Ask HN: How do you keep engineers happy in “Professional Services” teams?
I worked in PS for a few years.  I also worked in PreSales got to see the other side, including how projects&#x2F;services were sold to customers and how PS had to build what was sold.<p>&gt; Does your compnay have similar problems?<p>Yes, and I&#x27;ve seen the same at multiple companies.  IME turnover in PS tends to be high.<p>IMHO, there are two factors that make jobs at PS orgs at many Product companies boring.<p>1).Building with or customizing the Product tends to be repetitive and follow the same pattern.  The better and more mature the product, the more you basically just follow a set of steps and not get to really be creative or go outside of a certain box.<p>I&#x27;ll use a dashboard tool (E.g. PowerBI&#x2F;Tableau&#x2F;Spotfire) as an example.  They are very useful products and customers love them.  But from a PS standpoint, you doing the same thing over and over.  As a first job, you learn a lot the first 1-2 years.  But after that, you literally just repeat the same thing over and over again.  It gets old very fast.<p>What follows is an obvious lack of skill progression and career growth.  From a skill set perspective, the job titles (Associate, Consultant, Senior, Principal) can really say more about salary and less than skill.  In other jobs (e.g. Software Development) there&#x27;s a clear career progression.  In PS, upward mobility really means to go into PS management or sales - which a lot of people don&#x27;t want to to.<p>I imagine things are different in PS at a cloud provider like AWS since there is a much broader set of technologies and use cases to work it.<p>2). The second thing has to do with how projects are proposed and sold.  As a PS manager, you want customers to be happy and projects to succeed.  One of the best things you can do is come up with a &quot;Solution&quot; where you sell a certain deliverable and you understand all the requirements and effort to deliver that solution.  Then you just keep selling that and build a repeatable and reliable pipeline for your services group.<p>The worst thing is an &quot;exciting&quot; greenfield project where nobody can understand how much time, effort, and people are needed.  You can&#x27;t plan your schedules and people resources around unpredictable projects.  So those projects tend to get pushed to partners or stay in PreSales where resource planning is a little more ad-hoc.  Or the company just says they can&#x27;t do it.<p>If the best way to drive positive outcomes is to repeat the same thing over and over, then obviously the projects are going to be boring.  This works out great for PS management since they can have a high utilization rate and solid pipeline for work.  It&#x27;s going to be a mixed bag for ICs.  They get predictable work and a steady paycheck, but the work is boring.<p>&gt;Managers in PS has a target &quot;billable utilisation&quot; they are expected to hit.<p>Unlike some others in this thread, I had a good experience with utilization targets and time tracking.  For one of the companies I worked for, consultants had a utilization target, and then an accelerator.  The targets were set well. We had a good pipeline, so it was really easy to hit the accelerator, get nice bonus, and get time to take a vacation as well.  Some places set the utilization targets too high and it basically ruins the job.<p>We also only worked in 40 hour blocks.  So if a customer had 8 hours of work, they were billed for 40 hours and the consultant basically only worked 1 day that week.  This was in the contract the customer signed and they were told about it as well.  The end result was that a consultant basically only worked with 1 customer a week and tracking hours was easy.<p>This also pushed away a lot of the PITA customers who wanted to whine about 1 hour here and there.  If you want to micromanage the consultants, feel free to find a consulting company who will let you do that.<p>&gt;We encourage developers to come up with side-projects, improvements, learning goals etc. and we make time for them when there is something tangible. We also come up with initatives and offer them to take these up which would also contribute to their career progression. There is some take up but not much.<p>At least when I was in PS, my side-projects were really a way to learn things that could get me a out of PS.  There was no real value in me spending any spare time getting better at the Product(s) I was using in my job since all of that knowledge was too specialized to be useful outside of the company I was working for.<p>My work schedule was also very erratic.  I&#x27;d have one 4 week project with a very demanding customer.  Then I&#x27;d have 2 slower weeks with another customer.  Then 3 busy weeks with another customer.  It&#x27;s hard to maintain any momentum on side-projects, learning goals, etc in that situation.  So I wouldn&#x27;t even start.<p>If I told my employer that I wanted to learn a set of skills or work on a side-project that had nothing to do with my current job, I don&#x27;t know how well that would have been received.