The Tech Consulting Market Isn’t Looking Good.
After hearing the same dire news from several of my consulting friends, I put a poll up on LinkedIn:
About half of the consultants out there are having a tougher time bringing in new clients than they have in the past.
There are a couple things to keep in mind about the numbers. First, some folks call themselves consultants, but they’re really long-term contractors, working for the same client full time for months (or years!) on end. If these people have long-term contracts, they may not be looking for new work, so they may not see the shift in the market yet.
Second, I purposely said “tech consultants” because I wanted to cast a wide net: people who work with any kind of technology. Of course, my peer group on LinkedIn skews towards data people and developers, though.
Finally, I didn’t quantify anything here, and it’s a really short, simple poll with just 3 choices. There aren’t options for much better or much worse, nor does it ask for any quantifying data like number of incoming leads, billable vs unbillable time, or even whether or not the consultant is even looking for new work. It’s just a quick straw poll to help y’all look around the room to see what’s going on.
In the poll’s comments and on related social media discussions, opinions were all over the place about the root causes. Some people say it’s uncertainty, others say it’s the US economy, and of course there’s the elephant in the room, AI. I’ve talked to several existing clients where managers have said, “For 2026, anytime we wanna buy something, build something, or hire someone, we’re gonna try AI first and see what happens.” Yesterday, tech company Block announced that they’re laying off about half of their 10,000 employees in order to force the rest to use AI. Block has always been cutting-edge, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many other big companies – and not just tech ones – follow suit.
February 2026 feels like March 2020.
We know something’s going on, and there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what the implications are.
Back in March 2020, I remember sitting in Iceland, getting ready to go home because the US State Department told us to, and I was thinking, “Well, business is going to shut down for 6-12 months, so I guess I’m gonna be on the bench for a while.” I actually put serious thought into deciding which tool I was going to learn next because I’d have so much free time. As it turned out, the uncertainty cleared pretty rapidly, and in 2020-2022, most of us in tech worked more (and harder) than we ever had before, helping companies deal with chaotic change. Will 2026-2027 go the same way? It’s too early to tell.
This post doesn’t offer precision or analysis. I just wanted to give y’all a place to chat about it, and to know that you’re not alone. It’s certainly happened to me too – my new consulting pipeline almost shut off starting in December, although it hasn’t really affected me yet because I’d long planned to mostly be on vacation Dec-Feb, and then work on training material for SQL Server 2025 & SQLBits when I returned to the office in March. I’m keeping an eye on incoming leads, though, because it’s wild how quickly it shut down.
18 Comments. Leave new
I’m interested in some more clues to what you’re referring to in the last section. Are you referring to Iran, or the Measles, or AI, or something else entirely?
I’m not sure which part you’re referring to. Can you quote the specific line that isn’t clear to you? Thanks!
The whole section under the “February 2026 feels like March 2020” heading. Maybe I’m just oblivious or dense. 🙂
Never mind, I just realized it was a continuation of the same topic as above. Somehow I had read it as a separate item.
Cool!
I think this article from Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2026/02/27/who-pays-my-bills-if-ai-takes-my-job/?__s=t3zrabaziqsuwkw4gck8) really provides great direction. Just like Brent has been doing.
Well, plain and simple agree.
Admittedly, I worried about the dotcom crash, 9/11, COVID-19, tariffs, etc, and we mostly got through it all with a few scratches. This time feels different to me.
– Cost of producing software is drifting to 0
– The better models are capable of producing index recommendations and query rewrites that equal or exceed what you’d get from a tuning expert — something MS has failed at for 25+ years
– My main employer announced a new policy that all training and conference requests have to be AI-related
Earlier this week I reported a bug to a vendor by producing a detailed report with OpenAI’s API.
The vendor fixed the bug using Claude Code.
I found out about the patch through something my newsletter-writing agent found on GitHub.
My role is gradually becoming driving an agentic loop. I’m still adding value and in fact am producing much better work than I could without machine assistance.
But I’m not sure where this is going. Is there going to be a need for a driver in 6 months, 1 year, 5 years? Should I retrain on something medical or maybe masonry? Dunno.
I agree: I think we’re going to see an explosion of new tools/apps, and I think that’s going to produce a new problem: search.
We’ve gone through a few major milestones for search: the initial directories like Yahoo, then PageRank with Google, and now LLMs like ChatGPT and Google’s summaries at the top of search results. However, the summaries at the top of search require constant updates, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to keep up with the explosion of tools/apps.
(I’ve thought a lot about this, and it’s not to the point where I can write a blog post yet, but it’s fun to brain dump some of the problems.)
When you’re searching for tools & apps, some of the most important criteria are truthful reviews, accurate hype-free descriptions of functionality, app documentation, and liveliness of the product (recency of updates, response time to answer issues, etc.) Most of that just won’t be available for these brand new tools & apps.
So as a result, this will end up like the early days of the web, where there’s a glut of cool stuff out there but we just couldn’t find most of it. Which will then lead people to build their own tools & apps (because code cost drifts to zero, and we can’t find what we want.) We may be looking at a ground shift: people may be less interested in off the shelf tools, and more interested in building things themselves.
Sorry if I got too discursive and off-topic there. It was late at night, and I was wondering whether this was the apocalypse for white-collar workers.
I think what you’re describing is actually happening. If you look at something like OpenClaw skills, the results are a lot like what you’d find before people got app store curation right, and you’d search for “Facebook” on an app store and find 30 unauthorized or scam apps.
I think we will also see a proliferation of “fork by default” behavior, with a large percentage of people running their own versions of popular projects. It’s going to be a nightmare to keep security and performance fixes integrated.
No apologies needed! It’s an off-topic blog post for sure and I wanted to give folks a place to discuss things and think out loud.
I’ve found AI index recommendations to be particularly bad beyond the most straight-forward indexing needs that anyone can do without thinking about it. It doesn’t make sense to me, given the query and statistics, indexing needs are deterministic and AI should be extremely good at coming up with indexing recommendations in complex situations, but at least in my experience its mostly been a more dangerous clippy.
I have had much better luck with AI tools query tuning in messy queries but found many AI code assistants will make changes that weren’t requested and then not include the changes when you ask for a summary of what it did. Claude is particularly bad about doing this. It has been more like baby-sitting a talented yet extremely sloppy junior.
There is no doubt AI tools have increased individual productivity, but I personally have not seen any sign of the promised technical competency in these tools that would allow an entire developer be replaced by “just a guy” with a keyboard.
I’d suggest trying again today with one of the frontier models. My personal favorites: 5.2 Pro or 5.2 Thinking (Heavy). Make sure you provide it with all the right information. For SQL Server, that’s probably the query, the complete table definition, some sample data, and an actual execution plan. It’ll probably take 10-15 minutes, but I get very well-reasoned and complete index recommendations now that account for proper key order for equality and inequality filters, sort key and order, included columns, joins, partial/filtered indexes, exotic index types (xml, inverted) etc — all the stuff people writing index recommendation tools have struggled with for years.
Even better: use an MCP or coding tool that lets the model try different options and analyze plans.
If you ask the default model in Claude or ChatGPT or don’t provide enough info, then I’d expect the behavior you described — or if you did this 3 months ago, I’d expect the same too. Things are moving fast.
Yep, this. The newer the model, the bigger the model, the more background information you provide, it’s fairly easy to get good recommendations on that kind of thing today.
It’s wild you mentioned here the Block announced: I’ve been discussing this through all the weekend with my colleagues and ex-colleagues.
The conclusion is: Software keeps eating the World, but while developers were those who were eating the World we are now getting eaten by Software as well. Like in a modernized myth of Ouroboros.
I have a question for you all: I scale a park of >800 Azure SQL Databases monthly. I have been doing this for the last 3 years and this has been bringing massive cost reduction. (The scaling is based on CPU, Memory and Workers of the previous 14 days.)
Now I wander if it make sense to develop, package and ship the solution.
This is more a sort of a Philosophical question: what work is for in a World of AI?
Take the magnificent Erik Darling tool that you sponsored on this website last week:
– does it make sense for Erik (or any one of us) to spend time developing?
– does it make sense to create something like sp_Blitz today?
– does it make sense to give Open Source script expecting nothing? Because before at least, it was use to sponsor yourself. Will this make sense in the future?
You asked if it “make sense to develop, package and ship the solution” – I’ll focus on that because it’s more easily answerable.
If you’re looking to get paid customers for that kind of solution, you should pick up Rob Fitzpatrick’s book “The Mom Test”. It’ll teach you how to find out if there’s a market for your solution, and whether that market would be willing to pay for the solution.
Don’t get distracted by AI – focus on the business fundamentals first. If AI wasn’t a thing, would you even be able to find paying customers anyway?
Nice, this is what I was looking for!
Thank you
[…] Again, not saying a human (even me) wouldn’t have these problems, but this is what’s phasing us out? […]