Thread by @patio11

So true that I'd like to underline it for emphasis:

Nothing I ever did in my consulting career was rocket science. I wouldn't be the smartest or most diligent person working at any of my clients if I had had an employee badge there.

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1366587128176472064

I was selling, very directly, "If you could staff a talented engineer on this problem, you would not have this problem. But you do have this problem. For $30k a week, you very predictably won't have this problem anymore. It costs you a truly stupid amount of money."

"But I have many talented engineers working for me."

"Cool show me the project plan which is going to rework your purchasing funnel." "VPE laughed in my face." "Do you hear me laughing? No. I am willing to do this boring scutwork. For $30k a week. For two weeks."

(A thing nobody ever tells you about consulting is that your incentive structure is to find the gaps between other peoples' incentive structures and drive a truck through them, to the happiness of everybody.)

Dev: "Eff me if I'm doing web work; I'm a staff engineer at a company where that means something. If I owned the marketing site it's career death."
CEO: "My personal net worth is... $80M less because of how we allocate engineers."
Consultant: "How bout you two get what you want"

You might think "Well couldn't the company just *change* how it allocates engineers to projects?", if you've never seen e.g. that handled poorly cost a company plural engineering teams worth of turnover in a 6 week period.