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Comment by mola | Hacker News Reader

No one wants to believe they have a bullshit job. So we usually tell our selves nice little fairy tales to overcome this cognitive dissonance.

Truth is, McK and the like, are there just to give mediocre leaders an extremely expensive psychological crutch needed when human beings face uncertainties.

Now that these consulting agencies are the behemoth they are, it's mainly corrupt leaders that are being "pursuaded" to use their services.

Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the optics of credentials for this sordid affair.

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If a consultant is being brought in to do a job you think you should be doing yourself, then who really has the bullshit job in this instance?

First "a consultant" is @ very overloaded term. I was talking on the type McK bring to do a little business research and give some recommendations.

Software consultants OTH are usually sub-contractors and not consultants per se.

Regarding who has the bullshit job, well, probably both the mediocre/corrupt leaders, and the consultant.

Maybe it's bullshit jobs all the way down.

Context : "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues for the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

I don't think I have a bullshit job. Pay's good. Trajectory is good. People listen to me. Most of it's just fairly arbitrary business decisions. One had a client confirm months later that they believe the work directly contributed to saving lives. If a CEO point blank asks me for my opinion, I think that's more or less the definition of not being another cog in the wheel. The archetypal bullshit job is the finance/accountant who shifts a couple excel cells on a standard template that could have been automated in VBA ages ago. I know this, because that was my first job.

Contrary to popular belief, a good deal of McK work is not just regurgitating a pre-ordained solution. Most of my work involves creating original solutions tbh. But sure, you probably know my job better than me.

> Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the optics of credentials for this sordid affair.

100% whataboutism, and I'm not defending the OP or McK, but I wonder what you think of the PhD "brains" hired at Google that end up being in charge of implementing a menu in Google Carplay.

What are they?

At Google many PhDs may end up working on compilers, language runtimes, vulnerability research data center power saving/cooling and so on. And yeah most importantly implementing menu in Google carplay.

So I guess difference is Google has many types of work whereas at McKinsey it is slick MBAs facing fools looking to part with their money.

I know of many CS PhDs working at McK doing MBA-facing jobs.

So really, I don't see the difference.

They have bullshit jobs.

I don't get what's the point of your question?

I'm saying the OP has a bullshit job which he fails to acknowledge. I'm also saying is that McK only reason for hiring ppl like OP is virtue signalling and nothing else. And finally that McK is mostly harmful to society.

I never talked about why google hires PhDs. :Shrug:

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