Why I Prefer Consulting Overhead to Corporate Overhead

When I was at Google, half my time went into company overhead. A friend at Microsoft says the same.

I now work as a consultant, where half my time goes into overhead: lead gen, sales, contract negotiation, finance and legal.

It’s not possible to get away from overhead, unfortunately. But I can choose which kind of overhead — big company overhead or consulting overhead — I take on. There are a few important differences between these:

✅ Valuable skills: Consulting overhead is not overhead but valuable skills. When I was a software engineer in a jobby job, I was able to ignore lead gen, sales, contracts, finance and legal only, because someone else was handling it. If these weren’t taken care of, the company would collapse and I wouldn’t get paid any more. When I do it myself, I do it in a way that’s best for me, like writing my contract to reduce pain or improve work-life balance. When I leave things to others, I lose control. If it’s important, there’s nothing wrong with doing it myself. And it teaches me valuable business skills, making me well-rounded. It’s eustress, while big company politics is distress. I’ll take eustress any day of the week.

✅ Poor outcome: Learning how to play politics leads to mediocre products, like Google’s million chat apps. Learning skills that lead to bad outcomes is not a priority for me.

✅ Transferable: Lead gen, sales, contracts, finance and legal are transferable skills, which will be helpful no matter what I do in the future: starting a startup, being a cofounder of a startup, being a solopreneur, being the first employee of a startup, etc. Or if I switch over from being an advisor to being a content creator, my marketing skills would help me there, too. By contrast, navigating the Microsoft political hierarchy wouldn’t be as transferable.

✅ Corruption: Becoming a politician will corrupt me: tomorrow, I’ll think of political solutions rather than actually improving the outcome, because that’s what I’ll have trained my brain to do. Politics also requires me to not be forthright, which is unethical and a local optimum, not a global optimum. Everything I do today is practice for tomorrow.

That’s why I chose consulting overhead over big company overhead.