You're going to get across the board replies here. To each constituent, they do different things. There are consultants across the board in speciality, quality, etc.
On HN, they get a bad rap from the "i'm smart, I know everything, worker bee crowd" who think business is just slinging JS code and product updates. Consultants are often brought into those people orgs to deal with / or around, valuable know-it-alls, fiefdoms, poor vision / strategy, or politics that are holding the company back. They're often cited as "just doing reports", when in fact consultants sometimes stay out of implementation to make sure the owning team owns & implements the solution.
Consultants often provide the hiring manager a shield on dicey projects or risky outcomes. Where if it goes wrong, the manager can say "it was those consultants".
Teams are brought in as trained, skilled, up to date staff the company cannot hire fire, or shouldn't due to duration of need, or skillset
Sometimes they're brought in because the politics of the internal company lead to stalemates, poor strategy, etc.
Often at the higher levels, they're brought in due to focusing on a speciality, market, or vertical to have large experience that isn't possible to get in house.
One's experience with consultants frames their opinion. I've only worked with very high quality teams in the past that provide a healthy balance of vision, strategy, implementation, etc
I'm a consultant - for about a year now. Not at BCG or anywhere, I'm a one man company.
What I do is pretty similar to what I did before in my CTO roles, just a bit more strategy and less execution. Clients come to me with questions and problems and I help them solve them based on my experience. If you've got multiple C levels, middle management and a board, you're in a similarly consulting position also as a full time CTO from what I've seen.
I don't go anywhere _near_ LLMs for this, I'd find it somewhere between disrespectful and unethical. They're paying for _my_ expertise. I can imagine it could make a decent alternative to Google and Wikipedia for research purposes, but I'd have to double check it all anyway. I don't see how it'd make my work any easier.
> I don't go anywhere _near_ search engines for this, I'd find it somewhere between disrespectful and unethical. They're paying for _my_ expertise.
I bet someone said this 30 years ago. As it stands today, LLMs can't wholesale do the job for you, they merely augment it. And they are finicky and fallible, so expertise is needed to actually produce useful results and validate them. There are many reasons why an LLM isn't the right tool for a certain task, wanting to drive on some sort of moral ethical high road however is imo _not_ a great reason.
Continue on that road and people who have no qualms about using whatever tool at their disposal will eat your lunch. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.
The value of advice is largely estimated based on who gives it. If a client is hiring me, it seems clear to me that they're paying for mine.
For support tasks (like research or even supporting a writeup) I'm not ethically opposed to using LLMs. It's just that I try every couple of months and conclude it's not a net improvement. Your mileage may vary of course.
augmenting your advice with chatgpt shouldnt be difficult. You could simply bounce your ideas off chatgpt before meeting a client, that way your work has already been crosschecked, its not like it would be providing advice (your product) for you.
They wake up every morning hell bent on maintaining existing customer accounts, growing existing accounts, and sometimes adding a new account. They maintain a professional demeanor, with just the right kind of smalltalk. Finally, they produce a report that justifies whatever was the decision that the CEO already made before he engaged the consultants
Yeah I’ve struggled to understand what people mean by consultant and once heard that it was basically a person or group you can hire to take the blame for an unpopular decision and/or to weaponize it against others in the company since it was “someone else” that made the call.
I've mostly dealt with RAND consultants in the military / government. They were brought in to help answer specific questions about what we should do and how, presumably by writing up and delivering a report. These weren't questions that the staff couldn't handle itself, but nobody on staff had the time to focus on answering these questions (by digging deep and doing research, not just expressing a gut opinion) given their other duties and responsibilities. So the RAND people basically augmented the staff.
I guess they have the advantage of experience doing these things over and over again for similar organizations. It's also an outside perspective, which has both advantages and disadvantages. In the conversations that I was invited into, we spent most of our time just explaining things that any mid-level member of the organization would know, trying to get the RAND people up-to-speed, so that seemed wasteful. But the military is a huge bureaucracy dominated by people who've climbed up the ranks for 30-40 years, so there isn't a lot of fresh outside thinking, and it seems like it could be valuable to inject some.
In simplest terms, they solve problems for companies. If your company wants to achieve something and doesn't want to spend the time/effort/money to set up a new department and staff it with full-time experts, you can call a consulting firm and they will figure it out for you.
Don't worry, it's quite common for people who are busy and important like you not to know this. In our experience that's because the people that work for them are simply not using modern working practices.
It is a problem though, because frankly, although you might think that moving to a more modern way of working is a simple fix, we have found that your employees are actually your enemies and are plotting to kill you and your family. You might think that you depend on them to get work done, but we can fix that for you and get our much more skilled and low paid workers to do the job instead.
You will find out that if you allow us to take the required steps to prevent your family from rape and murder your shareholders will get a bump as well! And of course you will as well, you can expect your bonus to at least triple, and you are worth it for sure.
We have already set up the culling stations filled with whirling blades to deal with the scum downstairs, if you say nothing at all we will act and slaughter them instantly. There is no guilt, only reward.
