throat to choke. - There should be at least some institutional knowledge in the agency. - The agency will provide oversight, be it from leadership or a billable PM resource.
I have built a few products for startups and my own projects over the last few years, and even with a budget as small as $50-$100k I would rather work with an "agency" with a thin layer of management even though I am very technical. It is much easier to manage and less risky than betting on 1-n individuals.