Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture.
Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. And that's why we get paid a lot for not doing a heck of a lot.
I worked as a 'clean up' consultant in Europe for a couple of years - going to clients that had failing projects and were desperate to bring in a developer to get the project back on track. My job was 75% calming the client down and making them feel loved and 25% programming.
Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture
I think much of it is the nature of dealing with clients too. I wrote more about that in "How I learned about assertiveness and reality from being a consultant" (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/07/how-i-learned-about-assert...), which started life as an email to some friends who didn't totally understand the nature of consulting: Someone pays you, or they don't. If no money changes hands you don't have a business.
Much of the polite and deferential behavior that's inculcated in the education system or in large companies can be exploited by potential clients. Consultants have to learn this, and pretty much every one does, either with greater or lesser ease.
I've spent most of my career in a client facing role of one sort or another. One difference, at least from what I've seen, is that the incivility mentioned in the article is generally directed at the clients (behind closed doors of course). Especially once you grow past a size where losing a single client won't kill the company, you get the blame the client for everything that goes wrong (really just venting about the normal things that go wrong in any technology delivery).
I do think that, in that environment, one of the senior people has the responsibility to keep the client hate from becoming totally toxic and pervasive. Of course there are bad clients but even good clients can be demanding and you don't want to have a whole team of client facing people who hate all of their clients.
I agree with the general sentiment of your blog post but one claim caught my attention as not justified when it should be:
>Just as people’s salary is not an acceptable topic of conversation amongst colleagues I think negative opinions about clients should be similarly off limit for casual conversations.
The badmouthing of the client can get out of hand and become detrimental to your relationship with them. I have seen this happen. That employees shouldn't discuss their salaries is a piece of accepted wisdom but does experience support it? Personally, I can't say it does, but then again, it is such a rare freak occurrence you can hardly discern any trends. I suppose that under the conditions of a strong general taboo on it people talking about how much they make may already signal trouble; does it, however, create trouble where the taboo is weaker (e.g., in Europe)?
I am not urging to abandon the taboo on discussing your salary simply because I can't find a good reason for it but I would like to understand how it came about and whether the conditions
that created it still apply.
> Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment
Yep, that's me, and I have no shame admitting it. I absolutely cannot handle that kind of environment. The less interpersonal interaction I have to deal with, the happier I am.
Luckily, as a grad student I can work by myself and spend my time creating and learning all kinds of interesting things. But I'm a little worried that once I graduate I won't be able to find a job that has this much freedom...
They are certainly out there, they just aren't as common as one would like. Finding a good small business or startup (I don't mean a Silicon Valley "Facebook for Cats"-esque venture) with the right people can be a game changer.
After leaving my first job, I went to a, purported, "real startup" which wound up being run in a manner that was very corporate. Sure, you get the no-dresscode and flexible hours (which isn't really all that unique to startups nowadays anyway) but being treated like a petulant child with a Slack channel masquerading as a time clock, a bot that monitors the tone of speech, and being lied to about compensation, duties, etc. It was clearly wrong as could be.
Moved on to job #3, and the difference is night and day. Sure, the ability to work remote and set hours are very nice, but what makes the job amazing is working with folks who are dedicated, and treat you like an adult and an integral part of the team.
Coming out of your first, idyllic environment, you might not yet be cognizant of all the things that are important, but do be careful to try to distill your thoughts and be wary of what the folks hiring tell you.
Yes, and unfortunately you have to add to the aggression by being aggressive and abrasive yourself.
You have to stand up for yourself and push back. I make it a point to be somewhat aggressive and non-collaborative when I'm dealing with our VP of Development just so he knows that I won't be pushed around.
Guess what. It works. I've intentionally been aggressive in meetings with him to show him that I won't be pushed around. It's almost like a test for some upper management types. "Let me see if I can tweak this guy"
That's sad. I'd rather have a thoughtful, collaborative environment, but we deal with the cards we've been dealt.
Reminds me of my boss's boss at a big company some years ago. When you presented a proposal or project status he would badger you with vulgarities until you swore back at him. He insisted you swear at him. Then you could move on with your message. I felt sorry for my boss, a very religious man who would not swear under any circumstances. He absorbed terrible abuse in every meeting I attended where he and his boss were both present. But I had no problem since my nature is rather rough so once I knew the rules I would cuss that pr*ck out at the first opportunity every time, and he loved me. Toxic environment much?
>I worked as a 'clean up' consultant in Europe for a couple of years - going to clients that had failing projects and were desperate to bring in a developer to get the project back on track. My job was 75% calming the client down and making them feel loved and 25% programming.
How did you get into this if you don't mind me asking? Before I started programming (and went back to school), I worked in customer service/technical support for several years where 90% of my job was calming people down. I've also done plenty of contract work, so I think I'd be pretty good at what you described.
I share the opinion of the parent comment, pretty much exactly.
Some of my comrades call this a layer-8 problem. (hint: there is only 7 technology levels, 8 is the human one).
One story in particular my firm was hired to come into a startup that had failed to scale, both technology wise, and personnel wise. They had hired up to 25 engineers, hoping to fix their stability issues, and almost going bankrupt doing it. I am at no liberty to say which company this is publicly unfortunately.
It was stressful, but you can't take things personal. You have to put aside feelings, to get useful data out of these people to make the platform work. You can't possibly care about someone's ethics, approach, and often even coding style on these missions. The goal is to try and not piss off as many people as you and, and go ahead not worry if you do have to piss someone off to get the job done, and not lose sleep at night if someone does not get along with you.
The end result was that they had to shed, through various reasons the great majority of their internal team. We stabilized things and bought them lots of time, while they slowly brought in new senior tech management and rebuilt their internal team from the ground up.
It was a multi year affair, and involved working on over 12 codebases and consolidating applications from 3 different hosting providers into AWS.
They got very close to running the ship into the ground. If you think staying up late and pulling the occasional all-nighter is unhealthy, or having a job that has extremely high expectations and leave you no time for a personal life is bad, this is about one hundred times worse. Since my team is small and highly skilled we can get a lot done in a short amount of time, and occasionally we are terse even with each other. But the amount of sleep deprivation that comes with a task of gargantuan size, where your dealing with hundreds and thousands of requests (sometimes per second), the company is going for broke, and a single code change can improve monetary situations in instantaneous, tractable ways, it gets super intense.
You have the CEO, the COO, the CFO all breathing down your neck. One day they see light at the end of the tunnel from fixing the currently broken problem, and then the next day, you discover another codebase lost in git that powers commerce for android, is starting to experience issue, and you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
I can go on and on and on. But honestly, please don't read this as a recommendation. Being a digital mercenary is fun in your 20s, but it got old quick. Of course I still do it, but I have a much healthier way of saying NO, more often now. You can make a very lucrative living doing this sort of work, but its hard to earn the reputation to get these clients, and you may end up forgetting what your family looks like by the end of a 2 year job that is 365/24/7.
The story did have a happy ending though. The company does well today. Extremely well. A new era of management has come in over the last year, and I think everyone learned a lot. They are a household brand and I hear about them in the news it seems like monthly.
>you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
Recently I was searching for some report generating code that my team had been voluntold to maintain. I spent a day trying to find the code that generated and uploaded the report. Once I finally was able to get in contact with the last person who had worked on it I found that a developer in India was manually running and uploading the report every week. Why? Because job security.
"Layer 8 Error" is one of my favourites, classier than PEBKAC or ID-10-T. It's based off the OSI 7-layer networking model. Next layer up from the application? Must be the user...
>you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
I've been the 'some employee'. I setup the prod systems of a former employer's client. While I did hand over the credentials, for the first few months after leaving I expected to get a call from my former employer asking for them.
I think there's only one that I'm comfortable talking about since it was long ago and the people involved have all moved on from their parent companies.
Louis Vuitton was relaunching their public-facing website, which was tightly integrated with their back-end systems - inventory, manufacturing, etc. IOW, it wasn't just a regular website.
They hired a consulting company here in Europe who sold them a solution that was the epitome of using the wrong tool for the job - it was a non-relational database solution for what was obviously a pretty traditional relational db application. (except the product content - images, movies, etc, had to be tied to their back-end db systems)
Louis Vuitton rented out the Louvre for the launch party, hosted by the CEO. But no one took it upon themselves to let the CEO know that the rewrite would not be done in time for the launch. Not even close. The launch party happened but the new site wasn't ready. There was nothing to present at the launch.
The CTO was fired of course. We were hired to help bring the project back on track along with a couple of other consulting companies - it was about 5 senior developers and a few dozen junior developers.
However, the work was being done in France where the norm is to not work under pressure like what we had to do. And the senior consultants where all american, swiss, and german, and only one very good and amazing french developer. I spent most of my time working on politics and very little time developing. We managed to get some of the work away from the managing French company to be done by Swiss and German companies. And then I was transferred to another project with another desperate client.
I was in Hyderabad a couple of years later and met the fired CTO at a party - he was starting a consulting company in India to provide consultants to Europe. Nice guy but meeting him made me understand why what happened happened.
Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. And that's why we get paid a lot for not doing a heck of a lot.
I worked as a 'clean up' consultant in Europe for a couple of years - going to clients that had failing projects and were desperate to bring in a developer to get the project back on track. My job was 75% calming the client down and making them feel loved and 25% programming.
And boy, do I have some stories...