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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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