Comment by tomsaffell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomsaffell | Hacker News Reader

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I worked at one such firm for five years, and did a lot of recruiting of undergraduates in that time. This is a mostly fair summary, but I take exception to the following:

Even getting an interview often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents

Anyone could apply. All applications were taken seriously, and I worked with several excellent people from non-Ivy-League schools. It would be much more accurate to say:

Even _knowing_ about such business consulting firms often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents

I always found this regrettable. It boils down to the fact that most undergraduates have never heard of most business consulting firms (or the industry at all), so a lot of work (consultants' time) and money go in to on-campus awareness marketing. That doesn't scale well at all. So we ended up doing it where we had the biggest bang for the buck (in the UK, this was just Cambridge and Hull... err, I mean Oxford). We would sometimes send one new hire to the careers fair at a few other universities.

Bottom line: anyone could apply; every application was taken seriously; 99% of students outside Oxbridge had never heard of us, and that was too expensive for us to fix.

This is true. I went to a state school and had never heard of management consulting until everyone I met from MIT went into it. I remember a dinner in Boston where I kept asking them, why would a company pay a 24 yr old with no experience for advice on anything? I still haven't heard a good explanation.

http://ask.metafilter.com/76589/So-this-consultant-walks-int...

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered "sure".

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep. "That is correct; take one of the sheep." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.

Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", "OK, why not." answered the young man. "Clearly, you are a consultant." said the shepherd. "That's correct." says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. "You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/consulting-isnt-about-...

How about having someone to blame?

It might be one of those apocryphal engineering war stories, but one I've heard a few times: a consulting company is brought in by management with a pretty obvious goal of ratifying something management already wanted to do. The in-house engineers know what's going on, and what management wants ratified, but they're supposed to work with this consulting firm. The engineers at the consulting firm know that they're probably being asked to ratify some already-made decision, and their job is basically to find out what it is and recommend that. Early on, the in-house engineers just spill to the beans to the consulting firm's engineers, and both groups more or less take it easy for three months, short-circuiting the usual charade while management on both sides thinks that some sort of consulting dance is going on.

tl;dr The best chauffeur doesn't have to be the best driver, and consulting firms are not raw meritocracies.

I work at a McBain Group level consulting firm as one of the analysis-slaves. My colleagues hail from many different universities, but only around half are Ivy League, though all are first tier. There are 15 of us, whittled down from a field of around 3,000. In other words, for each position, they considered about 200 applications.

We might not be the best analyst, the best client negotiator, or the best excel wrangler, but in this industry those aren't the only things that are valued - the firm's profits aren't singularly tied to the strength of their recommendations. There's a certain amount of flash and pedigree that they need to justify billing out a 24 year old at $300 an hour. This isn't unique to consulting, but seems to get paraded around due to the amounts of money the position commands and the apparent inequity of taking the 'rich' and making them richer.

Think of your girlfriend/wife's hairdresser. Are they worth the $50-150 she pays them to cut their hair? Is that haircut really worth the %300 premium over supercuts or the corner store?

Based on the raw haircut of course not. But this stylist does Michelle Obama's hair, he has great gossiping skills, and the salon looks great. So she does it anyway.

There are tons of industries just like this. Why are there no ugly people in Hollywood? Why do Apple products command a premium? It's very similar to any other luxury good; you pay a lot for each incremental improvement.

Can you explain that "flash and pedigree" line? What is that? Is that basically having the right upper-middle-class background? Your next sentence seems to imply that it's related to the economic status of these 24 year olds.

If that's the case, as per your last paragraph, what's the incremental improvement that "flash and pedigree" provides?

Well honestly it's about backing up the $300/hr rate. the job of the consultant is to come in and quickly convince the client that they not only know what they are talking about but are experts at what they are talking about. In reality you've only read the wikipedia article and a few trade publications for background, but somehow you have to convince the client that you do, in fact, know your shit.

The flash and pedigree refers to one of the ways you can convince people of your expert knowledge. People tend to put more faith into a recommendation that comes out of a Harvard grad than others, even if the Harvard grad talks completely out of their ass (pedigree). Furthermore, if the client sees that other people, just like themselves, have been paying this Harvard grad to talk out of his ass, they figure he must be a good person to have (prestige).

So in essence, the high rate of consulting comes down to the ability to say 'but we have lots of Harvard/Princeton/Yale minds working on this!' and 'No one ever got fired for using IBM'.

And that's just the way the firms like it.

ah, thanks! So it's the incremental improvement of a Harvard vs. a Cornell, or even a (gasp!) non-ivy. That makes sense, i suppose. I think I got confused because, as you acknowledge,

  "We might not be the best analyst, the best client
  negotiator, or the best excel wrangler,"

which suggests that they are not actually experts, right? I.e., school-choice and performance/ability are already divergent, but that's really not the point of the school.

So i guess, compared what some of the other posters here are saying, if you didn't go to a top-flight school, then you actually don't have a chance to get into these places, right?

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