Technical Consultant vs Software Engineer. Which career is for you?

Although these two titles are used interchangeably, their whole workflow and the role in a project are complementary. For the past month, I interviewed with a good number of firms for an independent and full-time consultant role. My experiences were quite wholesome and I decided to pen down this article to share them. Despite both being responsible for the technical development of a product, they attend to requirements at different stages of a project aiming at different deliverables.

Hypothetical Problem Time

Let's look into a day walking in both shoes. We’ll try to get an idea of how each of them executes their day to day work considering they work on the same project, say a Quality Reporting dashboard, where some auditors visit factories and report their findings of all processes going on there.

Technical Consultant

• Hit a couple of cappuccinos.
• Discuss UX feedback report from a customer survey conducted last month with client/product owners.
• 20% of auditors reported that in factories network conditions are bad and they can not fill reports in real-time. They have to make a note on paper and type it up on the website after the visit again in the right format.
• The client see this redundancy as a problem and reached out to me to “Find a solution”.
• We did a lot of digging the whole day, weighed the pros and cons of every possible solution.
• After 2 days and 20 coffees, I presented them with the idea of an assisting PWA(Progressive Web App). It can be installed locally and they don’t need an internet connection to open the actual website.
• I worked on a POC demo for the next 1 week and came up with a dummy 5 field report form mounted on a PWA with few validations and business logic enabled. Here, you can write a report even offline along with photos from the phone camera and once you regain connection it will sync to the main database.
• I started to do cost, feasibility and maintainability analysis with the business admins after the successful demo and assisted in validating the final proposal.
• Once the timeline was approved, I started coordinating with the development lead on the implementation plan for this feature.
• The loop starts with the dev and qa teams until the final work is done, ensuring the vision for the solution never gets diverted.

Senior Software Engineer

• Hit 3 straight espressos without sugar.
• I sit in a meeting with the above consultant and discuss the feature along with the end goals.
• Since I have a better ground report, I informed him about the complexity of implementing the feature in this website and suggested adjusting some overheads in the timeline for training one developer in PWA specifics for a couple of weeks.
• I also studied the plan till 3 AM and found a couple of other technical hurdles wrt to the implementation in this specific project.
• After everything was addressed, I started looking into the libraries and integrations we’ll need for this feature and selected the best toolchain for the job.
• I divided this work into 3 sprints, each having 15 days and put atomic deliverables in each avoiding any cyclic dependencies.
• After distributing work among dev team members, code commits started popping up and now I spend most of my time ensuring best practices are followed and the feature codebase is scalable and bugs are not branded as features. Now and then, I also spend a couple of hours coding some critical parts of this feature myself.
• After every sprint, I and my consultant friend sit together and discuss what we achieved and the alignment of ongoing work with the proposed solution.

Conclusion

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The above case study would have given you a practical and first-person look into what work each of those roles does and in the project lifecycle where they are most active in. A consultant is more in touch with the business, whereas engineers tend to incline towards the product. The general rule of thumb as per me will be:

• Choose Consultant line if you have/aim for diverse technical and practical knowledge. It allows you to decide what’s best for the business, unchained from a particular technology.
• Go for a Software development role if you love converting a solution on paper into a robust and clear codebase. It requires more in-depth knowledge of the specific technologies and know-how.

To Connect

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🏭 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameerkumar1612

🏠 Website: https://hi-sameer.web.app

Comments

[Sofiia Shevchuk]

Interesting, thanks! IT consultants are always experienced, skilled, and thus expensive specialists. Maybe you have info about software consulting rates? I am reading a similar article from Cleveroad now.

[CuriousDev]

It actually depends on what people understand regarding these two roles. A "technical" consultant does not necessarily decide anything related to business. This looks more like tasks for Business Analysts. What you have provided are some nice examples and this is just how it could be seen. But I do not see any detailed comparison, which shows (main) differences and possible similarities.