Agreed. And I think European countries really need to start eating our own dog food and stop being 100% reliant on US software and hardware. It's not (only) about opposing certain political behaviours, but (also) about supporting our financial independence and wellbeing.
Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution".
In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks.
Of course there are the cases that managers have personal motives, either to add an extra (useless) achievement on their list or even worse to get referral fee or presents from the external consultancy.
The people working inside the company may be both judge and party to the issue, it’s not always a bad idea to call in consultants. Do you prefer independent and somewhat misinformed or stakeholder to the issue and knowledgeable?
If you can't trust your people, why are they your people? The consultants are going to get the story from your people anyways (even if they do their own data collection, your people are going to tell them where to look), so it's not like you're actually eliminating the bias, you're just obfuscating it.
You hire consultants when obfuscation is the point - it's not Jim from down the hall saying this, its the consultants. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for obfuscation, but it's always some variation on "so and so needs to hear this, just not from me."
There is a simple expression for that: decision laundering. You use a third party to convey credibility to a decision you have already taken internally. Even CEOs themselves say it in private.
Ah, but by outsourcing the consultancy to AI, the consultancy firms are playing the same game! Now we just need to train a perfectly bureaucratic LLM to provide iron-clad but completely vapid conclusions and citations, and we can finally fire all of those pesky public servants!
That’s a kind of due diligence theater. In particular, managers want to know what their competitors’ engineers would recommend, which is the best static advice consultants say they can give.
What if your in-house engineers are morons but you need to have one particular project done correctly. I don't understand the glorification of normal engineers - quite often they're normal people drawn from normal distribution, with all consequences of that.
Why would you hire, and then knowingly continue to employ, morons? Your employees are not chosen at random, you can evaluate their skills and select the ones optimal for your organization, as demonstrated both by their prior experience and their work performance under your employment.
On the other hand, the people you get from the consulting firm, who were not hired with your particular needs in mind, and who are assigned by leaders who are both unfamiliar with what you do and have motivations which may not be perfectly aligned with yours, are normal people drawn essentially at random from a normal distribution. Maybe you don't need to have a particular skillset in house full time, but the person whose job is to do something will always outperform the person whose job is to maximize billable hours.
This is my experience as well. One of my clients tasked me with stuff their average engineers can't do due to many reasons, not only competency. They just had to have this one project working in time.
Personally consultants are just another tool in the mid-hi management toolbox. Just as a workforce on a payroll, this can be used in a good clever way and this can spiral into a shit show real quick.
If shit hits the fan, the director can pull the "we just followed Deloitte's advice" where "Bob from IT said so" just does not have the same responsability shielding.
They should effectively immediately freeze and potentially cancel any Korean investment in US and investigate all US companies based in their country. US behaving rogue should not go unpunished.
Starlink is a legitimate business (ISP) that wants to make money from customers in that country. They will comply with all of the regulations and bans imposed by the government in that country or risk getting banned completely.
It's not about blocking the sky. Starlink sends the internet connection back down to the ground somewhere in the country you are in.
That being said, if I have an American starlink account, and I go to Indonesia, what happens? Does my internet connection go back down through Indonesia or does it go through somewhere else?
UK is its own kind of dump, and has the same anti-immigrant dumpster fire being stoked by the media to distract the populace while the politicians & their friends finish looting what little is left of the country. Would not recommend.
The UK is much more run down and low-quality than the rest of Europe.
EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.
The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
I have lived in Germany for 5 years but am from the UK and I don't see much difference overall. The UK is just a bit more individualistic, much less racist, and has London, which has the highest wages in Europe. Germany has less income equality but far worse wealth inequality—most people in Germany will never own their own home because although Germany is rich, Germans are poor. Healthcare is better here, though. It's just a case of picking your poison I think. Also, believe it or not, Germany has its shithole cities too, I've visited a few of them.
But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
I've also lived in London for 8 years, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here. I made the difficult decision to leave and abandon everything I've built there because I could no longer sustain paying Switzerland-level prices for Eastern European level of quality.
> has London
Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.
> the highest wages in Europe
Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).
Where did you go to? Like I said for all the flaws of London and the UK (and I agree there are many), Europe is largely comparatively shit too. I live in Germany’s richest city and it’s also quite shit and everything is falling apart and nothing works.
It has the same problems of having an ageing population as the rest of Europe. Brexit is bad but relatively small in comparison to the demographic challenges. I live in Germany and it's in a sorry state too, because there are so many old people.
i know europe is making it easier for grants/proposals to go through and lessening the overall time it takes for grants to be accepted, for people in academia leaving the US
It all depends on the country you live in and if you have a legal contract. In UK for example you can use a debt collection agency. Those guys will probably give you 50% of the amount and then it's their problem.
reply