Once I began my mission, I quickly started to realize that being a consultant puts you in an awkward position:
- You are employed by company A and sold off to company B. Not very gratifying to feel like merchandise.
- Company B isn't your employer and yet you feel like it is. The people you work with every day, and with whom you start building interpersonal and professional links are those from company B. The technical challenges you face and overcome are those also faced by company B. Everything you learn, you owe it to company B.
- You never meet any 'colleagues' from company A, except during corporate events that are exclusively designed to make you remember who you really work for.
- Your manager from company A doesn't really know what you do. There are supposed to be so-called "mission reviews" every 3 months. In the beginning they are done on time. After a while, as long as everything goes well, they tend to space out more and even disappear. I've been in company A for 2 years now and my last mission review was 11 months ago. I recently had my yearly performance review with my new manager whom I had only previously met once. He had absolutely no idea what I do in my work, how I perform, how I interact with my colleagues, how passionate I am about what I do, etc. He had to fill out a performance grid based on different criteria. Him having no idea what to put, I basically spent an hour telling him everything I could think of about my work and he gave me grades based on what I said. When I asked sensitive questions, I felt that every answer he gave me was a direct extract from the "Perfect Business Manager's Handbook - pre-fabricated responses to every question you can face!"
To sum it up - company A (MODIS) doesn't really care about you as a person. To them, you are a number with a list of skills - skills that can be monetized. They thrive on manipulating young graduates that don't really know what they are worth and what the professional world is like.
