When McKinsey comes to town
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They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss.
Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
Do the 80 hour work weeks not ruin the psychology of non-LGBTQ folxs?
(Off to dig my tongue out of the deep hole in my cheek.)
[EDIT] Well, and also it's not kept within the host country, but exports those ideas & methods globally.
At my previous place of employ they made some really terrible decisions which ended up costing a LOT of money later.
Their response was classic "the design was vetted by McKinsey"..
No.. you sent them what you wanted to do, they told you what you wanted/needed to hear and now you are deflecting your decisions.
We were already using agile in our org, but nice to know some incesteral relationship between directors/VPs were able to make a nice pay day.
you should read the book.. The industry is rife with this type of behaviour.
There are always stories about how "senior manager" X is basically a shadow employee. While they work for company "Y" their real job is to send business to the consulting mother ship.
I can't find the comment now, but there was a similar conspiracy about ex-Amazon Managers being paid to force their new employers to adopt AWS on one of the programming subreddits.
But lets say that in my industry this sort of "kickback scheme" is well known.
I saw it first hand, and have had friends tell me other instances of it as well. And i am NOT singling out "McKinsey" but consultants in general.
As for McKinsey, read the book, they provide examples of this.
One example in the last few years: BCG and NCR Corporation.
"It is undisputed that Mr. Benjamin, as an officer of NCR, owed NCR a fiduciary duty that includes a duty of loyalty. The Counterclaims allege sufficient facts to show that Mr. Benjamin breached that duty by entering into a secret agreement with BCG to promote and expedite his candidacy for CEO. The Counterclaims further allege sufficient facts to show that BCG worked with Mr. Benjamin to negotiate a one-sided contract, and remove and replace employees who opposed adoption of the contract, and that BCG advocated for Mr. Benjamin’s promotion to CEO in hopes that he would award BCG with a discretionary bonus." [1]
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
Because of this, it is now irrefutable that this takes place and this is your response?
"I can only speak to my own experience..".. Well.. Have you considered your experience may be severely limited?
Perhaps in the future don't be so fast to pull the "conspiracy" card?
I'm not legally literate enough to understand the court opinion you attached. Regardless, of course there will be cases of bad players in any large company - that goes without saying. But its tiresome always hearing the same "McKinsey is the root of all evil and secretly influences governments and companies".
The opinion that most engineers have of MBB is often based on conjecture as they typically have only ever hard arms length exposure to such consulting firms. As a software engineer myself, working at both startups and FAANG before McKinsey, I was of the exact same opinion about McKinsey and these types of companies. The truth is much more mundane and boring though.
That's the best strategy to prevent the masses from investigating further. You shouldn't label something like you did if you haven't done your research.
> legally literate enough to understand the court opinion you attached
I think you are literate enough to read and understand the key part I included in quotes for you, from the ruling which completely refutes your prior position, and attitude, with hard evidence. It's as clear as day!!!
> McKinsey is the root of all evil and secretly influences governments and companies
Well they've had a lot of bad looks, especially with their role with Purdue Pharma and OxyContin. Their former alumni was CEO of Enron which they consulted for 15 years. "But up until the very end, it was promoting Enron’s business model, especially its off-balance sheet accounting practice, and encouraging others to follow suit." They "recommended ICE save money on food served to the detainees or send the migrants to facilities in rural areas to cut back on expenditure" They agreed to pay $100M to South African government in a corruption scandal [1]
Last year, one of their private investment funds agreed to pay $18M to settle an SEC issue regarding insider information gleaned from the corporate consulting business. [2] They have a hedge fund which makes bets on the advice they sell.
Here's another one regarding McKinsey & their investment office (MIO) and Valeant Pharmaceuticals which buys out other drugmakers and jacks up prices. "Four top Valeant officials, including Mr. Pearson, were McKinsey veterans, and the firm was advising Valeant on drug prices and acquisitions." Later in the article, "a federal judge in Virginia last month reopened a coal-company bankruptcy case after learning that McKinsey had not disclosed, as required by law, that it was also among the company’s secured creditors, through MIO". Further down: "An investigation requested by the oversight board found that MIO had five direct and indirect investments in Puerto Rico’s debt while McKinsey advised the island". [3]
So you start to look at all these big corporate consulting firms and if you are being unbiased, you can see it's systemic. They wield a lot of power and influence. They get their alumni and friends placed in government and huge companies and then make deals and institute their strategies to make a ton of money.
> The truth is much more mundane and boring though.
Yes from your position it would be. You aren't the one placing CEOs, making kick back deals, getting involved with foreign governments and corruption, writing strategy for Encron, ICE or OxyContin, investing in company government debt on one side and advising on it the other. The system isn't designed for people like you to be included in that part of the business.
In my opinion, people fall into one of these buckets - pawn, shill, or informed. In an information age, isn't it remarkable that most STILL fall into the pawn category?
[1] https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-ha...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/investment-fun...
[3] New York Times - https://archive.ph/ZSDBH
Look at your response on the "agile" comment. They feel it was "pure graft" and you defended it without knowing any details?
Now look at the other response on this thread, where someone stated they saw it first hand as well.
Are they in on the "conspiracy theory" as well, or perhaps there is truth to it?
I think we need to be more critical of what it means to see things "first hand". MBB are typically operating at the executive level and the motivations between executives decisions typically don't reach the "rank and file" of the organization (forgive the wording). In my response I mentioned that the cost of engaging McKinsey is so extremely high that there will need to be some type of rational justification for bringing them in (beyond just covering my ass).
That being said, I worked on a few projects where I wasn't sure whether the cost justifies the benefits but this was largely due to incompetence or overselling - never "pure graft".
I think everyone needs to be more critical of "Shill" accounts such as yours.
You are fast to assume that i did not see it "first hand", slow to realize that this does take place and when provided new information (the lawsuit post) unwilling/unable to incorporate new information into your position.
What value do you feel you are adding to the conversation? You seem to be wearing your McKinsey hat "they never do anything wrong, it is all justified just not at your level"..
I'm trying to offer a unique opinion of a software engineer who spent a short time working in this industry. If you're not buying it then no problem.
Personally, I would never invite McKinsey or any of these companies into my own company. But then again I don't run a 100k person company.
The driver to me seems to clearly increase complexity for the sake of it in order to push for more billable hours.
This was pure graft.
Honest Q since you're a throwaway but is this how consultants typically act? Justify simple things to be more complex to lay people and charge them out the wazoo?
I think I'm slowly starting to understand why some of my friends are creating their own dev agencies. This racket is rife with stupid money.
At the micro level, I would agree that in some cases there was a tendency of some to make things more complex than necessary. The implicit intent here was generally to demonstrate some type of credential to lay people.
That being said, at least in my personal experience, most of the actual recommendations were backed by as much data as possible. In the projects I worked on, I don't think a single slide went by without hours of debate and critique by the partners. It was a given that any recommendation should be supported by data.
That being said, there are also lots of cases where there is no right/wrong answer - especially given the timeframe (typically 4-8 weeks). Companies basically pay consultants to come in, analyse as much data as feasible and just make some type of informed decision. In most cases the company is either unwilling to make that decision themselves or does not have the ability to do so (i.e. organisation is too complex to tackle this problem within so just get an outsider to cut across the company and get it sorted as best as possible).
And an insurmountable barrier to then declare it was a waste of money.
ie once these initiatives start - they are inevitably declared successes because too much has been invested ( literally ).
So the consultants always leave with success declared, whether it works out in the long run I suspect the consultants will hardly ever know - just moving on from one declared success to another.
There are obviously lots of hacks and shenanigans around defining and negotiating these success metrics with various "levels" [1] of impact being defined and fees being released only when some stage is crossed.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/rts/our-insights/keepi...
There was a genuine and optimistic belief in agile among programmers and management. They tried and failed refusing to admit the mistake and doubling down on all the BS.
It works perfectly fine to hire consults to do welding courses for the employees. If agile was a good idea "agile consultants" would do fine to.
Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat.
They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money.
"They are not brought in to solve problems"
I've known people that worked for consultancies and the biggest value add they think they have brought is when the problem is the rivalries, politics, and squabbaling has led to inaction and they've needed outside support to come in who don't care about these things.
Perhaps we should hope for companies to have leadership teams where they are able to cut through this intransigence, but unfortunately all too often with old companies stuck in their ways this isn't the case.
They care about the agenda of the person they've been hired by. Usually a C-level agenda-setter or someone influential in the org, and often a McK "alum".
And speaking of action, they have zero stake in the actual implementation of what they proselytize.
All this isn't to say that they don't provide value. Exchange of money is usually is a reasonable signal of providing value, and these firms and its employees do reliably well in that area. However, the narratives around what value strategy consultants provide I find to be truthy, but not actually true.
How do I get some of the drugs you're on? Sounds like a truly magical journey.
One team had no clear leadership, and there was an important milestone coming up that the team didn't seem to be orienting around. I started kicking up a fuss in meetings by constantly asking "Is this important for our April launch?". I know I upset at least one person, but with some help from management we ended up collectively getting the launch back on track.
At another company my perspective was relayed through my consulting company to the client's upper management, and that ended up being used to fire someone. It doesn't feel good - he was a nice guy. But he was genuinely useless. He spent about 90% of his attention brown nosing to upper management. Once or twice he even actively sabotaged the team in small ways so he could be seen stepping in and fixing the problem. I think they wanted to get rid of him anyway but they didn't have legal cover.
There's absolutely value for companies in having outside consultants sit amongst a team. But its a subtle kind of value. I thought I was brought in to write code. Hah!
Certainly though if all they're doing is parroting back conclusions backed by "research" that the exec who hired them wants to hear then they aren't providing much value, other than perhaps providing air cover when some decision, any decision, is better than no decision and gridlock.
In my experience, hope has always been a terribly poor and ineffective strategy.
Problems that will screw you royally (speaking of the firm here) if you get them wrong, so you bring in outside perspective that can pattern match your problem to real world examples (and get in the room with others who’ve navigated a similar problem) to make sure you take the best trajectory.
At worst, consulting is exactly what you say. Large firms, being so large, cover the gamut in their services (and so surely get some exposure to these more flippant projects). The bread and butter of consulting though is solving real problems.
From here, this perspective you have about consulting looks a lot like the mindset some people have around VC: “they just come in to pump companies and dump them in the public market / make an exit before the music stops and everyone realizes it’s bullshit”. Of course there’s some of that in VC, but by and large it’s legitimate and serious work, focused on legitimate outcomes, and done all around by genuine people looking to do a good job - all while creating real value for everyone involved.
We also were fully aware of the old joke that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and then tells you the time. We sometimes deployed this ourselves with customers, and extended it to say that unlike our rivals, we would actually point out how late you were and how to get back on track.
[Edit] We sometimes found ourselves supporting one of the big 4 companies (as domain experts). We were often amazed by the quality of the A team that they would deploy to win the work, compared with the B or C team that would then actually execute it (often bright but junior staff).
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.
This highly-paid factory efficiency expert was enthusiastically explaining how he works. "You just listen to the workers. They know where the inefficiencies are"
It worked but was a very expensive way to about fixing social problems.
Just come to provide the results the boss wants to have for him to rubber stamp and justify the cost cutting.
I've also had some experience working for a smallish company with very big clients and they sometimes insisted on having an IT-Consulting company like Capgemini as a middleman. That's the biggest nightmare because they were always a net-negative from my POV...integrating them was just extra work and they provided no value except for their brand name to make the client feel at ease.
- when things go well, they can take the credit, or
- when things go bad, they can blame the consulting company.
Grubby business if you ask me.
The other half haven't figured it out and think they're getting top-tier stuff and end up with life destroying garbage like your employee performance system or a citywide trash crisis? [1]
Do you need to spend millions to justify an inevitable decision but blame the hired guns for it? Hire McKinsey.
Do you need to spend millions for severely overworked junior grade consultants and offshored "experts" to provide you with objectively terrible advice and create an opioid epidemic? Also hire McKinsey! [2]
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/nyregion/new-york-city-tr... 2 - https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/opioidfacts
Everyone knew that one of 'big 4' was hired to make the prospects of going public legit and credible. That consulting firm made things look right in exchange of big bucks.
Managers charge 400-600(mind you 25% on top of this is for travel).
So something like (just making up numbers here)
$120,000/year $170/hr for each billable hour over 20 hours/month Sales/delivery bonuses, etc.
Top tier consulting firms are: McKinsey, BCG, Bain
It's like Deloitte consultants referring to MBBD.
I'm pretty sure that's just a reddit meme, but I guess it's funny someone took it seriously?
I am not nor have I ever been an Accenture consultant.
Big 4 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms
Big Three / MBB = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_%28management_consul...
I would be impressed by them if I wasn't so disgusted.
Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
$150/hr is really not that much money, depending on the importance of the project, and having devs from India is fine.
Almost the entirety of the question in any given situation is 'Did it work out?'
Because if it did, it was worth it.
Companies are not interested in making 'great products' like a startup would, for some secondary thing.
Mostly, it's like construction: they need something built. That works. Not some kind of innovative thing.
They don't have a year to find 'top talent' and go through interesting architectures, or dynamic processes. They wouldn't even know how to do that.
You might be very well downplaying your input: if you are competent, know what you are doing, show up, and can solve the problem, you're probably worth every penny and much more. Now maybe that is or is not the case! Or maybe 'it depends' or maybe, some projects kind of necessarily require 'proper engineering'.
Now, all of what I just said would apply to normal circumstances. In Africa, it's so complicated. McKinsey is also very different office by office. Corruption is harder than we understand, because when it's a random event we can say 'oh, corrupt!' - but when it's normal trade practice aka 5% kickback for the buyer, well, it takes on a different characteristic.
- Client is a legacy bank
- Client wants to be a fancy new cool digital bank like Revolut
- Client brings in McKinsey to help get them there
- McKinsey (traditional side) does a strategy engagement first (4-8 weeks) to define priorities, budget, etc
- McKinsey Digital + traditional consultants come in to do the implementation. This includes architecture, actual tech building (more on this below), assisting with hiring and HR, coaching, financials, integration/de-integration with rest of business. Essentially everything involved with starting a "new" business.
If you want a single company to come in and literally do everything to build and run a new business I do think you would need an MBB-type company as they can bring in all these different skills (business, people, tech, process etc). I'm very reluctant to praise my former employer.
On the actual tech building side, McKinsey would typically bring only 1-3 technical people as it's cost prohibitive for the client (I was one of those people). McKinsey would help the client hire new people or bring in contractors (i.e. Nagarro and the likes).
I suspect probably not unless they were following/copying some very tried and true path of an upstart.
'New Models' have so many dynamic aspects, you need 'good people and leadership' to do it, and generally it's hard for them to be truly copied.
Some smart consultants and a well-lead offshore team could make a run at it ... but it's a bit risky I think.
I can see how people might think that would work but I'm skeptical.
That’s not being hoodwinked either. If you’re happy to pay $1B for something and get that thing, then that’s your fault for not shopping around for a better deal.
Bernie Madoff and SBF hoodwinked people. Somebody charging a premium for their services and getting willing customers isn’t.
There are regional hubs they have (I've worked with Philippines and India and heard of Eastern Europe) for the support and maintenance.
There are some back office financial shared services (e.g., AP / AR / cutting POs) that they also support. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more.
Accenture can give you everything from the PowerPoint slides up to the people that will be seconded or placed in your organization as contingent workers / contractors.
What if you have a grocery store that makes $50,000 an hour? and you need to update the payroll software to deal with the latest tax law changes.
in a situation like that, does $150/hr matter?
There's a difference between strategy consulting (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain) and consultants that do large implementation projects (e.g. Accenture).
Yes, it's not so black and white these days as both do a bit of both but the reasons they are hired are very different:
Strategy: best practices, ass-covering, politics. Smaller teams, shorter timeframe, C-level. Think interviews & powerpoint slides.
Implementation: body leasing, offloading large projects. Larger teams, IT-heavy, longer timeframes. Actual coding / documentation, etc.
And no, your experience working on a 300-people core banking project at Accenture doesn't translate to a 5-people McKinsey project.
And while both types are "expensive", they are needed in the corporate world. Because work in that environment is more than just writing code in a text editor, it's mostly politics at the top.
There’s a certain class of work that is (1) really critical to get right the first time and (2) only done once a decade. That’s the type of stuff where it’s good to hire an outside firm - the outside guys go from company to company, doing this one rare thing over and over.
Other examples might include M&A (eg divestitures), offshoring (eg standing up a factory in Mexico), or new market entry (eg launching a product in a brand new country).
I draw a parallel with some Asian cultures where being tanned is a sign that you're working in the field, so it's better to avoid the sun and stay as white as can be. When I was at accenture, there was a huge culture to "leave code" as soon as you could. Code is for people who do. Mere grunts. You gotta be a decider, a boss. The only career path (I think that's not true anymore) was management track. They even had a subsidiary called accenture technology services to recruit from universities with less reputation, but "keep the blood pure". It does make sense when you're in it, but golly am I happy I left that world.
It pains me that it's always seen as an evil, because sometimes it is the best option.
I don't know what you did, and I don't want to besmirch it. So let's take a recent "successful" project: OMNY, the new transit fare system in NYC.
That system cost the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority over three quarters of a billion dollars. $772,000,000.
To put that in comparison, the point of sale payment processor Square raised 170 million fewer dollars over from seed to series E and does fifty times as much payment volume.
There is a staggering amount of inefficiency in these projects, and I suspect it's because of capture.
So, they also do some -high end- implementation work as well :)
- They worked on the presidential campaigns of Macron in 2017 and 2022, and were awarded huge government contracts with little or no bidding afterwards
- They didn't pay any taxes in France since 2011, sending money to the mothership instead to reduce taxable profits to zero; and their managing partner, who is accused of having lied to parliament about it, resigned in the wake of that discovery.
Here's one article (of many), in French:
https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-...
(Disable javascript to bypass the firewall).
So it's not just South Africa, UK and the US; it really is everywhere.
- I'd guess >95% of people never run into anything morally questionable while there. My teams always tried to do their best and I never felt like we were helping achieve any sort of nefarious goal. Most of the time I think we were worth the money for our clients.
- I do think the culture makes it more likely for individuals to take risks that may end up getting them in trouble. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, and a lot of money (and prestige) at stake. It's easy to imagine individuals cracking under that pressure and making bad choices, and that the rest of the team might fall in line so that they can also succeed. I'd put most of the blame here on McKinsey and some on the individuals involved - maybe 70/30.
- I'd guess most other consultancies have bodies hidden somewhere that are similar to McKinsey's (questionable contracts, outright fraud, botched projects, moral failures, etc).
- The closest I got to something morally questionable was a project where we had a huge contract to help the client cut costs, including firing people. You'd think our budget would have been on the chopping block too, but I guess not. Obviously this left a bad taste in most of our mouths. I feel we tried to do our best, but I doubt we were worth our fees in that instance. The company eventually merged with another, so even more people were fired in the end.
- The 'internal firewalls' are real - if you've been on a project for one big company in an industry, they won't let you work for a project with another one. There were internal experts we couldn't talk to because of concerns in this area. I'm sure this hasn't been 100% true 100% of the time, but generally I think this is a real concern for McK (if they couldn't guarantee this they'd lose client trust) so they make a real effort to prevent it.
- While I was there, projects with the tobacco companies were famous for having better work/life balance than almost any other project. They were hard to staff because so many junior consultants refused on ethical grounds, so I guess this was a carrot?
- I can mostly only speak to the US. I heard some jawdropping stories about how reliant the Saudi government is on McKinsey and other consultants to get almost any work done, even the most basic things. But that's all secondhand gossip. In general, the sense I get is that the standard in the US offices doesn't carry over to every global location, but I don't have the personal experience to say that for sure.
Will the big3 be around in 15-20 years or is it a dying industry with many of the best people leaving for exist opps in tech/finance/etc.
In my opinion, there will always be a need for large companies to bring in outside help to get very specific things done (largely due to their size and dysfunction). MBB are smart enough to generally move where help is wanted. Just in my time there I saw them hugely lean in to big data, design, cloud, AI etc. And when they invest they go big.
That being said I personally would never bring in MBB for a purely technical implementation project. Way too expensive and the value is not there right now.
And the HQ not caring as much because those other countries bring in the 'franchise fee'. At the risk of a story like this.
I don't think there'd be much hiring of already 'corrupt' people, but it's pretty reasonable that when you have a very competitive and prestigious position, on average, you might find that more 'cutthroat' people are more willing to invest time and energy to getting hired.
The rest is a history of consulting companies and their (criminal) endeavours
Few of my viewpoints have changed more drastically in the last 30 years. Now, when I see someone has one of those firms on their resume or business card, I just assume they're not someone I want to hire or work with. Or even have a beer with.
There was a relatively big scandal in France before the last election, as they crossed some lines, but this is far from over.
> The revolving door between McKinsey, regulators, policymakers and businesses is a consistent feature of the consulting businesses.
As a younger person, I recall being informed that a culture of continuous improvement originated in the manufacturing centres of Japan after WWII. They told us the term for it was "kaizen". I do not know if any of that was true, but it sounded sensible then and I always carried the idea with me.
Having used it in sports coaching and having seen the results on the playing field, I do not consider a "culture of continuous improvement" to be meaningless management-speak. Assuming one can get a team to buy-in, it works.
IMHO, the alternative to continuously trying to improve, complacency, mediocrity, laziness, or whatever we choose to call it, is nothing to celebrate.
Please note. Not intending to defend McKinsey here or clients who spend taxapayer revenue on vacuous consulting. But as a general principle, I would defend the idea of "creating a culture of continuous improvement". Same goes for the oft-used term "growth mindset". The terminology might sound silly, but the principles are sound, not to mention timeless, IMHO.
Maybe I misread the sentence in the context of the article. If so, pay no mind.
(I did peruse the book a while back and discussed it with a friend who used to work for a McKinsey competitor.)
It's easy to talk. It's easy to convice yourself that talking and ceremony == doing. But it's the doing that matters.
1. You have no idea what you are doing. You like shiny things and the consultants are shiny, fancy, and use big words.
2. You know what you are doing and realize you have a gap in your org and it will take too long to fix it so you need outside help in the short term. This is the only good reason to hire an agency or consultant.
3. You are a bad actor. Work is a political game to you that you are trying to win. Fuck the organization. Fuck your colleagues. A consulting firm can be both a shield and a hammer. It provides plausible deniability for failure, it gives you a trump card in arguments with colleagues and it buries everyone in fancy presentations, reports, and jargon that no human has the time to sit down and parse.
it would have chapters laying out the Kafkaesque, extractive bureaucracy, the amoral shenanigans concocted between lawyers, accountants and consultant suits in the remote top floors of tall glass buildings, the endless financial engineering, the non-stop cut-and-paste acquisitions and disposals, the vacuity of management fads and the zero signal-to-noise ratio of inane powerpoints regurgitating platitudes (the high-art of saying nothing because reality is too gross to discuss).
somehow we are supposed to believe that this is the pinnacle of successful private enterprise. the natural evolution of "best practice" as articulated in posh business schools
in fact historians of the future, with the independence and clarity granted by the passage of time would be very brutal about the type of social pathology this is.
I remember more or less the same criticisms two decades ago:
- Lewis Pinault, Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting, 2001
- Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, 2005
https://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Demons-Inside-Unscrupulous...
I never thought anything the company did was morally wrong per se, it was just a different business model that I didn't really want to be a part of. The role of most people in the U.S. was landing the big deal, talking the client down when things went wrong, and then winning an extension for additional services at the end. Actual implementation was just a cost to be minimized and handled somewhere at one of the company's offshore sites. Somehow it all worked out (usually) even for some truly massive projects.
Honestly, I think I might try...
It's the same for uni — you probably get similar from a public school vs. Harvard, but Harvard gets you the prestige.
You think they don’t know they’re making sh*t up anyway?
1: random article there, tons more available through google https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mckinsey-to-pay-for-role-in-o...
The real story here is that it took a decade+ to arrest (not convict...arrest) the Guptas and the vast majority of the money is likely never to be recovered (disappeared into middle east). i.e. Functionally this was a successful heist of multi-generational wealth.
Same story on government enablers size - Zuma clan is now wealthy.
The will to go after players like this is simply not there - in SA or internationally. Good business breaking countries it seems
So we then have this whole convoluted contracting process where consultancies run by people who know how to write and win bids, but know nothing about software engineering, end up being hired to write software systems. All because the government can't really build highly skilled teams on their own.
Again, it's not all of the problem (not by a long shot), but it definitely contributes. Plus, the government employing people directly is socialism, but paying an incompetent consulting firm that plays middle-man to the system isn't.
I would expect the leetcoding and system design interviews across the industry to get much tougher and juniors to get squeezed out before top salaries drop.
Software has very high leverage in the right markets. It’s comparable to pro euro football where the teams that already have eyeballs will pay huge sums for top players in order to keep the eyeballs. Software salaries will only become more bimodal as VC money tightens.
Why would somebody take the .gov job? Same reason anybody would take a .gov job... Benefits (though that gap has closed).
Work/life balance.
Job security.
Interesting work (agency-dependent).
Inertia + location (many of my peers who are bureaucrats come from families of bureaucrats and are DC natives)
Anyways, the government can't hire developers not because the salary is too low but because the electorate has decided the government should be "small" which forces outsourcing to the big name consulting/contracting shops.
I wouldn’t say “not” because those are really the same problem from different angles. Keeping salaries low encourages attrition, not adding or backfilling positions makes it permanent. The best part is that this process reliably produces expensive failures to provide the pretext for repeating it.
- Sense of purpose. You’re working to perform some function with integrity and to the best of your ability. There’s no profit driven pressure.
- Career / Long Game. Typically you earn 50th percentile salary, but if you stay that doesn’t tell the story. In some places benefits are 50% of salary. That usually means best in class health benefits and often a defined benefit pension.
- PTO - the place where I was at I received 7 weeks of vacation and 3 weeks of sick time annually.
Government is a good place to start. McKinsey is a good landing zone for apprentice MBA types.
1 - They need external validation/blame.
2 - They don’t trust their own people to execute.
In reality I’ve found it’s more efficient to just hire the ex-consultants and not pay the markup.
Does anybody know how much McKinsey services are used in the C-suite around silicon valley (Or big tech in general) ?
Fortunately, it seems like there's a growing focusing on consultancy use and frivolous spending. Hopefully lazy politicians will get called out more on this kind of stuff...even though it might just be the oppositions calling each other out, but more transparency is always good.
It seems like gangsters in suits.
Edit: corrected spelling, thanks
Wikipedia:
"In February 2021, McKinsey paid $600 million to settle investigations into its role in promoting sales of OxyContin and fueling the greater opioid epidemic"
All appropriations, budgets, bids, contracts, revenue, finances, and so forth, must be public by default.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
OK I paraphrased the rest of the sentence into the last 3 words but if you bothered to read to the end, you see that the reviewer completely lost her way. Purporting to review a book, she concluded by the end that its authors are misguided because the real culprit is not the consultants, but rather, every pursuit of efficiency, including all "software development".
> software development [is] in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas._T._Main
The chapter in Perkin's book on the post-oil shock economic entanglements with Saudi Arabia is very relevant. It's fundamentally about the establishment of the petrodollar recycling scheme that was intended to solve the balance-of-payments crisis - i.e. dollars flowing into Gulf Arab dictatorships represented a current account imbalance on the US/Europe side, which in turned required a capital account imbalance on the Saudi side. Thus, buying Saudi oil with dollars required the Saudis to invest those dollars back into the USA and Europe, and in exchange for agreeing to this scheme the House of Saud got military protection, engineering assitance, etc., with outfits like Chas T Main and McKinsey and Vinnell serving as the glue that held it all together (along with extensive arms sales). While many have forgotten, the Shah of Iran was also a key player in that system before the Islamic Revolution.
Notably, the vast majority of Saudi citizens live in near-Third World conditions, particularly the Shias in the east and the tribal groups in the south, not that this gets widely reported, while the 15,000+ members of the House of Saud and their hangers-on (the bin Ladens, bin Mahfouzes, etc.) collect the vast majority of the wealth that isn't re-invested back into the USA.
Understanding current world events really requires an understanding of this balance-of-payments dynamic, because that was essentially the same deal that was offered to Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin, via the same entities, and which Putin eventually rejected after 2003 in favor of using Russian oil money to rebuild the Russian military and generally increase the general standard of living inside Russia. Prior to that, Putin was regularly praised in the US media (much like Syria's Assad before his 2009 deals with Iran and Russia).
This also accounts for the differential treatment of various authoritarian government leaders by the USA and its economic partners like Britain, i.e. Saudi Arabia is not treated like Iran or Russia. For example, if Putin had taken that deal, then today's war in Ukraine would likely be called 'a fight against neo-Nazi terrorist elements' in corporate media, much as the Saudi assault on Yemen is protrayed as a struggle against Al Qaeda and so on.
This is certainly no defense of Putin, who has held onto power for decades now - but there aren't really any 'good guys' in this storyline, the 'democratic norms and humanitarian values' claims are all nonsense. It's more like how the New York City mafia organizations or the Mexican drug cartels fought each other over access to territory and profits than anything else.
Even a relatively modest proposal like a 3% per year replacement of fossil fuel production with renewable production is not at all likely, I mean look at EIA projections [USA] through 2023:
> "The EIA believes that oil production will hit 11.9 million barrels a day (b/d) by the end of the year. Next year, the agency expects the 2019 record of 12.3 million b/d to be shattered, with production hitting an average of 12.7 million b/d."
https://en.as.com/latest_news/energy-outlook-shows-increased...
This is... just not true. There absolutely is poverty in KSA, and the wealth of the elite is obscene, but the average Saudi citizen lives a pretty cushy life of sinecure jobs and vast subsidies (gas is cheaper than water). The official median income is around US$50k, and while you probably shouldn't trust that number, I think we can safely say it's not more than an order of magnitude off.
The people really living in Third World conditions in Saudi are the vast armies of migrant workers, who make up something like 80% of the labor force and do all the literal heavy lifting at construction sites, service industry jobs, domestic work, etc.