McKinsey: Friendly Neighborhood Spreadsheet Sociopaths Are Back in Town | Hacker News Reader

McKinsey: Friendly Neighborhood Spreadsheet Sociopaths Are Back in Town

apexsnotes.substack.com

Another famous McKinsey piece-de-art comes to mind - the work they did for the NYC Dept of Corrections to stem violence at Rikers. Their recommendations were to build a piece of software which they built and delivered but it never worked. The software did all sorts of analytics and tried to pick the prisoners who would benefit from their risk violence reduction program.

Apart from their sordid failures in building and delivering software, it turns out that their data analysis was outright fraud as they cherrypicked the trial inmates, who were low-violence, to show it worked.

This disaster ended up costing NYC 27.5 million. Their recommendations were a dud, the software never worked and violence soared. Ripping NYC for tens of millions and condemning the people with the lowest power - prison inmates - to worse outcomes - that is McKinsey's credo for you.

The thing that baffles me is not that the majority of McKinsey consultants would go along with it but there are almost zero whistleblowers. Shows the power of the firm's narrative and the prestige. My hope is enough of these exposes and the prestige of working at McKinsey will be akin to having worked at Enron or a WorldCom.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...

Wow, the guy who asked for McKinsey to consult:

> Anthony Shorris, and other aides decided to hire a consulting firm. They solicited proposals from firms on a pre-approved list from the previous administration. Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract.

According to Wikipedia, he is also a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company.

Straight up money grab.

"Ultimately, when we reduce our fellow man to numbers in a spreadsheet, when we become alienated from them, we have turned them into shadows."

The folks I happen to know who work at McKinsey are wrought with insecurity, ego & entitlement. They seem to love the business model of exploiting those most vulnerable.

Confirmed. This is standard fare in business school, undergrad and MBA alike. There’s no academic rigour because everyone passes because the schools treat students as high paying customers who are always right, and then they have a straight shot into consulting or investment banking, ruining the world due to the aforementioned insecurity, ego & entitlement and attraction to exploitation.

That’s hyperbole is incorrect. My generic state university only has a 60% graduation rate and it’s just a regular non-ivy league state university. That means 40% drop out or flunk.

> Ultimately, when we reduce our fellow man to numbers in a spreadsheet, when we become alienated from them, we have turned them into shadows. And we too, have become shadows. A kind of perverse collectivism emerging out of individualism. Every person, reduced to a shadow.

Good article. I followed up on their work with ICE as well and how some members on that team were shocked by the penny pinching on food, medical help and even in illegal areas of due process. Fuck McKinsey. Spreadsheet, growth, models my ass if you do not realize the human factor

Instead of commenting, I'd just want to bring up this brilliant scene from Margin Call: https://youtu.be/2f2kGHcdJYU?t=67

> To these snakes, people are nothing but numbers to squeeze revenue out of. Spreadsheet sociopathy. If every single consultant and banker disappeared tomorrow, we would be better off.

Who's the sociopath I wonder?

I would suggest reading the materials. It’s slightly less insidious than the headlines would have you believe. A couple choice lead lines:

“We are committed to lowering average daily doses on OxyContin and will provide higher rebates on prescriptions with higher dose strengths”

“We believe in our technology: We will pay additional rebates on any new OxyContin related overdose or opioid use disorder diagnosis”

Remember OxyContin was supposed to be less addictive than traditional opoid painkillers. Unfortunately it turned out to still be quite addictive and deadly, but at least this doesn’t indicate that McK or Purdue actually knew that. I guess they probably should have?

There’s also a worrying chart showing rising overdose deaths which doesn’t seem to be accompanied by a thoughtful commentary or real analysis of why—it’s just an actuarial exercise.

Purdue is a clinical pharma company. They do extensive testing on their molecular candidates both in-vitro and in-vivo. There is no way they would not have known that OxyContin was more addictive. If memory serves me right there was a whistleblower who claimed that Purdue knew and hid the fact from regulators but I might be mistaken.

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