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Comment by throckmortra | Hacker News Reader

The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)

Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted outside support for an initiative or to sink someone else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go against the executive that brings them in

I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them.

At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.

It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.

The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.

I agree that McKinsey sucks, just pointing out that it's the only one with a facade of prestige (anecdotally)

The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.

Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.

Accord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees."

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

> Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

And not for a cheap fee either!

Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

Yeah well https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-franc...

A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at least for a while...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth

Enron sounds eerily familiar to today's tech companies...

If you’re discussing Enron and consulting you could just go straight for Accenture’s predecessor: Arthur Andersen which was the responsible party.

Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting had an expensive divorce in 1997ish, and Andersen Consulting became Accenture.

A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.

AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....

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