Not enough people, especially on this site realize this when they generalize about consultants being lazy, stupid, parasitic, etc. - the majority of the folks in SV could never cut it at an elite boutique consultancy. That said, consulting at an elite level doesn’t scale well, the equity multiples aren’t good and the lifestyle is a grind at best and mentally and physically unhealthy at worst.
Does it pay better than FAANG? I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that for less money than they would make working at the companies they consult for.
Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.
Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.
Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.
Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.
Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.
Consulting is in a weird spot right now. It used to pay well and give good projects that allowed to get experience and nice exit opportunities (aka skip few years of usual career grind).
Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority.
Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.
For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding?
Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto.
There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.
This is the type of uninformed comment I mentioned earlier. The draw of specialized boutique consultancies is the ability to step into challenging situations, take charge, make a big impact and move on to the next engagement once the problem is solved.
You get lots of at bats to do “something big” as opposed to 9-5 keep the lights on work that most engineers do for years in stagnant, highly politicized cultures year after year waiting for their boss to quit to get a promotion. It’s also a good way to level up a stagnant career.
The downsides include always “living in someone else’s house”, having to adapt to the clients tech and culture, having to leave your work behind and start from scratch.
Agreed that these type of shops are in the minority and once they scale, they exit to the big guys who then kill the culture and drive away the talent.
Palantir (from the outside) seems like a good example of this dynamic scaling along with the advantages of maintaining their own stack. Could you imagine what it would be like to be an engineer employed by the customers they serve?
Deforestation in Iceland predates industrialization.
“Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this tree cover was reduced to just 0.5 percent. To this day, the government of Iceland is working towards reviving the lost forests and restoring the land, in order to work towards a more sustainable future. This problem relates to the course of Sustainability for the Common Good because it covers the environmental issue of deforestation as well as the solutions that are being put into play to make the land more sustainable”
Randomness is just one of many possible algorithms generative music can use.
For example: Music for Airports is built from very long tape loops with different durations. It's completely deterministic, but the results sound like a random-ish stream of constantly changing note patterns.
It only works because no human has a long enough memory to hear the loops as loops. If our short term memories could hold a long loop as a percept we'd have a very different and less interesting listening experience.
My 10yo daughter plays a chess app mostly with suggestions turned on. It has substantially improved her game when we play together. Way more effective for her than my coaching, although I’m a total amateur. I think this would work without a doubt.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre (1923). Inspired by the life of stock trader Jesse Livermore in the late 1800s to early 1900s. The narrator starts trading in bucket shops (antique equivalent of Robinhood), makes and loses several fortunes through various (often less than honorable) financial escapades. Was inspired to read this by the GameStop situation and was not disappointed.
That seems difficult to test. For convenience here is the text:
Revelation 13:16-18
New International Version
16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
18 This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.
I'm not religious but I think this is brilliant. Some 2000 years ago they'd already realized how dangerous it is if a tyrannical government has a way of IDing everyone and using that ID to arbitrarily grant or deny people rights and services on a whim. It's like anti-totalitarianism built right into the religion.
I don't think it was an "if", there is speculation that the mark is reference to Nero [0]. If true this means it wasn't a guess about the future but a commentary on current day events.
The Mendoza Line is an expression in baseball deriving from the name of shortstop Mario Mendoza, whose poor batting average is taken to define the threshold of incompetent hitting. The cutoff point is most often said to be .200[1] (Mendoza's career average was slightly better than that, at .215)[2] and, when a position player's batting average falls below that level, the player is said to be "below the Mendoza Line".
I was not familiar with the term, but useful concept. Reminds me of something I read recently about the “Goat”, the West Point cadet finishing at the bottom of his class.
Without any context, Apple’s Dictionary lookup serves up the definition of “cromulent” from both OED and New OED entries. It was apparently added in 2017 according to a Reddit thread, and in 2018 according to this list: https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-june-2018/
