Seems there is plenty of money to go around if you know where to look.
Pretty much the going rate range for consultants.
For the record, I’m happy to volunteer to offer up as many of my own opinions on the topic as they are willing to pay for … lol …
It’s a trap. Selling subscriptions.
At any rate stay away from the bears out there. A guy had a crash and a bear dragged him into the woods. They said the bears are hungry after a long sleep.
@cdaquila That link is soliciting subscriptions and should be removed me thinks.
Every few years, the Board of Ed would pay a “consultant” to lecture a gathering of teachers on a particular topic. These sessions never presented any new information, and were a waste of time for everyone… except the “consultant”.
My colleagues liked my definition of “consultant”, which was… Somebody who travels 100 miles, and is highly-paid, in order to tell you what you already know.
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I especially liked the motivational speaker (sarc). Get out there and sell sell sell, etc. etc. depending on the audience. Norman, nightingale, the catapiler covering a lot of ground going around the flower pot but getting nowhere, etc. get everyone worked up for a day or two to exercise, change their lives and then hit the reality wall. Of course they collected their $5000 speakers fee on the way out the door so worked for them. My boss confided in me that once a month he would have to go out and get stinking drunk to clear his mind. Figured it was time for a career change.
So what else is new? Politicians have always lavished their well-connected friends and donors with kickbacks and grift. And that’s really what this boils down to. Just like the billions California spent on “consultants” and “studies” to help solve the problem of homelessness there.
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lol … I must say however some consultants in tech do offer up some pretty good advice. That advice in my own experience was almost always ignored. MonthlLater, the management folks who ignored the consultant’s advice lose their job, b/c what the consultant said proved to be the case.
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My brother’s first job after returning from Vietnam was as a management consultant, and he was part of the team that was sent to try to straighten-out Pan American airlines. They found that the paperwork system was bizarrely outdated, their accounting was a shambles, and no attempts had been made to computerize anything. The team made a lot of suggestions, and they were apparently ignored–for too long. Pan Am continued to spriral downward, but they did manage to keep flying for several more years.
We had a satellite vendor in the late 1990s that had poor yield for the in-house built hybrid circuits. Good news! Our consulting was free. We found that the workers weren’t wearing clean room garments commensurate with the cleanliness level needed before the lids were welded on. The foreman that ran the shop refused to implement the suggested changes. The company also went to other local shops building similar circuits. The other companies also did more to mitigate contamination. The foreman went on those trips and was still unimpressed. He was eventually fired, the line workers were reassigned, and the company bought their hybrid circuits from someone else.
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I worked summers and vacations in the truck and castor plant. Gordy was the wood shop foreman. Must have been about 1965 that they hired a consultant for the whopping fee of $50 an hour to show Gordy how to organize his shop. The guys said as soon as the consultant left, Gordy put everything back the way he wanted it. A couple years ago I had a chance to talk to the plant manager at that time and we kinda laughed at the whole Gordy episode, but actually it was fairly well run. It was a family run business and they ended up firing the pm for trying to modernize the foundry.
Fairly common discussion- I’m going to retire and work here as a consultant- look how much they make!
OK, let’s consider that- First, you need to set yourself up as a business. You’ll have all the normal demands required to manage a business, including taxes and the IRS. Now, you’ll need your own health care and liability insurance. We tend to pay net 60 or even 90 on those contracts. Hope you can wait to get paid. You’ll need to track your hours and submit bills for your time. Any vacation you decide to take will be on your dime- no PTO. Bear in mind, if a customer sues for any reason, they can also name you- hence the liability insurance. But there could be legal costs you’d bear…
It usually ends the same way…nevermind. Or, we convince them to stay on as part time. That way, you can retain some of your insurance and other benefits.
Do the math- you find out what’s a reasonable hourly rate…
I am not a fan of consultants. I have worked for too many companies that suffered losses because they took the advice of a consultant.
For example, one company was advised to change their production from job based centers to product line centers, everyone in management knew that would not work, but they did it anyway and eventually went out of business.
After I left them, I suppose I should thank the consultant at the next company I worked for. A previous consultant suggested that they fire all their supervisors and go with “self-directed workforce”. I got hired when productivity had dropped to 20% of what it had been with supervisors.
I should thank the consultant at the next company too. The consultant suggested a training plan that the management did not understand and would cost them over a half mil to incorporate. I understood it and could implement it at a fraction of the cost.
My experience is that all too often, companies value advice by how much they paid for it and not by what it is worth. I would often bring ideas from people on the shop floor to management and in every case, the engineering department would try to kill it. They offered many reasons why it would not work but the truth was that they were against it because they didn’t think of it. They would then offer an alternate idea that wasn’t as effective but I would go straight to the CEO and make sure the better idea was used AND credit went to the right person.
Somebody who travels 100 miles, and is highly-paid, in order to tell you what you already know.
Someone who travels in to “validate” the decision you’ve allready made…
Ha ha. Around here it was called shared leadership. The monkeys were in charge and management ignored. If you tried to argue about something debunked 20 years before, ya got labeled as an old white guy. Kinda like today. Onward onward, utopia is right around the corner.
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