Respectable move. My primary complaint with solo-turned-agency people is how grifty they get.
As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue.
Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract. Now instead of hiring that solo dev, they’re forcing you to pay 20 hours/week to the project manager and to have two devs minimum on it, one or more of whom are complete juniors who will spend incredible amounts of hours solving simple problems, but that’s okay because that’s what they want.
Agencies rely on their status and size to impress clients, which short circuits the reputation issue and opens the door to these shenanigans. They also target bigger companies where wasting time and moving slowly might be the norm, or at least something they can gloss over by sending the sales people out to schmooze the execs over dinner again.
I knew some excellent devs and infosec people who turned into agency operators who just tried to milk companies for contracts and run a revolving door of junior hires who they can squeeze hours from until they quit. It’s sad to see.
To be fair, I know a few good agencies as well. They tend to be in such high demand from reputation that they’re always booked without even trying. It takes a long, long time to get there though.
I’ve unfortunately done studio/agency work my entire career and they’ve all been pretty small (around four devs) until my last employer, which was closer to 70 people and exactly what you described. It’s like you were describing them specifically. I left that job because it ran the capable people ragged and also generally felt dishonest to our clients despite financial transparency being one of the biggest public selling points
Telco I worked at spent 6 months choosing an agency, end up spending 3 million for what turned out to be a new Color scheme on the public website. Mind blowing, but completely normal for them
This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
As a buyer, I would rather work with an agency or a consultancy, given enough budget. The advantages are:
- I don't have to source, manage and pay individual contractors.
- If a team member isn't right then the agency will switch them out quickly.
- There is one throat to choke.
- There should be at least some institutional knowledge in the agency.
- The agency will provide oversight, be it from leadership or a billable PM resource.
I have built a few products for startups and my own projects over the last few years, and even with a budget as small as $50-$100k I would rather work with an "agency" with a thin layer of management even though I am very technical. It is much easier to manage and less risky than betting on 1-n individuals.
> This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
Judging by all of the comments from people saying this matched their experience working either inside or with agencies, I don’t think it’s inaccurate.
> What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
I think you’re talking about something else. I’m not talking about a sales process being done ethically.
If I was talking about ethical sales with aligned incentives, I wouldn’t have used the word “grift”. That was, literally, my whole point in using that word. :)
I’m specifically talking about the huge incentive that exists to unnecessarily balloon the hours as much as possible.
It’s simple, really: As a solo dev with a mostly full pipeline (assuming this for simplicity) your incentive is to finish work efficiently so you can impress the customer, build trust, and build a reputation to overcome the challenges of being solo. If you sandbag your efforts and deliver inefficiently, they have nobody to blame but you. You also burn your chance of a good referral. It’s bad all around.
As an agency, the situation changes. You now can scale up to as many people as you can convince to work with your agency, but now you need to force them into as many projects as possible. You’re no longer limited by the number of hours you have in a week because you’re selling other people’s hours. Hiring inefficient people will actually get you more profit.
When the client catches on, you can remove the inefficient people and apologize for the “bad apples”. You temporarily assign some superstars to the team to impress the client until they’re not looking again and then you slowly go back to the inefficient people when they’re not paying attention again.
Like I said in my post, not every agency does this. However, as someone who has done a lot of hiring of contractors and agencies I can say it’s almost like most of them are operating out of a hidden playbook. The headcount always gets inflated over time (including their assigned project managers who they require to work alongside our internal project managers) and the revolving door where the good devs get pulled off to other projects and then they try to substitute lesser devs.
It’s gotten bad enough that we have a framework for bullet points to negotiate away from agency contract proposals. We reserve the right to aggressively dismiss anyone they assign who isn’t doing work up to par. Agencies hate it, but it’s a necessity these days (at least until an agency has proven themselves)
This was my experience as well- I started my career with an agency, and it grew from 80 to about 500 people in the course of 7 years. My last two there made it abundantly clear it was turning to the grifty side- every year, we were less profitable, and every year, they kept pushing for ways to get more hours (document more! Test more! Add more value!) despite the fact that the quality we delivered varied greatly from one team to the next.
It was really hard to watch what had been a committed group turn into a grubby machine.
If a client doesn’t care, that means it also internally operates on principles different from just getting the job done. Sometimes it doesn’t even know what the job is. There’s a budget and a general direction, burn the money and hope the wheels are at the right angle. The fact that they spent millions on a simple result only helps upselling it further.
As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue.
Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract. Now instead of hiring that solo dev, they’re forcing you to pay 20 hours/week to the project manager and to have two devs minimum on it, one or more of whom are complete juniors who will spend incredible amounts of hours solving simple problems, but that’s okay because that’s what they want.
Agencies rely on their status and size to impress clients, which short circuits the reputation issue and opens the door to these shenanigans. They also target bigger companies where wasting time and moving slowly might be the norm, or at least something they can gloss over by sending the sales people out to schmooze the execs over dinner again.
I knew some excellent devs and infosec people who turned into agency operators who just tried to milk companies for contracts and run a revolving door of junior hires who they can squeeze hours from until they quit. It’s sad to see.
To be fair, I know a few good agencies as well. They tend to be in such high demand from reputation that they’re always booked without even trying. It takes a long, long time to get there though.