I can’t wait for the day when engineers from Facebook or Google are treated the same way after all the harm those companies have caused is revealed.
It's pretty cool to be able to turn down projects because you disagree with them ethically. I can't say I agree with the other doom and gloom posts that say everyone leaving hates the company. I would say the average employee leaves on positive terms.
Short answer is I like my job. I like the work that I do. I think it directly helps the world be better. I get to operate at a very high level working with CEOs of important companies. The company is genuinely interested in advancing my career. It's a rare mix of tech and business. Coworkers are pleasant. Leadership is good and listens to its people.
The controversies don't bother me that much. the firm is decentralized. It bothers me about as much being associated with American problems. On a whole I think the firm helps things more than it hurts. The same confidentiality rules prevent us from sharing our successes. ymmv
* Founded a non profit which has upskilled hundreds of thousands of medical workers
* Did a lot of pro bono work (meaning "valuable" consulting work, but also the usual humble volunteer stuff) to keep food banks alive during covid
* About $200M in pro bono work dedicated to improving racial equity and hosting a leadership program for black leaders
* $2B in cash and support dedicated to social responsibility (I think this is mostly climate?) over the decade
* Around 220,000 hours of pro bono consultant time over the year
* Apparently we helped Khan Academy reach kids as things were going remote and TeachForIndia _____
And of course there's the not totally pro bono stuff which is just "nice problems to work on". Some people scoff at this because its paid for, and it is typically very expensive. But I'll list it it anyway:
* COVID response for 35+ national governments and many smaller governments
* Public Health
* Economic and Social Development
* Racial equity and diversity
* Upskilling or reskilling workers who lost jobs
* Lots of decarbonization and renewable energy stuff
You can read if interested here: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/about%20us/social%...
And again, many companies have stuff like this. I tend to think this is a bit better than average big co., but whatever, it doesn't hit my day to day. In my opinion the more down to earth impact that you might enjoy is just helping companies you like do better. If you like to help pharma, or renewables, or videogames, or... banks, you can do that. Which is just kind of good enough on its own. Unlike a job where you work within your little sphere within a big company, consulting lets you just tackle big problems with the big decision makers. idk, my experience has been largely positive. I'm happy to speak on its behalf. I know I could go work for Facebook and earn probably another $100k, but I feel pretty strongly that would be a lot less fulfilling. My view of the firm has maybe 50 people in it. It's a pretty flat org. And you have a clear line of what partners oversee your stuff. It was legit upsetting to hear about the ICE work during the trump admin for myself and many others, but at the same time it feels more like a separate subsidiary. Less like facebook where all rolls up to zuck. Like if you worked for ben and jerry's and something bad happened at dove. Both are owned by unilever. Is dove thus representative of all of unilever? Ehhh I don't think so. Example companies chose at random.
tl;dr solving business problems you're interested in is simply a good business.
If you're on the tech / data analytics side, it'll be more of listening to how they accomplish X today, thinking about how it could be done smarter, and working with the client to come up with a basic model that does X better.
Feedback culture is strong. It's very hard to do well if you're not actively part of the team. Maybe like... a bougy hackathon vibe.
Your opinion is not borne out by facts: it is a way of letting you rationalize working for an organization that is corrupt and corrupts other.
Mckinsey absolutely lets you choose the team you work on, there is zero expectation to work on teams that service immoral industries or companies.
Except for management consulting, of course.
I work as an accountant at FB. Do I contribute to the issues FB causes? Not really.
I work as a product manager at FB that isn't a "problematic" project. Do I contribute to the issues FB causes? Not really.
Your mental gymnastics are on par for a McKinsey type consultant.
If I work on a project to help a pharma company set up its supply chain to produce rare disease treatments, does that enable some guy in Asia to work on oil projects? Vaguely, yes in the sense that there is more money in the system. But not much, and certainly far less than it does on building the local capability to support other pharma companies on similar supply chain problems.
Personally I feel the direct impact of my work is positive, and likely orders of magnitude more positive than I would see working in tech for "engagement" or spyware or whatever. If I decide to leave, I'll go to one of the companies working on these same sets of problems.
And on a wider spectrum, no I don't believe the firm is bad on a whole. I think it nets good, trending towards banal average.
edit: putting it another way Facebook could not run (or would run less effectively) if it had 0 database engineers or PMs. McKinsey's oil division could work just fine if it had 0 pharma consultants. And its not that much of an anathema for some people to work on oil clients.
Their oil division would be much smaller, or possibly insignificant without the other divisions because the of the total "power" the company has by having its tendrils in every industry and government all over the world.
If the COO of Ghana Oil needs a consultant, he will ask his friend the COO of Ghana Pharma, who is using McKinsey, and will get that recommendation.
McKinsey is the whole sum of its parts. If some parts didn't exist, the whole would be much less effective, just like engineers and product managers at FB who don't directly work on the "problematic" parts make the whole more effective.
Also, I was being sarcrastic to compare your statement about working at McKinsey to FB employees
For example, if I design a boring mechanical part for a bomb my labor is integral to when that bomb kills civilians. So, if you are in the defense industry, believe in the net benefits of the missions that you support. And likewise for FB.
Claiming one is a meaningless cog in a machine, FB or otherwise, and one is therefore absolved of the responsibility of one's downstream impact is disgusting cowardice.
What if you design t shirts for a fashion company that shares a parent with the the bomb company. You're not even in the defense industry. You might be able to argue that your t shirts generate revenue which may translate into capital that the parent company reallocates into the bomb company.
What if you're a voter who's elected representative, among a handful of liberal, pro-humanity policies, also supports bombing people in the middle east to support the defense industry?
When does it stop being disgusting cowardice and instead pragmatism to acknowledge systems are interlinked and complicated and you may be better focused on the local direct sphere of influence your choices make as the primary driver of your decisions?
You're asking if capital flows between 2 unrelated entities sharing ownership matter? No.
You're asking if diffuse responsibility via elected representation matters? Yes, even if you didn't vote for the representative, it does because they act on your behalf.
Obviously, one should focus on what one can change directly where possible.
There's no dichotomy--disgusting cowardice can be pragmatic. After all, FB has to pay someone to run its databases and to close its books and therefore someone is going to get paid. But it doesn't have to be you. You have a choice.
An increasingly interlinked system makes one increasingly responsible, not less. Unless you want to throw up your hands and to declare utter powerlessness. I can't live that way.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041821397/nazi-concentration...
Was I a nazi? Well, yes, but I don't see how my work helped gas the jews 1000kms over there. I was just doing community work as a nazi and helped a lot of kids stay in school. Are my actions may have made people higher up have a better control over the population and future soldiers, in my opinion, not really.
/s
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041821397/nazi-concentration...
Being a cog in the machine still makes you part of the machine, even if you didn't directly do anything.
Fiction in the free world loves to say "You always have a choice", but the characters who learn this lesson tend to have much more power than others, be it physical strength, political power, or maybe just access to some important thing. Many people don't have a meaningful way to make a difference, and the cost is the livelihood of themselves and their families. And it ignores the local goodness of their action in favor the some vague affiliation with a bigger picture that they may not personally agree with.
I also think the whole analogy is entirely tangential.
A lot of others left for smaller consultancies where they are able to have a say in the company versus being a cog in the wheel.
I’ve debated going to McKinsey or the Big 4 but I’m not traveling Sunday-Thursday. Smaller shops pay more. Speaking with other consultants I’ve found that working with medium sized Software Vendors means great benefits including sweet RSUs and they don’t travel as much.
The reason you hate McKinsey is not the people who leave, it's the people who don't.
I'm sorry to jump to Nazis, I know you're not supposed to do that on the internet. I'd like to explicitly state that I don't think McKinsey employees are as bad as Nazis. This comment just reminded me of that very valuable lesson in engineering ethics.
In this case it's not really relevant - engineers on consulting projects are not "back office staff". They're part of the team, on site, in meetings, making decisions.
In any case, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5-9Rfrui9A "'Patriot' Piping Lingo, The McMillan Way (Amazon Prime)", where a seasoned CEO / engineer talks about pipe fittings at length. I'm sure software/devops engineers sound just as obtuse to those not familiar with software.
McKinsey is a conglomerate of silos, and it's entirely possible for McKinsey NY to be working on something that's related to something McKinsey Atlanta is working on - that doesn't make it a conflict of interest.
In any more than banks advise and act for all sorts of clients who have related interests.
There are reasons to maybe having Red Flags (or points of concern really) about McKinsey people but I don't think that this is generally it.
I would hire everyone from McKinsey that I know if there were a role for them, and their 'integrity' wouldn't remotely be an issue. The issue frankly is how applicable their skills would be in most operational environments.
"At times, McKinsey consultants helped those drugmaker clients fend off costly FDA oversight — even as McKinsey colleagues assigned to the FDA were working to bolster the agency’s regulation of the pharmaceutical market. In one instance, for example, McKinsey consultants helped Purdue and other opioid producers push the FDA to water down a proposed opioid-safety program. The opioid producer ultimately succeeded in weakening the program, even as overdose deaths mounted nationwide."
McKinsey was actively helping opioid manufacturers minimize government oversight. The misconduct in question by McKinsey isn't hypothetical.
Different McKinsey teams were hired by different entities to do different things.
To the extent that those teams are not related or coordinating, that's understandable and not a breach of ethics.
An Accenture division can be helping to the IRS build tax compliance software while another division help companies write tax minimization software.
There are only a small number of 'Big Accounting' firms, and they all have overlapping interests.
Banks to similarly.
McKinsey, Goldman, Accenture, all the big accounting firms are always working with 'Big Pharma' and 'Government' at the same time and all of the parties know this.
While we do need to be wary and cautious about backchannel information passing etc. - the notion that there's a breach of public interest as it is being presented is hyperbole.
But most of the time, it's due to how these guys are managed by their client. When you bring in an individual from a top consulting firm, they will fight tooth and nail to get the results you want. Or at least not "fail" at getting those.
If this means doing a great job, they will definitely do that. If - due to factors they can't really control - they need to endanger the rest of the project so that their part is successful, they will avoid to do it if they can. But they will do it if they need to. Failing is just not an option.
This is the danger of hiring consultants: incentives are not fully aligned between you and them. You want the whole project to be successful - on the long run. They want their part to be successful - right now.
If you are careful enough, these two absolutely coexist. If you aren't it can be dangerous for you whole organisation.
McKinsey is a consultant. If a company asks it to figure out how to make the world a better, happy place, it'll consult on that, but they don't. McKinsey has been used as an excuse for a host of evil activity but it's their clients that asked them to advise them and the clients that execute on the suggestions.
Enabling evil is itself evil.
Whether or not McKinsey is, when taken as a whole, evil is debatable. But, they certainly do enough work with dictators and other known bad actors that we should have the debate.
McKinsey primarily (not exclusively) works with actors who have the ability to pay fees, and those tend to be actors in power.
The number of organizations whose leaders have had intimate dealings with saudi arabia or other nation states with dictators at the helm would include most of our employers.