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

March 20, 2022 · 3 min read

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

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.