The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell (2010)

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237 pointspraptak128 comments

> What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work.

That's pretty profound, and indeed I think it's not uncommon for people to get very burned out on very light workloads, as in OP, which OP has explained neatly.

I think this mis-characterises where the burn-out often comes from.

If you have an outwardly light task with onerous implications (just feeling you are being dishonest, as in these examples, can easily be enough) or very stressful segments, you aren't just dealing with the stress during the hours you are officially clocked-on, you will be thinking about it throughout chunks of the rest of your day. It may even inhibit sleep to an extent. Time away from a stressful situation is often not stress free time.

Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times, mentally shift responsibility ("not my job to keep that correct, guv'ner") without guilt, or lack the awareness for these issues to even present themselves at all. See "how do politicians and lobbyists sleep at night"!

> Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times

I have no evidence or considrations one way or the other, but I wonder if people without an internal dialogue, without an inner voice, have less stress or anxiety because they never switch those thoughts on or off.

As someone like that, maybe? I'm much less stressed than other people I know, though work does sometimes piss me off, bleeding well into non-work time.

In my experience this is a highly underrated statement.

In my day job, I work with Roblox developers, all whom either dropped out or never went to college to be full-time Roblox devs. They are so motivated by being on the platform that they will happily spend 8+ hours a day re-creating MS Office products on Roblox for our clients.

My son plays a lot and I watch.

The creativity, whimsy, and fun is off the charts. I find it very appealing compared to the "outside" gaming world.

I tell my son "Hey you know what if they had a game about bugs and you---"

"Dad they have that."

"But what if they--"

"Yeah dad that's exactly how it plays."

I agree. Additionally, the velocity of development blows me away.

I frequently ask them, "why Roblox?" and the answer is so obvious I feel dumb every time: Time investment to stand up a fully network-enabled multiplayer game with a "metaverse" UGC catalog, user account management, and "good enough" trust and safety is literally as fast as the dev can click "Create" and "Play".

Recreating Office products inside Roblox? Sounds interesting, but why?

Without divulging too much info about the client, they want us to create a tool for giving audio+slide presentations with their Roblox avatar. I know Roblox is known as a kid's gaming platform but from my observation of the API capabilities, they see themselves as a "metaverse operating system" and development stack.

I found that to be the case, with me.

I was a manager, for a long time. Before that (and after), an engineer.

In the early days of being a manager, I was able to also be an IC on most projects, and my work counted for a lot.

However, my handlers did not approve of me "getting my hands dirty," and, quite often, explicitly interfered with efforts on my part, to be a technical contributor.

The last couple of years absolutely sucked. My team was burning out, and I wanted to pitch in and help, but I wasn't allowed to. The startup we worked with, wanted me to. The work was interesting as hell (however, in the long run, it never worked out). It was pretty much exactly in my wheelhouse.

Instead, I ended up sitting on my butt, trying to keep track of a chaotic situation, without imposing on my engineers, and waiting for stuff to happen.

That was real burnout. I didn't want to go into the office, anymore.

Eventually, my wish came true, and they disbanded my team, after that project went pear-shaped. Could I have made the difference? Almost certainly not, but I probably could have made a difference.

Since leaving that company, I have been working pretty much seven days a week, often, from early morning, until hitting the sack.

I have not felt even a tiny bit burned out.

"I believed I was invincible. If MIT couldn’t burn me out, nothing else ever could. It took roughly three months before BCG disproved my “burn-out proof” theory"

I also wonder if this is a 'getting older' thing. When I was young, I had all the time to do anything. I had no money or opportunity, so when an opportunity came along I would go 100% into it.

Now that I have money, education, and experience, I have nearly endless options. I try to do the ones that suck least and have good ROI.

I think it mischaracterizes burnout entirely. Burnout is an internal process, and not one that can be defined in terms of external causes - you burn out when you are persisting against stress for long periods. There are certainly many standard recurring situations that can reliably cause such stress, but none of them are universal. In OP's case, it sounds like he's fairly motivated by his value-add, and found the prospect of functional dishonesty a major stressor (I'd have the same reaction).

I agree it is profound. I think the key is whether the workload is meaningful or purposeful; motivation being a proxy for how meaningful the work is. That meaning is both intrinsic (something someone finds personally meaningful) and extrinsic (something that contributes meaningfully to a greater whole).

You can still kill yourself on onerous yet meaningful work, but you'll also die fufilled and self-actualized.

You are partially mixing cause and symptoms. My burn out was totally erasing my motivation until I did not want to get up anymore. The cause was IMHO too much subconscious stress on multiple levels that kept my anxiety too high. But it is true that what follows is a downward spiral (which makes the statement true again: you however are unlikely to fix it by adding motivation)

Maybe there are different kinds of burnout.

The reason that statement seemed profound to me is because I have had experiences where I was doing something that was easy, that didn't involve any unethical behavior in this case, but it just seemed useless to me. I didn't care about it, I didn't find the work rewarding at all. And it led to burnout, eventually. Eventually I couldn't manage to get any of the (formerly easy) work done. It was still easy work. I was just burned out from doing work I had no interest in doing, even though it was easy. It wasn't really about stress, the work was easy, there wasn't too much stress.

You're right that my motivation dropped as I got burned out -- that's why I couldn't even accomplish the formerly easy task anymore. But I never really cared about it, which is I think why it led to burnout. If I had found the easy work really important and rewarding, I didn't think it would have led to burn out. Maybe "motivation" isn't the right word, or maybe motivation can mean a few things at a few levels...

This relates with me deeply. I once was almost literally told to "work harder, not smarter." Fortunately for my sanity, I was able to leave that place soon thereafter.

It's not that the work was hard, it was just kinda stupid.

I appreciate the brutal truth here about consulting. It took me a long time to realize that the goal wasn't to make something better or solve problems real. It was mostly about executive feelings, flattering people with money, and competition in dominance hierarchies. I don't do much consulting anymore.

And I salute anybody who turns down hush money. When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement. This guy really got his money's worth.

> When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement.

Thank you for the chuckle this gave me!

I spent a long time working in what you might call mid-tier consulting. We did a lot 6-8 figure consulting gigs at large corps mostly for digital and marketing projects, but also did some business strategy and product development. Sometimes we cross paths with Big 4 consultants who were embedded with the same client. We absolutely lived and died on our reputation and word of mouth for successful projects. The best engagements were the ones where we told clients they were asking for the wrong thing and needed to rethink their strategy. These were probably lower-level decisions than what Big 4 were doing, but still expensive things to get wrong. I've never seen or heard of anyone who has a positive opinion from the inside or out of the Big 4. It's like they are hired explicitly to draw up presentations to provide cover for knowingly wrong decisions that are already made.

You certainly won't get any contradiction from me. My one encounter with a big-4 consultancy shocked me. It was a software project with a hard deadline; the client had contractual obligations to a lot of state and local governments. The consultants said it would take them $5m to do it and the client happily signed. The consultant deployed a lot of bright young people with very little experience. As the deadlines were near, nothing worked. At which point, the consultants downed tools and said the money was spent. The client paid them another $5 million to come back and clean up the mess they made.

It was the most brazen theft I'd ever seen. I would never be able to do such a thing, and if I had been working for the consultancy I would have quit, stammering apologies to the client as I left.

16K for mutual non-disparagement isn't a serious offer. That's likely less than a month's salary for this guy. The message is they don't really care what he blabs about.

The message is that 99% of employees will blindly sign it without reading it, so they don't see a point in having a large dollar amount. The amount is high enough that courts won't immediately throw it out, but low enough to not break the bank for the company.

Hurts though putting your head down when you're a problem solver and want to do what's best for a client. :(

That is exactly why I just don't do much consulting. I like solving problems. I don't like bullshit. But human nature plus our modern business culture of managerialism make it so that problem-solving is pretty rarely the priority. Especially when the root cause of the problem is, say, our modern business culture of managerialism.

Yay America

This is pretty much what every consultant I've met in a personal setting has ever said to me. MBB, Big 4, boutique, all of them.

The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided.

You get put into awkward positions. Someone close to me ended up doing a presentation to the governor of the Bank of England, at age 23. Clearly this person did not know much that the boss didn't already know, but the consultancy charged the Bank nonetheless.

Perhaps just one of dozens of people I've spoken to about this career thinks it was a good choice.

It’s not that bad. Plenty of boutique do genuine very specialised work and both MBB and Big 4 have both interesting missions and rubber stamping ones.

Consulting is very uneven and as a new hire, being assigned to one or the other is mostly down to luck. That’s fine because at its heart consulting is mainly about managing your clients and their expectations and that’s something you can learn in both kind of jobs.

A big difference between small and prestigious consulting firms will be how insufferably full of themselves your colleagues are however. It has a significant impact on how the job feels on a daily basis.

Ex-consultant here. It's an amazing choice to get into business...then gtfo.

There's a certain kind of person who thrives in consulting and good for them - it pays really well, you're seen as an expert, and for partners it's pretty 9-5.

But it requires a very clear line of ownership - like this article alluded to, if a client wants to piss away $1 billion, that's their choice. I'm here to support you however. I'll disagree, but not too hard.

If you can walk that line, and sprint for the ~10 years to get there, it can be a very good life.

Part of the issue is that the entire game is individuals in companies saying "We have free money!" and consultancies responding "We'll take that money!"

Who's to blame?

Well, I'm inclined to trace the temporal chain and say it starts with the client.

If you hire a consultancy and say "I want to figure out X, Y, and Z by doing A, B, and C, and show me your work" then that's a very different engagement.

But it requires you to know your business, and a surprising number of clients don't.

> This is pretty much what every consultant I've met in a personal setting has ever said to me. MBB, Big 4, boutique, all of them.

Add "and one random commenter on HN"

Consulting is a social exercise, not an intellectual one.

> Consulting is a social exercise, not an intellectual one

I'm beginning to realize that work in general is mostly a social exercise, not an intellectual one.

Social exercises are intellectual exercises.

> but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided.

Here's the truth that no one wants to admit to: People aren't looking for advice. Ever. They're looking for affirmation on the choice to which they've already made and are going to commit.

That's what they want. That's what "consulting" is. That's what "advice" is.

And it's all useless bullshit anyway. The reason it's all useless bullshit is because situations and circumstances are never the same across time and location. You could do exactly what Larry Ellison or Bill Gates or Elon Musk did in their lives, and you'll have a vastly different outcome, because the world isn't static - it's an endlessly dynamic system.

"Management consultant" isn't about consulting, and it sure as shit isn't about "management", other than "managing" the feelings of the people with whom you're dealing and making them feel like they're making a good choice.

The reason being, if that was an honest job, and you really were a recognized subject matter expert with decades of experience and knowledge in regards to whatever field you're hired to consult in, when you tell the client to do X and Y, they'd do X and Y. Well, if that's the fuckin' case, why do the clients so often do W and Z instead??

They're looking for validation of their idiotic, hare-brained idea... that's why. They're paying you to reassure them they're not as stupid as you know they are, and as dumb as they actually feel.

its called CYA

Local government can't make a decision without paying a consultant six figures

Not just local governments, but most large corporations as well.

Not just large corporations, startups too. It's embarrassing the kind of consultancy a mid-size startup can hire.

> The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided.

... which is all you need to realise to see how conspiracies occur, how politics is a dog and pony show, how finance is just the execution of pre-determined strategies. Reality is not unfolding naturally - there is a clear plan, to which a veneer of 'natural unfolding' is applied to carry most people along.

I'm not sure how you get there from the quote

> you're NOT really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided

"I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others."

I still can't believe there are people this naive. Just reading a newspaper for a year should dispel these myths. A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless free-market train crashes. It's like those economists who thought most people were rational. Crazy stuff.

There are indeed those that are shockingly naive, and they are likely the majority. To give the benefit of the doubt though, it is widely accepted, even within say the Austrian school, that free markets need guardrails, and those guardrails are kinda like Fermat's famous "I'd write out the proof but there's no space in the margin". People underestimate what is necessary to provide reasonable levels of information symmetry, a just legal system, what constitutes fraud and false advertising, and so on. In the real world, you have mega corps in one corner and individuals in another, so the game is never as fair as "I trade you my tomatoes for your oranges" leads you to believe. As a result, there's a wide range of opinions amongst free marketers. The loudest tend to be accepting of things like insider trading, sex work and even organ selling, although that's likely not representative of people who self-identify with free market ideology.

The system of the Roman Republic had term limits, no corporate lobbying, and no political parties, and they still had all kinds of corruption and problems. My theory is that any political system will inevitably inherit the characteristics of its constituent parts, human beings, who are almost always corrupt or corruptible.

It's not due to coincidence that government corruption by the rich has been unsolved for thousands of years, across completely different civilizations, cultures, and places.

> no corporate lobbying

> no political parties

Really? I doubt it. I am no history scholar, but lobbying and grouping are so pervasive now I find it hard to believe they did not happen there and then

Yes really. There were of course wealthy families that had business interests looked after, but nothing like today where you have corporations whose power eclipses the state and calls the shots.

The lack of parties is even more black and white, those alliances did not exist at all. Advancement in their political system was based on individual accomplishments and if anything they were incentivized to sabotage each other, which is one problem they had.

It pays to game any system, that's why keeping things honest, functional and human is a perpetual effort.

Advocating a fixed view/system, that all we have to do is accept certain fundamentals as all we need, that's how you can tell who's openly trying to game this system. Gaming a system is cheapest if the system doesn't change, after all.

> corruption by the rich has been unsolved for thousands of years

I guess we found the root cause :)

> The loudest tend to be accepting of things like insider trading, sex work and even organ selling

Are you suggesting, that these are all bad things?

It's also seems self-contradictory. Another bit of free-market dogma is the economy is so complicated no one can understand it, but if that's the case how can anyone tell that "goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others" and not bullshit games, like the consulting described in the OP. I feel it just collapses into circular reasoning: "define what the market does as good and true, therefore what the market does is good and true."

Your problem is plainly answered by Hayek in The Use of Knowledge in Society

I mean they're basically a college student given the YOE and where this was published, sounds like the kid got mugged by reality. But yea, definitely jaw-droppingly naive.

> sounds like the kid got mugged by reality

It's curmudgeonly of me, but he got mugged by MIT; which operated very much like the consultancy he went to work for. Promise everything, give the client what they want, ignore the obvious problems in the proposal and let the client take the hit if that's what they want so desperately.. just give them the rubber stamp.

So, he took his MIT rubber stamp out into the real world and found out how much "double class load" was NOT like "actual paid work."

Well, he did mention monopoly effects and negative externalities, but only as if they are minor "extra terms" rather than completely disproving his starting point.

? I can't believe there are still people who don't grasp that he's right.

The free market has 'train crashes' just like the highway has 'car crashes'.

Most things of value are created by regulated markets.

We tend to only intervene when there are ugly monopoly areas (single access rights), and where pricing/elasticity cause problems (healthcare).

I mean you're literally on a site create but ultra captilists.

That said, there's no substitute for 'regular morality' I mean, beyond legalities etc.. I think it's assumptive in a lot of our systems, we just don't talk about it enough.

Saying "train wrecks" to disprove the point is like saying "A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless modern medicine train crashes."

I don't know about you, but despite the "train wrecks" in modern medicine, I'm still a believer.

yeah, this is just in issue in the US due to our "free markets". Never ever happens in countries with real socialism

Also, look up at the green grass

Honestly not a very surprising story. Maybe it wasn't even worth skipping the $16k. Looking at the endless list of boondoggles undertaken by some of the middle eastern countries awash with oil, one can only surmise that there is a well staffed consultant class there who are very talented at never saying no, I can say I'm completely unsurprised about that.

If you believe that as an employee of BCG, you're offering next to no value (as a yes man who makes snappy powerpoints to help squash the fleeting doubts of some architecturally aspirational minor royal), and that the actions of your clients are broadly unethical (destroying the planet, facilitating other people destroying the planet, cutting up diplomats, etc.), arguably, is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite for such clients to increase inertia in their operations and drain their ill-gotten gains?

No, it's not a surprising story, but I don't think that is why he passed on the $16k. Rather I think that he was done being payed to suppress his conscience. And $16k to give up the freedom to discuss your life doesn't sound like a good deal to me (especially if you are not hurting for cash).

> is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite

If you're surrounded by a transparently evil organization AND you profit from it, even if you think you are doing good, you will likely be corrupted and trapped in a web of your own justifications that just happen to support the continuation of a fat pay check.

It may have been a bit more surprising in 2010 when this was written, before there were a lot more stories like this one being published.

For me the shoe dropped after Palm Island #2 in Dubai, when they announced The World. It looked silly, didn't sell well and it didn't succeed cleanly and was immediately followed by the announcement of The Universe, where even the renders looked sloppy.

If you want to undertake a boondoggle, why not skip the consulting and get right into it?

The consulting provides it with a veneer of legitimacy.

It was surprising to me.

When I was a consultant, the saying was

  A consultant is someone who borrows the client's watch, tells them the time, and keeps the watch.

In doing consulting, my biggest failure was turning down a class A network for the client (the client ended up with 6 /16s equivalents -- worth far more than what they paid me). I turned down $600M worth of IPv4 space at today's prices.

I started my career as a programmer in the late 90s, the golden age of consultants.

Two jokes from that era that reveal how they were viewed by the rank-and-file:

---

A young zookeeper walks into the zoo on her first day of work. As she was being given the tour she notices 3 cages each containing a monkey and a computer.

"What's with these monkeys?" she asked her new boss.

"An amazing experiment. Look at this one" he said, pointing at the first cage. The monkey was sitting beside a small pile of bananas while happily typing on the keyboard - occasionally stopping to take a bite.

"This monkey will produce over 200 lines of Visual Basic a day so long as it gets a few bananas."

"Wow! What about this one", said the new hire, pointing the to second cage where the monkey was typing faster next to a larger pile of bananas.

"That monkey eats more but produces over 300 lines of fully debugged Java a day"

The trainee was astounded and pointed to the last cage, where the monkey was sitting on top of a huge pile of bananas, seemingly asleep. "What about that last monkey? He has the most bananas but doesn't appear to be doing anything."

"We don't know what that monkey does," explained the boss, "but he calls himself a consultant"

---

What is the difference between a shopping cart with a broken wheel and a consultant?

The shopping cart seems to have a mind of its own but you can fit a lot more food and drink inside the consultant.

Sounds like the third monkey had the most apeeling job.

I'm currently suing my previous employers for unfair dismissal in what is honestly a compliation of some of the most craziest work stories people I tell them to have heard. At the first settlement offer had a boilerplate clause that I could saying bad things about the employer and considering the nature of all the stories it would be a non-disclosure covering some epic stories. Reality is, I would rather be able to tell those stories than take any settlement. The stories while super stressful to go through are super fun to tell to people, they're just that crazy.

Unless you tell us right now I’m going to assume you were in the wrong ;)

Edit: saw your response, sounds crazy!

I'm gonna sue him for non-disclosure.

Well?

It's still going through the courts.

But I feel bad not giving something and this isn't part of the legal case so, the CEO kicked my french bulldog puppy, called a former employee a slut, implied the only reason to respect the COO was to have sex with her, and by the end of it we highly suspected he beat his wife.

Was this a small startup? I’ve seen these terrible antics in smaller ones where the CEOs can hide better.

A startup that was acquired and operating as its own entity. So basically still a small startup.

Based on my own experience at McKinsey and what I heard from coworkers, I think the author’s experience comes from a mixture of the realities of management consulting and the realities of working in the Dubai office. For whatever reason, my colleagues who spent time in that office described poorly-defined projects, unmotivated clients, and rubber-stamping that went well beyond anything I experienced in the US.

People vastly overstate the implications from one-sided anecdotes.

Not only are these firms 'different at every office' even within the same office it varies a lot.

I work at one of the well-known tech companies. We have recently gone on a consultant hiring spree after previously having avoided external contractors for years.

With a team of five consultants and their manager, months of useless hour long meetings to answer simple questions that can be looked up in the documentation, and plenty of slideshows and design docs that are mostly filled with fluff, they’ve produced... a dashboard that I could have put together in about 30 minutes.

Whatever social purpose this contract fulfills is a total mystery to me, but all I can think of is what a waste of human time this is.

Facebook? Layoffs homie.

>I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder such questions, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the children test.

This particular sentence struck a nerve. You can justify literally anything self-serving in this way; I had to beat that old man up and take his wallet, it was to pay for my hypothetical kids' college!

That's why you need to look at the deeds first and take justifications into account only optionally.

> Analytical skills were overrated, for the simple reason that clients usually didn’t know why they had hired us. They sent us vague requests for proposal, we returned vague case proposals, and by the time we were hired, no one was the wiser as to why exactly we were there.

Achieving this zen state is a primary goal of consulting firms working with public sector. After winning an initial brutal low balling battle with competitors, the goal is to transition to a model of a steady conveyor belt of non-competitive fluffy proposals for changes going one way to the client, and money flowing back the other way back to the firm.

Great Podcast and Great podcast episode on Mckinsey: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34553310/sheth-mckinse...

Gives a bit more background on consulting. I've always thought of it as a fluffy business but its still big business and the podcast breaks it down.

Interesting factoid: the "Chief of Staff" role in the White House was created thanks to McKinsey.

Highly recommend watching management consulting tv drama/comedy - House of Lies

Trailer for season 1: https://youtu.be/pNLlHYJnj8I

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 (1y ago, 261 points, 182 comments)

Top comment there is:

> The experience taught me a lot about business and business leadership. Many times I’d ask myself “what would McKinsey or BCG do here?” Then I’d go do the exact opposite. That’s proven a good course of action at many critical junctures.

While this agrees with my personal impression “in bulk” it’s worth noting that there are exceptions. McKinsey is currently focusing heavily on hiring actually accomplished top engineers from production environment…specifically targeting those with 6-10 YOE who may have hired into a “lesser” company during a recession or market downturn than they should have qualified for their graduation year of college. They’re hiring engineers who have had outsized / personally unexpected (by the engineer) success with changes to processes or best engineering practices that ended up being rolled out to wide swaths of their company, or globally across the org.

They are also specifically looking among those effective engineers for who can also speak competently with many layers of an org - not just the business people but also lend help and expertise on the technical side and gain trust through competence.

The experienced engineers I know that they’ve picked up are among the best industrial / process / manufacturing engineers that I’ve ever known and are insanely technically competent.

But I also think these are hired into relatively small, niche groups and offices. The bulk of the consultant pool are still fresh MBAs, maybe with limited but glamorous resume fillers.

Yes even McKinsey had to realise at some point that the bulk of the money was now in IT consulting, prestige be damned. But I have to give you that they have spun a good tale around it as usual.

Current McKinsey. It's a big decentralized firm so it's hard to say definitively what other groups are doing but I don't think we're doing "IT consulting" if you mean the body shops that do implementation work like Accenture.

The engineers and folks are mostly because we need to do a lot of stuff with analytics and working with different platforms as needed.

I knew it would touch a nerve but yes, McKinsey is currently doing things which are not very far from what Accenture is doing minus the putting developers in seats part and that’s very much what I would call IT consulting - quotes non included because I still don’t like smelling my own fart enough to despise actual work.

You could try to spin it and say they only touch the high value complex parts of issues – I will concede that if there is one thing McKinsey is good at invoicing aside it’s putting a shiny coat of paint on things – but the reality is they do relatively unglamorous and low brow things for the money.

> I knew it would touch a nerve but yes

Am I supposed to be upset if you think some parts of the company I work at do IT consulting?

> It was clear that the client was going to go forward with their decision regardless of how I acted. How could I be responsible for a foregone conclusion?

I wonder if it was NEOM. But that's going to destroy a lot more than only $1 billion when all is said and done.

Edit: Oh, 2010. Never mind.

Also a different country...

Their clients were only Emiratis? I did not see that in the article.

Do you have any insights on Neom?

Just public info.

This is quite a sober and reasonable analysis from an architect https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o

A comment from a consultant, on Astral Codex Ten https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122...

Not to mention Scott Alexander's writeup: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122

> My moral system is organized around a utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number — that which adds value cannot be wrong. It did not bother me therefore when I was handed consulting reports that had been stolen from our competitors. If the information in those reports would help us improve our client, then who could say we were doing wrong? Like downloading MP3s, it was a victimless crime.

My reply is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson [1]:

> A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

[1] https://www.bartleby.com/5/104.html

>The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” >in Munich. I expected instruction in Excel programming, data analysis, and >business theory.

Imagine signing up for MBB and thinking it was this. Completely misguided.

This post is ridiculous, the writer thought the business world was an academic meritocracy like (MIT). Also a silly notion.

Totally out of depth and naïve.

Not everybody has experience with consultancy work, and this doesn't make them or what they write "ridiculous".

Happy to talk about my experiences at Bain & Co (very similar to this). After four years of undergrad in Math & CS, and four summers of internships, I decided I no longer wanted to do software engineering. Thus, I applied and was accepted to strategy consulting.

I lasted six months, and am now happily employed in SW. Just wasn't worth it.

Clickbait. The author was offered a standard severance package when he was terminated. Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement.

Severance helps people make the transition to their next job, but it also serves the company by preventing you from suing for wrongful termination or saying bad things about the company.

>Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement.

Ive seen ones that do and ones that dont.

For the ones that do they all had a very good reason to want it.

These clauses are indeed very standard boilerplate. I don't think people take them very seriously, although maybe they should.

My conclusion after reading: $16,000 blog post

@dang, this person is right. The title is clickbait; the author wasn't offered hush money to not report or blog about something. They were offered money for signing a severance agreement with NDA:

> What did surprise me was the offer BCG made to me as I was on the way out the door. In exchange for me signing an agreement, BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams. Much of it looked boilerplate, like any common compromise agreement used in Europe — in return for some money, I would stipulate that I hadn’t been discriminated against on the basis of race or gender, etc.

> But the rest was very clearly a non-disclosure agreement

Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure.

You are omitting the sentences immediately afterwards. "Non disclosure agreement" is just a word, the provisions are what are important.

> Not only did it bar me from making any disparaging comments about BCG or my work experience, but I wouldn’t even be allowed to reveal the existence of the non-disclosure agreement itself.

I concede that the title is a bit sensationalist, but it is essentially accurate. BCG did offer the author $16k to not write anything about them, including this story.

> Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure.

I am not at MIT or even loosely affiliated with MIT. I know that BCG stands for Boston Consulting Group in the context of consulting. Also, it's kind of like IBM, you don't really need to know that it stands for International Business Machines, that cluster of initials has an identity all by itself in a certain context.

BCG is one of the big three firms. Just like the big four accounting firms, they aren’t known to the average person. That goes for just about every company outside the top brand names. In the context of the [business] world, BCG is known enough imo.

> the author wasn't offered hush money

Just because the hush money is a standardized agreement doesn't mean it isn't hush money.

Really enjoyed this article. Old business partner was at McKinsey and shared a lot of similar things with me. One oddity is how low $16k is. Their salaries are above average big by comparison. Could be they just cheaped out and thought it was adequate but it feels quite small to what I'd expect.

The story is interesting, but the grabber in the headline is overblown: a severance tied to an exit agreement with an NDA is bog standard in consulting, especially if you're leaving due to a RIF, as this person seems to have been.

Former consultant here. I once got staffed on a project to "predict the economy"

Not an exaggeration - it failed (obviously) to the tune of $2M. And then the client bought another $5M extension on a different project.

Consulting is so insane sometimes.

In 2010ish, I worked at a place that did various things for a Dubai gov't-owned development company that had invested in us.

What exactly did we do? I'm not sure. There was lots of meetings. And proposals. And trips to Dubai. And nice dinners. And executives with vague titles like "VP Special Projects".

I think Dubai's economy fizzed out at about the same time that we discovered our owner was squandering/embezzling their investments in us.

>> I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.

This author is thoroughly analytical, and explains in such good detail why consulting is the work of the devil. Yet, he doesn’t apply any of that to the tenets of American Free Market Capitalism, which proved over and over to be the enabler of both the business model he’s decrying, and the end reason for most of his misery.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how efficiently capitalism is able to self-preserve itself. Free market as a framework for the definition of value has proven to create distorsions and inequalities never before seen in society, but we still gotta drink the cool aid because… because there just nothing better than free market and it’s a dogma!

So the criticism stops at BCG, and not at the freaky system that made BCG possible.

The guy has 2 cognitive dissonance 1/ the fact that his full belief of free market contraicts his job of lying to the client and 2/ the fact that he had to producz bogus reports.

One is hard to handle, two when your are younf and full of drive is downright impossible

https://archive.ph/VavYg

I think the headline is misleading. The author was offered a standard corporate severance deal, which had a standard non-disclosure, in return for a very standard (even low) severance package. He was not offered money for silence on his specific story.

50% of consulting work as a business consultant can be summed up in one phrase:

"Shut up and color"

Anyone who wants more consulting stories like this should read "House of Lies."

Not mentioned here in the comments (and slightly unclear if you only read the title) is that the $16,000 was not USD but $16,000 AED, so about ~$60,000 USD.

> BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams

I read that as enough AED to be equivalent to ~$16k USD.

Agreed. Dirhams is the unit, so it would be "16,000 dirhams," not $16,000 in dirhams.

1 USD = 3.6 AED

Also, the article states that the offer was for $16,000 in equivalent local currency, so ~AED60,000.

USD/AED is 3.67, so 16K AED is USD 4360

> This is the third in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai.

Anyone found the others? I haven't but I only tried a little bit.

Sure:

#1 https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16

#2 https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17

#4 https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19

I think the author of this went to MIT.

But I can't be sure.

Good article. Looking forward to the next part

this was written in 2010. here are all of Keith's articles

https://thetech.com/authors/keith-yost

but not sure if he ever wrote a followup. here's his AMA on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kde8s/iama_former_bus...

Hmmm... I have a really hard time accounting with the MIT course load, which throws shade onto the rest of the article.

Yes, I have no doubt large firms offer NDAs at separation. I regularly sign NDAs when I start a new job, and when I exit them. Each time, I am compensated. The exit NDAs are reasonably narrow, and limited in time. If I do not like them, I do not sign them or ask for changes. It is just as much "hush money" or "not to tell" money about the company culture, as it is about intellectual property. It does not read like the OP was forced, threatened or coerced. If so, it is abhorrent and should be trumpeted to all.

> I worked hard at MIT. I routinely took seven to ten classes per semester and filled whatever hours were left in the day with part-time jobs and tutoring.

MIT uses a combination of lectures/recitations, labs/design/field, and outside prep in 'units'. I converted the units to credits. Overall, a 1-credit course is 3 hours a week work. Most courses are 3 and 4 credit. If we take 50% of the ten classes at 3 credit, and 50% at 4 credit, that comes out to be 335 and 345, or 105 hours. At max that 120 hours a week (10 courses @ 4 creds/class), and at minimum is still 63 hours a week (7 courses @ 3 creds/class).

Full time load at MIT is 36 or more units, or 12 credits.[0]

Three MIT units is approximately equal to one "semester hour" or credit.[1][2]

First year students are limited to 60 units (20 credits)[3] and

>you should note 48-54 units is still considered a typical load and advisable for most students. Requirements at MIT are structured so that you do not need to exceed 54 units per semester (or 48 in many cases) to successfully complete your degree in 4 years. [4]

[0] https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/student-sta...

[1] https://ospa.utdallas.edu/semester-credit-hours-fall-2019-av...

[2] https://registrar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/calcul...

[3] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit...

[4] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit...

Market for lemons.

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