Consultant Bullshit

Names locations and languages have been altered for the sake of preserving anonymity.

Introduction

Consulting is fiat bullshit.

In another post I discuss why finance and consulting are intricately linked and necessarily form a black hole of value destruction. People may wonder how something like this manifests itself, so this is an account of what it is like when a professional services business meets a financial institution and how bullshit is invented solely for the purpose of billing and creating pointless work.

I went into consulting because I needed a job. I figured it would be easy enough to land the job since I had a great CV, and I knew that big data and other buzzword bullshit bingo was all the hype at the time, and I could point to all my studies in college to show that I actually knew what I was talking about.

I wasn’t staffed into a project for the first couple of weeks of my time at the firm. I didn’t mind that at all since I still had some classes to take so I spent my time on my own stuff. Eventually though, I got staffed, and while I wasn’t all that keen on working there, I was still excited since I could finally get a chance to put all my data knowledge to good use.

The client was a small national bank in Sweden. Our devs were located in India, but the dev manager was stationed with us- that is, myself and my manager.

Meet the team:

• Me: Bullshit
• My manager: Sarah
• Dev manager: Vikram
• Senior dev (also a really cool dude who I’m friends with to this day): Raj
• Other devs who were on board for a week at most until they found something better to do
• Sebastian: Client side expert
• Carrie: Client side manager

The Project

The client had decided to outsource their entire IT department and related operations to a handful of consultant firms. This was, and still is, the most bizarre business decision I have ever come across. Not only were they now vendor-locked, they were vendor-locked to multiple different consultancies, each of which will jack up the price every chance they get.

From a more social interaction point of view, the setup also led to each separate firm spending most of their time covering their own asses at the expense of their competitors. That meant that if you did a bad job, you were incentivized to not fix the problem, but instead to dig through emails and chats to try to find some way to shift the blame on another firm. This created an incredibly antagonistic and hostile work environment, because whenever you had to interface with another system that was not part of your domain, it was never in anyone’s interests to share information; sooner or later a consultant from another firm would need to point the finger at you, and the less you knew about how those systems worked, the less ammunition you had to defend yourself.

Our project was not really a project, there were no defined beginning and end states. Instead, we were called “Small Support”. As the client had no IT operations of its own at all anymore, even the smallest regular maintenance and scheduled tasks and runs and updates required going through an external party - that would be our team. So our project was literally updating database tables, adding and removing fields in databases and other miniscule things that do not require expertise or a dedicated team to perform. The most complex request we received was to create a pipeline between two separate systems, but this task was abandoned due to ridiculous costs and communication issues with a competing firm which was in charge of the other system.

My title in Small Support was “Business Analyst”, which was strange to me because I would have assumed I would go do something related to data science or analytics, but I was staffed into this instead. Still, I needed the money, so I figured I’d work on this for a while until I moved on.

On top of the bizarre outsourcing decision, the client had also decided to demand service in Swedish, refusing to communicate with any consulting firm in English, even though each firm had its dev operations in India and communicated internally in English. Still, they paid extra for service in Swedish, so, naturally, we obliged.

Sarah came along with me into the project as my manager, since I was only an analyst and could not report to the dev manager, Vikram, whose job it was to coordinate the dev team in India. Before Sarah and I came along, the client had been sending their requirements, in Swedish, to Vikram, who had been sending them off to be translated offshore, and once the translation was complete, he would send the document off to the team in India, who tried their best to interpret the translation. While the service agreement was to receive translations within 24 hours, deciphering the results could take weeks.

It turns out that Sarah and I had one job: To soothe the client. They were frustrated with how long everything was taking. Only a few months earlier, when they had their own IT department, these tasks were completed in a matter of minutes. Now that these tasks sat with us, they tended to take weeks, if they ever happened at all.

I suggested to Vikram and Sarah that I could solve the entire issue if I just ran the whole show. I’d speak with the client in whatever language they wanted, update and maintain their systems and sort out the backlog by the weekend. They could all pack up and move on to other projects.

That’s not how things work in fiat land.

The aim is not to provide good service, it is to generate as many billable hours as possible for as many people as possible. If they could bill the client for two managers, an analyst and a dev team, there’s no way they would give that up.

The job could have been that much easier for everyone, but my suggestion was dismissed and I was told that my job is to interface with the client and “clarify” their requirements for the dev team who were having trouble understanding the requirements.

The Process and the Value Add

I was not sure what was meant by “clarifying requirements”, but I figured I’d start by introducing myself to the devs and figure out what they’re struggling with. I called the dev team, and my man Raj picked up. We chatted for a while, and he welcomed me to the project and told me to give him a call once the next task comes in.

Not long after, I received an email from the client. Attached, was a requirements document in Swedish, which I promptly opened. I read through it, and figured it’s a simple enough task, so I asked Sarah that if my job isn’t to code anything, am I expected to translate the requirements from Swedish to English. Sarah said “No”, and she told me that that wasn’t my job either. Instead, my job was to read through the requirements and ensure that they were clear, then I should send it over to the translation office that Vikram had been using thus far.

I would soon realize why the devs couldn’t make heads or tails from these requirements.

As I mentioned, we were more than happy to provide service in Swedish, it just meant that we could charge the client more for the work. Someone in upper management had figured out that if we can push the cost of translating every document as low as possible, that just meant bigger margins for us. Thus, someone had shopped around for the cheapest translation office in Europe, and they found one - in Latvia.

Now, these guys were competent translators, but this place wasn’t actually a translation office, it was a travel agency. Before we contracted them for work, they were translating travel brochures and tourist guides for the old town in Riga, a stunningly beautiful place, but informing tourists about which restaurants and museums to visit is a far cry from technical specs of obscure databases for financial institutions.

Because full auditability was a necessity, we had agreed with our translators that they should deliver their translations in a certain format. Each individual word would be translated verbatim. To give an example of what we were dealing with, the translation for the following text:

“We want column X in table Y to get updated to a Unix timestamp without the front end being affected”

Would look like this:

Vi We vill want kolumn column X X i in tabell table Y Y ska (to be) uppdateras updated till to a Unix-tidsstampel ??? utan without att that granssnittet in front of paverkas affected.

The question mark meant that the translators did not know what a unix timestamp was, so they marked it as a typo in the original document.

Add to this mess Microsoft Word’s annoying default setting where typos are underlined in red, and since the document is written alternating between two languages word by word, the entire text has a decorative red underlining because MS Word has no idea what language it should be spell-checking.

So my job was not to translate the document, but instead to ensure that the translation was correct and legible. I asked Sarah what I should do if the translation was wrong, and she told me I should highlight the errors and send the document back to the translators. I had no idea how anyone could expect me to read these awful documents, so I just glanced over them and sent them on to our devs in India and prepared for the inevitable phone call I was about to get when they ask me what they’re supposed to do.

Raj the dev called me. I told him how sorry I am about him and the guys having to deal with all of this, but he told me it’s alright and that he’s already used to it. He said he was told to just call me if they need clarification on anything and that it would be my job to call the client in case we couldn’t understand some requirement.

We went over what the client seemed to want, and Raj told me he’ll get back to me. The next day, the managers and devs and I all have a team call and we go over the latest tasks. Vikram asked Raj if they were done with the work estimate for the task from the previous day and Raj said they were still working on it. I asked what a work estimate is, and Sarah told me that before the devs get to work, they have to give an estimate of how many billable hours the job is going to take. The client can then accept or reject the estimate and either demand that we re-estimate the work or just forget about the task entirely if they think it’s too expensive.

Here is the fun part: Providing the estimate was in and of itself a billable activity - regardless of whether or not the client accepts the estimate proposal.

You do not have to be an economist to identify perverse incentives when confronted with this setup.

Interfacing with the Client

Sometime after the meeting, Raj sent me the work estimate for this task of updating a table. He said it will take 200 hours and provided a breakdown of all the activities related to it. Half of the time has already been spent on providing the estimate, and the remaining 100 hours had to do with actually changing the timestamp, running tests in the test server, pushing it into production, as well as a comfortable buffer of 20 hours, or 10%, for unforeseen issues. I asked him if this is really that complicated, to which he replied that he, too, could do it in a few minutes, but that he had been given a process and he had to follow it to the letter. He also told me that he did not expect the client to accept this estimate, but it’s better to negotiate something realistic when the starting point is absurd.

So I sent the estimate document to be translated by the travel agents and received the unreadable abomination the next day, which I then forwarded to the client. I can’t fathom how insulting it must be to receive a document like that. Imagine spending hours trying to piece together an incomprehensibly written document, only to find out that you’re being told that this request you sent over will take 200 hours to complete, and that half of that budget has already been blown on producing the document you just read.

The phone rang and I picked up. I heard the voice of a middle-aged man who introduces himself as Sebastian. He’s one of the few IT resources left with the client and his job is to essentially interface with all these different consultant firms. He’s friendly enough, and he asked me if we have really understood the requirements for this task because, in his experience, this thing should not take more than 20 minutes. I asked him if he read the estimate document, and he said he had and that we ought to talk about it. I told him that all of this needs to be documented, so he should send me an email with his concerns and I’ll be sure to pass them along to our devs. Irritated, he ended the call.

I received an email from Sebastian, expressing frustration and bewilderement, so I did my job and forwarded it off to be translated into English, and after waiting for another day, I forwarded an unreadable mess of a translated email to Raj. This time, I was proactive, so I called Raj myself as soon as I had hit “send”, because I knew he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I told him Sebastian is unhappy with the estimate, so we scheduled a call with Vikram, who demanded a better estimate, and Raj and the guys cut it down to 150 hours, a 25% reduction compared to the original estimate, but still about 60,000% more time than it should actually take to do it.

Raj rewrote the estimate document and sent it to me. I sent it to be translated and the next day I forward another insulting document for Sebastian to decipher. A few hours later, Sebastian asked me if we’re being serious, so I spoke to Sarah and Vikram, who told me that it would be the final estimate, and that it was now up to Sebastian and his manager, Carrie, to decide what to do with it.

You might be wondering what Sarah was doing this whole time as my manager. Well, she wasn’t idle. Every morning she would start her day on a call with Carrie and Sebastian, trying to deal with and explain away all the escalations that Carrie and Sebastian were conducting on account of us not delivering them anything besides work estimates that were so costly that Carrie couldn’t sign off on them.

Carrie was pissed off, Sebastian was pissed off, Sarah was pissed off, Vikram was pissed off and the devs were desolate.

As for me, I could hardly contain my laughter at how absurd it was that every minute of this circus was being billed from the client at the end of each week.

Celebrating Success

I must have been in this project for about six weeks until we celebrated our first successful delivery. The ask was to drop a table in the database. Not quite as prestigious as adding a new column to an existing table, but something tangible we could point to in our performance reviews. We had provided a comfortable work estimate of 60 hours, 40 of which went into providing the estimate. By this time however, Carrie was so worn down that she just accepted it. What’s another 20 hours anymore at that point?

Most workplaces celebrate success. A big sale, a big project at the finish line, or maybe you have a real job and save a life or receive a big tip for outstanding customer service. Validation feels really good, but it needs to come from the outside. It is a bizarre feeling to host a 30 minutes meeting where two managers, an analyst and a team of devs in a different timezone congratulate each other for dropping a table in a database. Yet, we were very proud of ourselves. For once, I didn’t feel quite so bad about billing all our bullshit from the client, but then I realized that our celebration meeting was also billable, and I felt worse again.

The Beginning of the End

If you haven’t guessed already, I started looking for a new job about a week into that project. For all its later humor value, it is soul-crushing to try to make sense of a situation that was that chaotic and over which you have no control. It’s also really bad for your CV, because if you can’t demonstrate using your skills in some way, they’ll wither away.

Still, it took me a while to land another job, but in the meantime I was staffed into another project at 50% allocation. That was actually a pretty lucky break, because I could juggle the two projects around and always tell one project that I was busy with the other and I could just play videogames all day.

Eventually, I took up another offer from another company. Toward the end I stopped giving even the few shits I had left to give, and just to see if I could get away with it, I went awol for a few days and no one seemed to either notice or care, so I kept going awol. One night I had gone out with some friends and I woke up in the morning with an awful hangover and I decided to open up my laptop and see how all my projects were going.

As soon as I was online, I was pulled into an escalation meeting with Sarah, some of our executives and Carrie and Sebastian and their executives. I was laying in bed with my headset on mute, listening as grown-ups yelled and bickered at each other. Normally when I’m hungover, I watch a movie or something, but I had so much fun listening to all that bullshit that I stayed on.

I even got to participate in the meeting when they asked for my opinion on what went wrong with the project.

I was a competent consultant, so I blamed the client for giving us unclear requirements.