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Comment by azemetre | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a health insurance provider that paid BCG $1mil to confirm that we should be using agile in our org. It took BCG a month to do their "study."

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.

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> 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 think I will now.

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.

There is usually no forcing: they are typically hired because of their AWS knowledge - the business has already decided to go AWS, the new hire is doing what he's expected to do.

This really sounds like a conspiracy theory. That being said, McKinsey (and presumably BCG and Bain) very much embrace their employees leaving to join their clients. It creates a good "referral" network if you will. But more than that, I don't buy it.

I'm obviously not using a throwaway account like you and so i am not willing to disclose details.

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.

The throwaways are likely shills (or charitably - ignorant employees that don't wish to dive into any claims about their employer?). There are actual cases involving big four and kickbacks/bonuses and corporate sabotage.

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...

I can only obviously speak to my own experience and I did not come across anything like this. There's no love lost between me and my former employer FWIW.

Previously you said it was a "conspiracy". Someone posted the results of a lawsuit.

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?

Apologies, "in my opinion and limited experience" it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

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.

> sounds like a conspiracy theory

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

I saw it happen with my own eyes.

PS - as a former McKinsey employee.. Would it be fair to say your view is biased?

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?

It's fair to say my view would be biased. But probably not in the direction you would think.

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 we need to be more critical of what it means to see things "first hand".

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"..

By first hand I mean you're the executive paying the bill and understand the motives behind hiring a consulting firm and the incentives such a firm is working under for the client. I'm doubtful most here have that experience (I certainly never did in 20 years of industry before joining a consulting firm). Having McKinsey or BCG walking around your office and telling you what to do is not first hand experience in my opinion.

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.

It's not always so formal or sinister. I've seen consultants build relationships with younger managers and "rising stars" by buying them lunch and drinks, and even doing some free work that makes them look good. Then the consultant is an easy connection when there's some dollars to hire consultants.

Running agile in a small team is one thing, having a company do "agile at scale" is quite another (yes I realise the contradiction in terms). As someone who worked at McKinsey, on several large scale "agile" rollouts the bulk of the work was on re-organising the company (this is not an easy thing to do in companies with thousands of employees - hence bring in the consultants). The driver behind these projects was almost always cost cutting or increasing efficiency. The agile part was mostly window dressing.

No not at all; this org had existed for two years already, was already using agile for said two years, and successfully delivered a multitude of projects using agile.

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.

That's interesting. I'm curious to know how the internal sponsor of the project sold it internally. It generally takes a lot of motivation to convince your superior (and finance team) to pay the millions McKinsey would charge per week.

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).

> It generally takes a lot of motivation to convince your superior (and finance team) to pay the millions McKinsey would charge per week.

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.

Fully agree with this. That being said, a lot of companies are wising up to this and forcing consultancies to work "fees at risk" - where they are only paid based on some measurable success metric.

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...

You are danger close to seem like you are defending agile. I am all in on blaming kickback consulting. But we can't blame agile's failure on consulting companies.

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.

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