Consultant and FTE collaboration

Consultants and full-time engineers (FTEs) need to work well together in order to deliver value to stakeholders. While the two groups have different expectations and different incentives, I want to argue in this post that these differences — when understood and accounted for — are positives. As an engineer who has worked both as a consultant and FTE for Indigo, I believe the company is a strong case-study in beneficial collaboration between consultants and in-house engineers.

I first want to state that I am a strong advocate of including a mix of contractors and FTEs in any engineering organization. Anecdotally, I’ve heard many engineers and managers dismiss contractors as cost centers that don’t add value or people that generate solutions worse than in-house solutions. As a former full-time consultant and current part-time consultant, this stereotype is false and likely borne out of some consulting engagements that were spectacular failures.

In reality, most of the time I believe consultants come in with more technical expertise in specific areas than FTEs, and have the benefit over FTEs of having seen a larger and more varied problem space. For instance, a ServiceNow consultant has potentially done dozens of ServiceNow integrations at companies with a unique range of problems; an FTE with a web development background forced to work with ServiceNow may be using it for the first time. Consultants — in addition to having strong technical expertise — can be added to or removed from a project with more ease than adding or removing FTEs. The strong technical skills and flexibility a company gets from hiring consultants makes them a must-have part of any engineering organization.

That said, FTEs have a number of advantages over consultants, including closer alignment of interests with the company and constantly compounding organizational knowledge. I’ll explore interest alignment more later in this post, but suffice to say that FTEs have more incentives to make solutions built to last. With regard to compounding organizational knowledge, FTEs almost always get more exposure to different parts of the company than consultants and have a better pulse on shareholder value drivers than consultants. In short, I think companies need both kinds of engineers to succeed.

Hiring both engineering types is no guarantee of success; getting FTEs to work well with consultants requires time and constant learning. The differences between full-time and consulting work are important to this discussion to the extent that they create incentives that drive behavior. Below is a high-level overview of what I see as the three most meaningful differences:

• Time horizon — full-time engineers are likely expecting to be at a company for several years or more. This time horizon means they will have nearly always have to deal with the consequences of building technical debt or pushing back on a stakeholder request in the future. In contrast, consultants may be engaged on a project for only a few weeks or months depending on the terms of the engagement. The varying durations means for consultants that each project has its own set of tradeoffs that are very different from the set of tradeoffs one would face when thinking about a multi-year future (or a future where company survival in the long-term is paramount).
• Compensation — full-time engineers will always have more skin in the game than consultants because of how compensation is structured. While exceptions do exist, in most cases consultants are paid by the hour or by specific project benchmarks. FTEs are salaried and generally have either equity or performance bonuses tied to the success of the company. It has been my experience that this compensation structure means FTEs are more informed about how specific product decisions drive shareholder value for the company than consultants. Indeed, understanding shareholder value drivers determines the value of the FTE’s stock, whereas it usually has no real bearing on the consultant (some consultants may occasionally get equity grants — I’m in favor of this compensation scheme as it creates strong incentives to build for the long term).
• Accountability — credit and blame long-term end up with FT employees; consultants may get some of both in the short-term, but ultimately code and project ownership must rest with full-timers. It is important for FTEs to understand that consultants take significant reputational risk with each engagement and rely on previous clients for testimonials and leads — in this respect, consultants are incentivized to write code that prioritizes long-term stability. Interestingly, I’ve found at a number of companies that it is common to blame consultants for particularly broken areas of the codebase. Irrespective of whether this blame is fair or not, the fact of the matter is that full-timers always have to work with this code and resolve the issues regardless of who wrote it in the first place. I want to reiterate this point — FTEs own the code, and blaming consultants for issues does not change the long-term ownership story.

So knowing that time horizon, compensation and accountability is going to impact how engineers behave in nearly all situations, how can FTEs and consultants work together harmoniously?

I think awareness of these issues and being able to talk about them openly is the foundation of a successful full-time engineer and consultant relationship. Indigo does this particularly well, beginning with identifying on its team pages for Marketplace (the group I work in) who is a consultant (and for what consulting firm) and who is a full-time engineer. This may seem like an obvious starting point, but I have worked for companies in the past where this hasn’t been clear, and there has been no central source to determine who works for what company.

Importantly, Indigo has built a culture where there is no stigma to being a consultant or being full-time. This culture exists because consultants are accepted as important parts of the company and treated as such. Consultants are encouraged to talk to stakeholders, attend key meetings and express opinions on the product, code patterns, agile process and more. By involving consultants in the key long-term processes full-timers care about, consultants become more aware of Indigo as a company than as a set of project milestones. Giving consultants this type of experience has led several former consultants to go full-time, myself included.

Conversely, it is part of the Indigo culture for consultants to talk about their consulting practices and share their consulting work outside of Indigo with full-time engineers. Consultants at Rocket Insights — the consulting firm I subcontracted for before joining Indigo — often had spent a year or more at Indigo and had fresh perspectives on technology, product and the intersection of the two at Indigo. Rocket is where I learned the foundation of much of what I know about Indigo today — it also helped me think independently about the company and its practices compared to other Rocket clients. Thoughtbot has helped shape some Indigo practices around hiring, the agile process and more. The culture of each consulting company has impacted Indigo uniquely. I think accepting that culture will in part be driven by consultants is necessary for consultants to feel comfortable and valued.

Awareness and culture are the foundation for having difficult conversations that address the differences between FTEs and consultants. These conversations need to happen when an issue crops up that will be viewed differently by a consultant versus a full-timer. One example that comes to mind — managing the consultant-full time relationship when a consultant will rotate off the project in a known amount of time.

This scenario makes all three of the aforementioned differences come to the forefront of the relationship — the consultant’s time horizon is now a set duration; the consultant’s incentives are now more time-based than anything related to product; the consultant will no longer be directly accountable for the work following the rotation.

What happens in this scenario when a production issue comes down the pipeline that the consultant is most capable of resolving quickly? What if a short-term hacky fix exists, but the consultant also knows of a long-term fix that would pay off technical debt and be the best resolution for the future?

In this case, the consultant and full time engineer’s behavior will be dictated by the strength of their relationship. The two won’t be afraid to openly identify that it may not be optimal for the consultant to take on the work alone. One solution here might be to use the production issue as a way to transfer knowledge and thereby break an information silo. Of course, the hacky solution should be done first if it resolves the problem, but while the consultant is still on staff, addressing the long-term fix makes sense.

If the knowledge transfer for the fix requires more time than the consultant has available, the full-timer shouldn’t be afraid to advocate on behalf of the consultant and ask for extra hours. In this case, the time, incentive and accountability problems are resolved by a relationship that takes into account all three and finds a solution (ask for more time, transfer knowledge and reframe the goal to be paying off tech debt instead of simply solving the problem short-term).

I’ve seen similar situations play out during my time at Indigo and in each case have been impressed at how FTEs and consultants understand the perspective of each other. One reason for this understanding is that many FTEs at Indigo were consultants in a past life and vice versa. In reality, FTE and consultant are just labels dictated by the career path people are pursuing at any point in time. I would venture many engineers jump back and forth between the two several times over the course of their careers.

The commonality each job title shares is a passion for engineering and a goal of using engineering principles to create great companies. Neither the FTE or consultant is succeeding if they cannot meet that goal. Indigo has done an excellent job of achieving that goal through creating an environment where FTEs and consultants understand and respect the position of the other.

That said, the consultant-FTE relationship will never be perfect and Indigo — as well as every company with FTEs and consultants — will always encounter obstacles with less-than-optimal consultant-FTE collaboration. Having seen a little of life as a consultant and FTE at Indigo, it’s my hope that I can continue to help bridge gaps in communication that would result from the different incentives and perspectives between the two. When working together seamlessly, the consultant and FTE relationship is stronger than any one working alone.

If you’re a consultant or an FTE looking to make a switch, check out our job postings or shoot me an e-mail at bbrostoff@indigoag.com.

Ben Brostoff is a Senior Software Engineer and tech lead at Indigo. He writes about engineering and business topics on his blog, which can be found at benbrostoff.com.