In many large companies, there are non-aggression pacts. “I don’t air your dirty laundry so you don’t air mine.”
The best consultants comment on the Emperor’s wardrobe, or lack thereof. And they do it in a way that makes everyone pleased that the logjam is released. And they can only get away with it by being temporary.
And for all the complaining of consultant bill rates, independent consultants have a lot of overhead to cover. (Sales, taxes, insurance, downtime, legal…)
In my experience 99% of consulting is fully in the business of telling whatever emperor or micro emperor with budget authority that their clothes are just beautiful the way they are. Very few billable hours are people like GP. But maybe Im unlucky.
I consulted for about 10 years and enjoyed building stuff, but I didn’t like how the key metric was “is the client happy? will they extend?” And frequently the client is happy with what is not best.
Now I strive to work in organizations that don’t use or rely on consultants very much. I actually think a health metric for organizations is having low levels of consultants.
In my experience there's a pretty fundamental difference between business consultants and consultants who "build stuff". I've done both and had similar experience to both your experience and GPs experience, but I'd put it down to the expected role of the consultant, rather than the customer.
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
The last paragraph should temper our enthusiasm. Allowing people to build more when there is a shortage is the best way to have markets solve problems.
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“ Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.”
2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)
3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.
4 - Domestic only.
My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.
I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.
In many large companies, there are non-aggression pacts. “I don’t air your dirty laundry so you don’t air mine.”
The best consultants comment on the Emperor’s wardrobe, or lack thereof. And they do it in a way that makes everyone pleased that the logjam is released. And they can only get away with it by being temporary.
And for all the complaining of consultant bill rates, independent consultants have a lot of overhead to cover. (Sales, taxes, insurance, downtime, legal…)
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