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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Whether this is a bona fide comment or a troll, I love this comment:

* quick witted aikido-move-of-a-sentence to accept OP's insult, thereby disarming it

* enormous paragraph made up of short, frank, vague sentences with an compelling rhythm of overarching claims that frame the 20-something haircut's ostensible work in a positive light. It's the wrong generation but I'm reading them in Ari Fleischer's no-nonsense, eternally dismissive voice.

* anticipating the accusation of happy talk, a final, single sentence to cover one of the many troubling associations McKinsey has had with shithole companies. Even spelled the industry wrong!

I'm not being sarcastic or snooty. This is the HN-post version of the pharma commercial pattern of showing heartwarming images of happy people on swings while the narrator enumerates horrific side-effects. Reliably distracting an audience from a topic is a skill, and that reliability is valuable to companies.

So to all those naive respondents who want to say that McKinsey is some kind of corporate leech that provides no value-- this very comment is proof that you have no idea what you're talking about.

And some at McKinsey, I assume, are just run of the mill consultents.

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I guess I'm glad you enjoyed my prose so much.

All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings. It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. I make a healthy wage, but its likely lower than I could get in tech. Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company.

Consultancy sounds fancy, but when it comes down to it it's fairly mundane.

I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.

> But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.

Does not sexy mean they are not willing to spend the tons of money they have on internal employees?

One more piece of the puzzle:

Consultants are easy to fire. Depending on the company's policies, local laws, and the internal politics of the organization, a 'real' employee may be a lot harder to get rid of. Consultants are also time/task limited (in theory), while a 'real' employee is not (again, in theory).

I think this is mixing up 'Management Consultants' vs 'Engineering Consultants/Contractors'.

I'm a (supply chain) consultant which is similar and have a full time contract and full worker protections with my employer. Projects are sold on a fixed price basis, so there isn't anybody to fire - clients are buying the work output or report, not the person or set hours. Some projects are time & materials, but if the project gets cancelled I'm still getting paid - I have a full time contract.

As an example of the value prop - I come with information that your company doesn't necessarily have. Let's say you need to expand your existing (15 year old) miniload ASRS and are locked in with the incumbent provider - I know up-to-date market rates for miniloads and racking, and will be better able to credibly negotiate it down to market rates (particularly as I have probably done a project with the vendor before). I will also be better able to tell you if there is a better solution to expanding the ASRS because, while this is a '1 in 10' year activity for the client, this is what I do every day. Maybe they would be better putting some shuttles in a separate ASRS fed by the miniload because the actual bottleneck is throughput/accessions instead of storage, and their stock profile is different to what it was 15 years ago? They are better than me at running their warehouses, but (hopefully!) I'm better at specifying automation.

So that's the value proposition of consulting - you can get access to very specific expertise that you don't need for long. Most companies don't need a full time expert on specifying warehouse automation!

Second this. Supply Chain tech consultant with one of the big guys here.

They usually want their tech outcomes to be more like Netflix, but they don't want to have a tech-culture. So they bring in the consultants to implement "the digital transformation"!

Exactly.

Being a software "consultant" and a management consultant are pretty different things.

Management consulting is a really different thing to consulting as a developer or specialist..

> It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence.

The article points to McKinsey's task to "turbocharge" opioid sales, for a company that sold them for "improper use." So there are obviously a few outstanding questions attorneys general are currently asking about what people at McKinsey knew from "listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings" on that campaign.

If you're simply saying that your day to day isn't that, point taken.

> Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company.

This in a thread about McKinsey settling for over half a billion dollars over its role in causing the opioid crisis, which is just one of the many, many arrows in McKinsey’s “aiding and abetting horrible shit” quiver. This was literally a conspiracy and a scheme. On just the basis of “harm caused” alone, McKinsey is far from a normal company.

No, this sub-thread is a response to:

> The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.

There are a lot of scammy consultants, but there are also tons of bad employees and whole bad divisions in companies. I run a website design and SEO firm that is highly successful because we actually do the work of building a website and the work of doing the online marketing. Many clients have internal IT or online marketing divisions that are incapable of even making a change to their own website. I find small consulting companies that actually do the work are actually much more valuable per dollar spent than internal employees whose main goal is just to hold on to their job as long as possible and do as little work as they can.

If we were to rank large companies based on how horrible they are to society then certainly McKinsey is indeed “far from a normal company.” They’re far lower than the normal company, in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say they’re not even in the top 75%. Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking have caused objectively (and subjectively) orders of magnitude more harm to our society than a bunch of reviled white collar consultants whose only real power is to give a voice to and action plan for all the bad ideas that a company has.

It’s easy to sit here and talk shit about management consultants while forgetting that management consultants aren’t coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn’t the common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like McKinsey do is “parrot back something a lower level grunt already knows”? Someone at the company gave them every idea they’ve ever had, or so the argument goes.

They can’t both be totally useless mouth pieces while also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.

Having worked at a large management consulting company, the harm isn’t direct but it’s still there. These companies have incredible leverage, but it’s from credentials not competence. Economic harm isn’t as obvious as say water pollution, but diffuse harm is still harm.

Anyway, the average company does all the stuff you don’t really think about like making pots, windows, staplers, hearing aids etc. It’s the extreme outliers that people talk about not the dozen small factories making decorative concrete flagstones, etc.

I'm not arguing that the harm isn't there. I'm arguing that the harm they cause is second order and smaller.

And just as a small rebuttal: the small companies are usually owned by larger companies. So while they may not be "the company" people think of, they're still part of "that company." The connection is certainly just as direct as a McKinsey-client connection.

EXACTLY

Look at it in tech: Some FB engineers are INCREDIBLY smart and good - but the, as you say, "diffuse harm" they do is still *harm*

FFS when I was at Lockheed and we got audited for SOX the execs were stealing stocks from the newer employees and giving those stocks to the execs

and the auditors, I think it was PWC, gave use a green passing grade and employees got fucked.

Some of the execs went on to Solyndra and we all know about how they stole 700 million from the USG...

(look at the SEC claims for Solyndra, where weeks before shutting their employees out without notice, they were giving out huge bonuses to execs and certain employees - e.g. they gave a $40,000 bonus to the IT manager that locked out all the accounts of employees)

Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....

> Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....

Jesus. Hackernews is one hell of a website

> Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking

If you're ordering by importance, I 100% agree with "social media" being at the top of the list, and this almost cannot be emphasized enough.

I say almost because this article is about McKinsey and the role it played in the opioid crises. As an article it's also light on details, so I'm let down that I come to HN-- which is often great at filling in details-- and begin to read low-effort exchanges about the implications of someone's hair cut.

What do people know about McKinsey's relationship with Purdue in this case of pushing opioids into treatments where they didn't belong? I'd like to know more about that. And when I can blithely complain about the shit UX of a billion dollar company on HN and get a direct response from management, I'd expect information from PR nerds about McKinsey's role in the opioid crises and the ongoing lawsuits against them to flow to HN, too.

It isn't productive if we keep hop-scotching over the meat of every article to talk about some other hazard to society that isn't mentioned in the article. If that's going to be the flow then the next article that pops up about Google's monopolistic practices will instantly veer off into whatabout Visa/Mastercard's monopolistic practices, as it did before.

Edit: clarification

It may be unique only in the regard that the impact directly affects the US citizens, but multinational corporations that work in underdeveloped regions are known for their shady practices. You can probably write 10 articles on Nestle alone.

I’m a physician, the biggest culprit in the opioid crisis is the government. They are the ones that started telling doctors that “pain is the fifth vital sign”. They are the ones that said they would pay doctors based on results of patient surveys - it turns out that addicts wanting opiates from doctors give you bad scores if you don’t give them what they want. And that has nothing to do with capitalism - more the opposite, it shows how good intentions together with the overwhelming force of the government can ruin people’s lives. So maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to encourage the use of government power in those cases where we agree with the political party using that power?

To everyone in this thread who has this overwhelming righteousness indignation about mckinsey - have any of you ever asked your elected representative about their view of the government’s responsibility for the opiate crisis? Would you ever vote differently based on the answers they give? Did any of the state attorney generals who are going after private companies ever do anything to stop the (federal) government encouraging the increased use of pain medication?

This is a classic example of unintended consequences by the government - the companies were just responding to the incentives the government created.

There was a discussion on the experiments by Stanley Milgram about obedience to authority, and it applies here.

When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff done", and the result of this is massive profits with a secondary effect of death and destruction, then the consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but let me guess nobody goes to jail).

The consultant may have been hired only for the first part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The minute you understand the possible consequences of the things that you contribute to, you become partly responsible for it.

As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial crimes, or worse.

As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible

Turns out this isn't accurate. See https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-obey-a...

But as my detective work in the Yale Archives has revealed, in the filmed version of the experiment 65% of participants disobeyed. Yet Milgram edited his film to show the opposite: that two-thirds will do as they’re told.

That still means 35% of people are happy giving others serious electric shocks if told to by an authority figure?

Not as bad as 65% but still pretty bad!

Given the many replications of variations of Milgram's experiments, any flaws in his original experiment don't detract from the overall result.

See https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-m... for some of that replication data.

Are Instagram engineers partly responsible for depression among teens?

Yes. Even more than McKinsey is responsible for the opioid crisis. Instagram built the evil product, McKinsey just told someone how to better weaponize an already evil product.

Yes. They have a choice, they are privileged enough to be able to choose where they work. If they choose to prefer more money over not making more teens depressed. (If that's a thing, I have no idea), then they are responsible.

Generally, most of us in software can choose where to work. If we don't make this choice according to morals (whatever they may be) then we are less moral than ppl who don't have a choice, and those who have a choice and do consider it.

Is that a bad thing? Depending on which morality you subscribe to I guess....

The Facebook engineers who tweaked the news feed to change the ratio of positive to negative news absolutely are partly responsible for that.

Remember this one?

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

> In an academic paper published in conjunction with two university researchers, the company reported that, for one week in January 2012, it had altered the number of positive and negative posts in the news feeds of 689,003 randomly selected users to see what effect the changes had on the tone of the posts the recipients then wrote.

> The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.

I will add they did this experiment partially in response to an academic study that found viewing happier posts on Facebook made people sadder (explained mostly by FOMO).

FB was trying to refute that, and their study was more technically rigorous, but the outcome they were measuring doesn't actually refute the original claim at all IMO. People writing more happy posts on FB does not indicate they are actually happier, it could also be that they wish to broadcast more of their happy moments, or perhaps even just pretend to be happier, in response to the attitude of their feed.

Not just partially, but fully. Until then, it's just an idea, and like most ideas, isn't worth much. Implementation is everything*.

*Not everything, which is a tad extreme, but certainly 95%+. But sometimes shocking statements are needed to jolt people into the reality that their work has positive/negative repercussions in the real world. We hold an arms manufacturer responsible for designing weapons of mass destruction, there's no doubt in anyone's mind that there is culpability.

Engineers who build addictive products fall into the same boat. But, but, but paycheque! is not an excuse. Has never been before, isn't now, nor will it ever be in the future. As builders, we are defined by what we build.

Asking the question is answering it.

This series of threads is difficult to respond to because there's three theses floating around

1) McKinsey is basically fraudulent and pretends to do things of value

2) McKinsey is a very bad and unethical firm

3) McKinsey masterminds the business world to enable (1) and/or (2)

The main bit of the subthread is about (1), but this response is about (2). All I have to say is that, yes, consultants should be aware that there are consequences to their actions like any other. I don't think that's in question. I'm not sure the stanley milgram experiments are especially relevant but sure.

You are probably getting paid less than you could be but your billable rate is likely substantially higher.

Not great links but you get the gyst...

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partn...

https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge

True. I'd note a couple things here though. The per/hour rates are for creating the contract. Actual prices are fixed. The partner rates aren't likely to be charging every day of a project either, and are comparable to lawyer rates. They're expensive, no disagreement there.

Everything you buy has a markup to pay for expenses and make a profit.

Consultants sell their time, so of course their time is marked up.

Just because there are ordinary employees at the bottom doing ordinary boring jobs, doesn't mean that this is not a company that has done all sorts of damage.

Most of the huge profits don't go to people like you, but there are huge profits.

The opioid crisis has caused untold suffering and death. The amount of money they were fined is a joke that couldn't make a tiny dent in what fixing this.

It's small enough that it it's unlikely to stop them being involved in something similar in future.

To give some color, the revenue from the perdue work was probably (much) less than 10M, profits, less so. McKinsey's total revenue (not profit (based on a google search)), is like $10B. Losing half a billion is a lot.

In this instance I'm more than happy to bring in Godwins rule, but yeah I'm pretty sure there were janitors in the Nazi party as well just doing their job.

>It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence

But it is a crime the company is responsible for that caused many people to die and become addicted to opioids.

You think Kim Jong Un walks among the people he starves to death on a daily basis in North Korea? No. He's too high up. He's in his palace in the capital and he doesn't even see the real state of his country. He just hears about it in reports and goes to do his day to day job like any other person in a company disconnected from the consequences of their actions.

Does this mean Kim Jong Un is not guilty? No. Not. at. all.

Does this mean McKinsey's is not guilty?

Does this mean you're not guilty?

Sounds like everyone is guilty? Not a very useful perspective imo

It's very possible for everyone to be guilty. We don't live in a world where if something isn't "useful" it isn't true.

Your statement ends up reading sort of like "Is every Nazi guilty of the holocaust?" Technically maybe not, doesn't change the fact that of the matter that overall all Nazis are guilty.

You can't run away from this with some garbage statement of "Not a very useful perspective." This incident literally killed an amount of people that is equivalent to a genocide.

Imagine if you were a Nazi and you said that. If you were just a mere guard at one of these concentration camps could you say what you just said to me to a victim who lived through the atrocity? Think about what you should say to the parents of a man/woman who died from an opioid overdose. Literally, I think you're unaware of the magnitude of the crime that was committed here.

Watch these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcKURD_osM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXL3F5HvCr8

I'm not unaware I have been very personally affected by the opioid crisis. And I don't think the pharma companies are responsible. I haven't met a single opiate addict (and I've met far too many for one lifetime) who blames pharma companies.

They accurately place the blame on themselves.

And I know people who have been effected by big pharma. Anecdotal evidence doesn't fly in the face of a journalistic documentary. There's tons of docs on the crisis and the blame is squarely on big pharma.

Do some searching there's tons of articles/video interviews on addicts who got addicted because of pain killers. Here's one: https://www.healthline.com/health/doctor-addicted-opioids

> 20-something haircut's ostensible work

I read your comment as "I am so emotionally invested in this caricature that I cannot tolerate hearing it humanized. The caricature must stand, or I lose something."

I know very little about McKinsey, but I don't think that the haircut of their consultants tells me very much.

> ...run of the mill consultents.

You spelled consultants wrong :P

(Boring clarification: riffing off of your "spelled industry wrong!" bit. Not an actual attack.)

I definitely need to learn lucidity or awareness or whatever it is that you springboard off of to be able to read something like this and mentally *hangonaminute* though... I completely went along agreeing with everything, and while I still do after having paused and considered, this isn't the first time I've needed another comment to help with the initial "you're completely not noticing this subtlety here".

>You spelled consultants wrong :P

I assume that was intentional.

And don't forget: there's always a bald guy standing by to disarm the "$100 haircut" conjecture.

It would be hilarious if the grand-grand op went for “I am an 80 year old bald McK......”

> Ari Fleischer

Honestly I got more of a '1 life is a tragedy, 1million lives is a statistic' vibe from GP

>the many troubling associations McKinsey has had with shithole companies.

not only shithole companies. At the total service of shithole governments:

"McKinsey Bans Moscow Staff From Attending Pro-Navalny Protest

...

In line with policy, McKinsey employees must not support any political activity either publicly or privately. This ban does include posts in social media featuring your political views or your attitude to any action with a political flavour. This line of conduct is mandatory. "

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/23/mckinsey-bans-mosc...

That message was genuine, but quickly retracted and apologized for. That's not a real policy.

In Russia everyone knows which of those 2 messages is the real one guiding your cushy employment there, and which one is just a PR BS which was produced after people like Ted Cruz cried foul in the US .

I call bullshit on this email being sent by the firm until I see it (though I totally believe it may have been sent by someone working at the Moscow office)

Grounds:

- it goes directly against several key employees rights policies which we are reminded of by the firm itself several times a year

- its formulation is very different from the firm's language in across-the-board communications

>I call bullshit on this email being sent by the firm until I see it

The firm didn't deny it. It issued retraction. So, it is genuine. And the firm wants the Russian regime to know that it is genuine. All that absolutely not surprising given the Russian environment.

>- it goes directly against several key employees rights policies which we are reminded of by the firm itself several times a year

nor policy nor "employees rights" (who is going to enforce them? Russian gov-t?) are worth losing GazProm and Norilsknickel as clients and becoming political enemy of Putin. People in Russia are arrested today for just retweet of a thread mentioning the date of protests (like that RBC editor).

>*This is the HN-post version of the pharma commercial pattern of showing heartwarming images of happy people on swings while the narrator enumerates horrific side-effects.*

OMG this is the bes sentence I have read in months! Thanks

---

I worked with a guy who was a previous McKinsey exec and now is the "uber of Dubai" founder and a billionaire and he is slimy AF.

I have worked with multiple companies such as McKinsey PWC and others and their consulting practices are all bullshit.

Now, thats not to say that any large company does not need some financial oversight/consulting/auditing - but still these consultancies are fucking vultures and are more likely to help you "cook your books" than correct your books...

They are great at making PowerPoint’s though.

All valid points, but diluting them a bit by accusing others of spelling mistakes when committing them yourself.

s/consultents/consultants/

That was most certainly a joke. He called out that grandparent made a typo in the last sentence and drove that home again by also making a typo in the last sentence when referencing grandparent's role. I had a good laugh.

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