That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.

When things go wrong you can blame the consultants so you don’t get fired.

Same reason all workplace PCs are Windows.

Taking responsibility so you can blame someone for your decisions and to find 'logical' Arguments for your decisions after you already made them but don't want to look stupid.

I think that's not quite the way consulting should, and to some extent does, work.

The ideal goal of consultancies like Deloitte's is that they hire a small number of people with experience and combine them with a larger number of young bright people and have them come in to review and advise organizations. The people with experience (so who have worked in that field before) direct the engagement and the leg work is done by the juniors, producing a report for the customer.

As to why companies would choose to use consultancies, there's a variety of reasons, some good, some less than good.

- Outside perspective & experience. The consultancy has done engagements with other companies in your field and can provide that experience.

- Neutral point of view. The consultancy should be neutral to any internal politics within the organization.

- Appeal to authority. Many times organizations use consultancies to provide evidence to external stakeholders that the thing they want to do is the right thing.

Now that's not to say that it always (or even often) works out that way, but in theory at least, there are some not terrible reasons.

Well, when you have a bad idea you want to implement but don't want to take responsibility for it, you keep on hiring consultants until you hear what you want to hear. Quality of the consulting is irrelevant and interns or AI will do just fine. When the project inevitably implodes, you blame the consultant. Your own employees will give you advice on what's best for the company, not necessary what's best for you so you stand on their neck until they quiet down and learn their place. By the time anyone figures out what happened you already moved on with outstanding resume bullet point.

When The Government Asks For An Independent Consultation | Utopia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M7SzS_5PlQ

pretty much covers it in under two minutes.

Aside from the thing where it's useful to have an outside (expensive) influence to help make your decisions sound more confident than they actually are, a genuinely useful side of consulting is as a form of knowledge laundering between companies.

Let's say you're a supermarket chain. You have lots of problems that only a small number of other companies - your competitors! - also need to solve.

If you hire a big enough consulting company, they will have a large amount of internalized knowledge relevant to those problems that they gained through previous projects working with your competitors.

Of course, they're never going to deliberately reveal other company's internal secrets, or directly assign people to work with you who worked last week with your competition... but industry expertise and "best practices" still flow through these channels.

In theory, there exist people who are exceptional at solving unique problems/challenges or managing things related to such endeavors. Some might specialize in certain classes of problems and gain experience solving variations for many companies. They might be both underutilized and underpaid in traditional companies for various reasons.

What if you built a company by recruiting such people and sold their expertise at a premium?

I also think assuming there's no real skill at any consulting company is probably a mistake. Or if anything, they're not just all "management consultants" and many of these places have tech consultancies as well. There are also tech companies that are basically specialized consultancies---compsec is probably a very visible area where it's a more common model and at least some firms get some respect for competence.

There's plenty of criticism for consulting firms and it can be very valid. You can probably even dig up stories of bad consulting experiences in the comments on HN.

But I've known people who worked at places where they didn't really have the talent to solve some unique problem, or their own people had caused the problems.

Good consultants will try to pick the brains of employees for insight that's been missed, ignored, or simply wasn't communicated well. They have have problem solving skills that overlap with a good software engineer, such as requirements gathering, communicating with managers, etc.

A couple of uses of consultants that I've seen at first hand:

- They helped our company to negotiate the minefield of government R&D tax credits, by interviewing all the developers and assessing how much was R&D compared to the guidelines (which are complicated). I think this was a good use of consultants: You get someone with specialized knowledge, and unless you're an enormous company, you couldn't afford to have someone with this knowledge on staff all the time.

- They ran a survey of our software development practices, which they also ran with many other software companies, and then compared our performance to the other companies. I think if you're a completely useless manager with no idea about software, then this could be good, as it might highlight obvious ways that you could improve your processes. For us, it was a waste of time and money.

> If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right

I love how you summarized 99.99% of influencers and lifestyle/business coaches.

It's not only "giving advice". "Consulting" includes a range of things, down to implementing software.

The customers are big companies with huge budgets, and a lot of red tape. The guarantees they want the most are legal. If things don't go well in a project, or if a project isn't implemented on time, they want to have someone to sue. Someone that will not simply go bankrupt and disappear. "Quality" is almost a nice to have, compared to the legal guarantees.

Enter the Consultancy companies. They have a huge amount of workers, a lot of them fresh out of university. The quality of the work they produce might not be great, but when problems arise, they can always throw more people at the problem (or to make them work longer unpaid hours). They are sometimes called "meatfarms", because of this. They will not go bankrupt easily.

The way these companies develop software is by third parties, often overseas, sometimes, frequently via several intermediate companies, each one adding their cut.

I must stress out that it work. Boring, soul-crushing at times. But it is not easy. Just dealing with the red tape is a job on itself. The kind of contract that needed to be written before a medium-sized project has to be very detailed. It details things like what will happen when the project derails, what will be the penalty and who will pay what. It's a small book.

Source: I was one of those "fresh out of college" people when I joined Accenture. I once was asked to estimate how much would it cost to change one (static) website's scrollbar color from default to yellow. The quote for that change alone, perhaps 10 LOC change implemented by someone in India, was 3000 euros. This was around 2010. I was glad when they offered me a severance package.

Leaders are usually insecure. They need validation. Management consultants give it, for money. In theory, they can take the blame if things go very wrong. But in practice, management consultants tell you to do what everyone else does, and that means both leaders and consultants are saved by the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect.

But there's more to it than that. Your investors don't trust you if you're not the sort to trust Deloitte. (Your investors probably also invest in Deloitte, by the way.)

The trope you’ll often hear in circles like ours is that big 4 consultants exist to provide cover for unpopular decisions. That’s sometimes true. However…

Big corporations and governments aren’t startups in which everyone is encouraged to do as they please in service of the mission. Corporations and governments hire people for very specific roles with very specific responsibilities. Stepping outside of your responsibilities is discouraged. Employees inside big organizations have to think, “how fucked am I if I make this decision and it goes wrong?”. A startup can write off big losses without a second thought, a big corporate or government has to investigate.

If you need to make a big decision, you don’t let an intern take a shot at it, even if they are convinced they have the perfect idea, because if it goes wrong, it’s on your head — which idiot let an intern fuck it up?

You bring in consultants who are (ostensibly) experts so that your responsibility ends at having done the right thing and if anything goes wrong, it’s not on your head.

Well that’s the core idea - build an environment of hungry folks who don’t quite know how the world works and suck all that you can out of them.

Indeed. This is something that isn’t said a lot.

A person who has been in an industry for 10+ years will be fine from exposure to LLM’s. Because they already built the discipline. Frankly if you’re an expert I don’t see where the value of an LLM fits.

People keep talking about productivity increases. But that just speaks to the quantity. What about the quality?

It’s tiresome to see people who just don’t get this.

That’s a kind of due diligence theater. In particular, managers want to know what their competitors’ engineers would recommend, which is the best static advice consultants say they can give.

The people working inside the company may be both judge and party to the issue, it’s not always a bad idea to call in consultants. Do you prefer independent and somewhat misinformed or stakeholder to the issue and knowledgeable?