[witek]

One of the common interview questions for a non-technical management/marketing person is: "having researched our market, company and competitive position, what strategies do you think we should pursue?"

Imagine if I were an experienced exec or strategy/marketing consultant, came up with a few interesting ideas and demanded to be paid for them on the spot? I'd get laughed out of the room.

Similarly, when you sell a consulting project, you're expected to do a certain amount of analysis in your pitch, with no guarantee of being chosen for paid work.

[Ensorceled]

But none of them will do 8 hours of analysis and put it into a report.

[antjanus]

I was going to add that. It's one thing where a developer gets asked, "Well, if you could rearchitect (or create) our application, what would you do?" and then discuss what frameworks, where to focus on caching and optimization, discuss technology, paradigm etc.

And I've been asked this before, "We serve a million visitors a day, what kind of caching and optimizations would you implement to handle that type of traffic?" Completely fair question.

It's another to do that work.