logoalt Hacker News

danesparzatoday at 5:55 PM2 repliesview on HN

Software consulting has been around for a very long time. Decades.

It has always been overpriced and had huge margins.

I think what management consultants are really afraid of is being replaced. By AI.


Replies

PLenztoday at 6:51 PM

Big management consulting firms real value prop is two-fold 1) (value to it's employees) networking for the corporate leadership class when young and 2) (value to outside companies) blame insurance, you can always blame them for why something didn't work

moregristtoday at 6:53 PM

> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins.

This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it.

I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can offload a lot of things unrelated to your business to people who are experts. At its worst, you’ve offloaded the blame to a group of over-worked twenty-something’s with impressive degrees who have no idea what they’re doing, but who sound really fucking confident about it.

Can an internal team do it better? Probably. Will they be cheaper? Probably. Will they assuage management’s anxieties and deflect some/all of the blame? Nope, not at all.

show 2 replies