Reply to: Free consultancy?

[Bee]

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.

Taking the example that you pointing out, it's more to check if you have technical skills and be able to solve a coding problem.

As a consultant, you can't give a solution in a interview because you have to know all the picture of the project..

[NotAllThere]

No not a myth, it is a fact. I've seen it proposed by clients.

A myth may have a kernel of truth; nonetheless, the idea that this is in anyway widespread or common remains a myth - for the reasons outlined above.

[Hapax]

Here’s what I do, if the client wants more than an interview, say a presentation or a substantial piece of off-line work.

I agree, but insist the client pays for it at my normal day rate. Payment is always up-front and in advance.

I also tell the client that if they subsequently give me more than a months consultancy then I will deduct this initial presentation charge from my invoice.

I have had some success with this approach.

[clearedforlanding]

So in the end you got the job, and impressing them at the interview wasn't really a hindrance in the event that you had to go on site, even if it was indirectly through CISCO.

The point was they had a budget for an external consultant so there must have been some sort of bonafide hiring process going on.

Seems to me that answering the questions in the interview didn't do you any harm.

The point is a real piece of consultancy takes several weeks and a 15 minute answer isn't going to change that. If a day's consulting costs 1K, a 15 minute answer has a value of around 150 pounds. If you have a project with the 10 people then it's a multi-million pound project. If they did want some pointers they'd just get in CISCO for a couple of days and get a bit more than a sketch on a white board.

If they were trying to save a grand they would have offered you a direct contract, because by giving it to CISCO they probably paid a 20-30% premium.

In a lot of high end consultancy, one is paying for experience, not time worked. The value of sorting out complex routing problems is significantly more than 150 pounds. In any case, it was quite a bit more time than 15mins at a whiteboard before I lost my patience.

"If they did want some pointers they'd just get in CISCO for a couple of days and get a bit more than a sketch on a white board." - Cisco outsourced a lot of pre-sales and POC testing to me during this era and trust me, they charged a lot of money. This was the period when Cisco were the largest company in the world.

In any case, the client screwed up their route maps, dropped 600ish prefixes on a production network and created a network down situation. At this point they had a bonafida reason for a consultant and it was no longer a bunch of NAs / NPs trying to wing it but CxOs.

[BlasterBates]

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.

So in the end you got the job, and impressing them at the interview wasn't really a hindrance in the event that you had to go on site, even if it was indirectly through CISCO.

The point was they had a budget for an external consultant so there must have been some sort of bonafide hiring process going on.

Seems to me that answering the questions in the interview didn't do you any harm.

The point is a real piece of consultancy takes several weeks and a 15 minute answer isn't going to change that. If a day's consulting costs 1K, a 15 minute answer has a value of around 150 pounds. If you have a project with the 10 people then it's a multi-million pound project. If they did want some pointers they'd just get in CISCO for a couple of days and get a bit more than a sketch on a white board.

If they were trying to save a grand they would have offered you a direct contract, because by giving it to CISCO they probably paid a 20-30% premium.

[EternalOptimist]

I got interviewed by some blonde Dutch bird who obviously wanted to know if I had any cleavage staring expertise.
I don't know what went wrong, but despite my many years of experience, I didn't get the gig

[vetran]

Never quite understood these one day working interviews. Especially for a contractor.

If I'm crap terminate me.

If you can't find out I'm crap in a 1-2 hour face to face interview then sack the interviewers.

[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.

[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 ?

[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]

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.

[SlipTheJab]

[NotAllThere]

I have no idea what you are talking about.

[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]

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