Comment by brailsafe

> But the client said we (consultants) had done in two weeks what they couldn’t do in six months.

I think this is more of a consultant vs employee thing than it is senior vs not-senior. There's this weird dynamic that happens where BizOps defaults to trusting and spending more on consultants, granting them more autonomy, such that they're wildly more empowered to take any risk. Employees are to be delegated to by BizOps, and BizOps doesn't like taking risks. It's paradoxical, because unless you come in with that authority or you were there extremely early, you're unlikely to acquire it, much more-so after the company's been around a few years.

This seems to me where the term "hired gun" comes from. You pay someone who's incentivized to solve a discrete important problem with their expertise quickly, whereas all of your employees are incentivized to do things for amounts of time reliably over however long, answering to product managers, implementing whatever crap to get the sale, answering to useless managers every two weeks, planning, reviewing, retrospectiving, blah blah. The consultant isn't about to go doing a broad-scale refactor if they're not paid to, and there's no reason an employee should either.