Free consultancy?

[Stevie Wonder Boy]

12

[clearedforlanding]

At the risk of moving the thread onto a different subject - There be dragons here as well, it is common practice for some clients to pose a problem that they need solving and use you the candidate for free consultancy with no intention of offering a role.

Agree entirely. In my earlier life as a CCIE I was ask to "test" on complex MPLS/VRF problems.

I don´t do free consultancy. And neither should any contractor.

[NotAllThere]

At the risk of moving the thread onto a different subject - There be dragons here as well, it is common practice for some clients to pose a problem that they need solving and use you the candidate for free consultancy with no intention of offering a role.

A common myth I think. The cost to the client in terms of time and effort of arranging a fake interview are almost certainly not worth the effort - especially as they've no guarantee that the candidate is of sufficient calibre to solve the problem.

I have a few times when interviewing asked the candidate how they'd solve some current, pressing problems. But never set up an interview for the sole purpose of getting "free consultancy". TANSTAAFL

[clearedforlanding]

A common myth I think. The cost to the client in terms of time and effort of arranging a fake interview are almost certainly not worth the effort - especially as they've no guarantee that the candidate is of sufficient calibre to solve the problem.

I have a few times when interviewing asked the candidate how they'd solve some current, pressing problems. But never set up an interview for the sole purpose of getting "free consultancy". TANSTAAFL

It depends, in the days where a CCIE R&S actually meant something before there were tens of thousands of Indians using pass4sure and the same guy showing up to all the labs it was a pretty good indicator that the IE had some talent.

When an SME started asking me to sketch on a whiteboard how I would redistribute specific routes from their own AS into an OSPF IPSec encrypted GRE mish mash, this was way outside of a standard interview question.

This was during the crazy time 1999ish where an IE would cost £1.2K a day.

[NotAllThere]

I have no idea what you are talking about.

[SlipTheJab]

[BlasterBates]

Well it might look like free consulting but it might equally be a deal breaker for a good contract.

When does an interview become free consulting? | mathbabe

Agree with NotAllThere, more of a myth than reality.

[DimPrawn]

Not so much in the software dev world of contracting, but definately happens with complex infrastructure, data centre, big data, BI world.

Clients have very difficult technical problems and no in house guru that can tackle it, they will have a day long "interview" with "homework" to get a handle on best practices and a way forward.

[BlasterBates]

For example you're in an interview for a contract worth 1k per day, and someone asks you to sketch a solution on the white board that will take you 5-10 minutes.

How do you know that this is free consultancy or it's a genuine challenging question because the company is prepared to pay 1K per day for your services ?

Are you really better off walking out without answering the question ?

[clearedforlanding]

For example you're in an interview for a contract worth 1k per day, and someone asks you to sketch a solution on the white board that will take you 5-10 minutes.

How do you know that this is free consultancy or it's a genuine challenging question because the company is prepared to pay 1K per day for your services ?

Are you really better off walking out without answering the question ?

When you are showing route redistribution from BGP to OSPF using the customers live BGP ASN and their OSPF AS, while explaining how to map IP precedence bits to encrypted packets on the fly, when a live config has been pulled from an MPLS CE router and you have a bunch of CCNA / CCNPs hanging on your every word and scribbling into note books with no follow up questions, challenges or discussions it´s a pretty safe bet.

On that occasion yes I was. No one had hiring authority (days before Linked In to check) in that meeting, and the role was eventually given to Cisco Professional Services who outsourced it to me.