Rising Star
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What’s your current billable rate and salary?
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Anyone up for practicing case coming weekend?
Conversation Starter
And they’ll blame the Orange Line
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Pro
Anything going down tonight in LA/Hollywood?!
What's the best trick in consulting?
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Rising Star
I have only ever billed actuals idk what y’all are on lol
Chief
Okay, let’s say we bill our actual hours. What do we accomplish by doing that? Genuine question.
It's a CYA policy for the firm. I worked at an Amazon warehouse for a bit as a college summer job and was trained on how to sort packages and load trucks etc. All of the Amazon "policies" directly conflicted how I was trained to do the job well enough to meet my quotas. E.g. if a package is label side down on the conveyor belt just flip it over. Amazon policy says to shutoff conveyor belt before doing so.
All that said, it's so that if we get in trouble or someone sues, they can point the finger at us and say we aren't following policy so the company isn't liable the individual doing the thing is.
Hear is why it should be a fireable offense to eat hours:
1. You are the biggest loser if you eat hours. Not in a derogatory way, just in the sense that you lose the most. Your utilization goes down. You could be a top performer but its hard to gauge when you have below average billables.
2. Next, the firm loses because they can never get an accurate assessment on how they should price the project you completed going froward for other clients for similar work. Therefore, the risk assessment will be inaccurate since it will be priced lower while the risk is constant.
3. Margins will be less for the firm = compensation will be less for you
You would directly contribute to your own pay cut and the pay cut of your team.
Moral of the story: Don’t eat hours, ever. Also, if someone does eat hours, tell them these three points to change their mind.
Chief
1. You can eat hours but still be well above targets, at least at my firm
2. In my experience, we price projects by just asking clients how much they want to pay and make that more or less work out
3. Assumes projext price is actually a negotiable item rather than firms just doing what the client wants, give or take X%. Margins trickling down to staff assume trickle down economics work - it doesn’t
Just my opinion
"Be honest with your billings and utilization doesn't matter your first year."
"HEY, you need your utilization to be a lot higher. Basically, you shouldn't be posting anything to GAA anymore. You should know this by now, you've been here for a month."
Feels like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes.
Chief
Gaslighting is unfortunate but here we are.
GT cares more about accurate time reporting than most other firms. We have better wlb as a result.
I would never eat hours. If someone higher up didn’t like my burn rate, I would ask for them to authorize moving me to the NB code, discuss future scope to limit the need for extra hours, or raise the topic of finding someone to take my spot on the team who could complete all the desired tasks in the set amount of time they expect.
Make it their problem, and propose solutions.
Yes
Yes
Pro
Yes
Of course. What else do they expect us to do
I think the main issue is with the under-estimation of project hours that happens to secure the business - then leadership expects those under-estimated hours to be a true reflection of the work needed to complete the project - then everyone is under pressure to work 80, bill 40 to adhere to budget. Person who under-sold project doesn’t want to look bad so this craziness is institutionalized