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Comment by malthaus | Hacker News Reader

Every single consulting article brings out comments who make the same mistake:

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.

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The big problem with talking about consulting is that there are so many different people doing so many different things that are all called just "consulting". Everyone has a different idea of what consulting is since they worked with different types of consultants but it all just gets called "consulting". Even in this article they talk about McKinsey's strategy work and their tech work basically interchangeably, even though the two are very different things.

Thanks for saying that. I worked on a bunch of large transit fare-card implementation projects for accenture, over a decade ago. Having a large company, with people having some know how from previous implementations, and the ability to handle a project that was far, far beyond the capacity of the transit operators cautioning them, made TOTAL SENSE. We effectively shipped stuff, in a very political environment (as in, with actual politicians trying to dictate requirements so the schedule fits their re-elections and stuff like that), through lots of integration pains and issues with large scale hardware deployments. I'm pretty proud of those projects, I'm sure some of the code I wrote back then is still in prod. I never worked as a bodyshop, or sold useless erp replacement projects. The outcome was a working system that millions of users can use. It's palpable. It's concrete. It's useful.

It pains me that it's always seen as an evil, because sometimes it is the best option.

Was the use of your team necessary due to the political and regulatory capture, however?

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.

A lot of the comments make this mistake, but the article clearly talks about both. It snarkily says the Ivy League graduates end up doing strategy and everyone else ends up doing software implementations.

There is truth to that, because strategy is what sounds the most shiny, brings the most money, and is the most prestigious... Even when it's in fact either pure garbage or outright devilness.

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.

Note that BCG also have BCG X (recent fusion of Gamma, Digital Venture and Platinion), a Data Science and Software arm that could be compared with Palantir in size and breath and depth, but are not working with the CIA.

So, they also do some -high end- implementation work as well :)

Would you describe examples of negative impacts to businesses' performance from not hiring these firms?

It’s not uncommon for firms that need to do big layoffs to not hire consulting firms, and then screw up the layoffs (multiple rounds, bad severance, etc.)

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).

Most strategy consultants are saying what management already knows but needs to confirm in case things go bad in order to cover their ass. Without the consultants they maybe wouldn’t make the “difficult” choice of laying people off or paying pharmacies to get people addicted to opiates and therefore the business would suffer.

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