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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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