“The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in areas they’re advising in” | Hacker News Reader

“The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in areas they’re advising in”

ft.com

231 pointstaubek108 comments

"A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.

Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the executives.

In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.

> you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist

Some more cynical view. You are only there because your boss doubt that you know how to look at your wrist.

You're only there because there's been no visible effect of whether you look at your wrist or not.

You're only there because instead of quantifying work, boss worries about whether or not employees are looking at watches.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound (make a difference)?

Some would argue yes. Others won't know until something is broken.

It seems like abysmally bad management and also pretty common, to have to bring in an outsider to ask the workers “what obvious stupid things do you see going on here.”

They are a bit hokey, but I think this is something shows like Kitchen Nightmares or Undercover Boss or The Profit get absolutely right - just a few honest conversations is often all you need to uncover a bunch of improvement opportunities if you know how to ask questions.

This is why Toyota consistently crushes it with quality and manufacturing efficiency - their entire idea of continuous improvement depends on trusting low-level workers to have the expertise to suggest improvements.

Except Toyota's process isn't secret. Any company that cared to execute well could simply buy everyone a copy of one of several books on Toyota's system and start cargo-culting themselves into success. The only explanation I've found with predictive power is that most managers/executives don't really want to do things right, they just want to BE right. It's rare to encounter a "leader" (at any level!) willing to admit they could improve.

I think this is one of those reasons where leadership quality and company culture are still important. Toyota knows they can't be copied which is why they share it so openly.

You can even read up on the failure of NUMMI where Toyota literally tried to teach GM executives their production methods and GM just couldn't do it.

Also, critics of Toyota's offerings never understand the appeal of reliable and easy to fix cars to the masses, and how people value boring over unreliable, cost optimized "excitement"

There is a saying: "there's the right way, the wrong way and the Army way". You can replace "army" with the name of your employer. Every organization has their own way of doing things. Sometimes you need that outsider to point out that your-employer's-way is not working and is not a "best practice".

> you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.

Or there was a political battle over who would wear the watch, and whose budget it would come out of. And the only person who owned a watch lived in a different time zone and didn't want to change it to a timezone they didn't live in.

Pretty much. Lol.

It's unbelievable how many expensive reports we generated that said "fixing X would result in $Y revenue" and the business response would be "well, that would piss off Ryan so we can't do that".

In Ryan's defense, the firm he hired wrote an even prettier and more expensive report supporting his decision.

Consultants pay attention: this is how you're perceived.

Lucky bastards, I’d love to be perceived as “work product is linearly related to compensation.”

Aye. Bill more make more. Reminds me of bartending, where if I worked doubles or weekends -- often crazy, long, hard days -- I could walk out with more cash. And not like an abstraction, like literally $100 cash in my wallet, if I sold more expensive drinks or put in more hours.

Hard work though, fairly tough maximum caps in terms of pay, and brutal to have to do into retirement -- my knees (or liver) wouldn't last long enough to do it for 30 years.

Better yet, Jeff's been yelling that we should do X for months and now that we have an expensive report says that we should do X, we're gonna do X. But not at all because Jeff thought it was a good idea. And then wonder why Jeff up and leaves the business.

The funny thing is, if someone actually has the guts to tell Ryan "Hey you know that thing you insist we do? It's costing us $Y every year. Do you still want it?".

The Ryans of the world usually respond with "no that's mad, why didn't you alert me sooner? Stop that at once!".

no the actual issue is that it would mean a demotion for Ryan

Like our tech director spending millions on Microsoft stuff. Anyone sees that it's not really the most sane investments to be making. But the only way out is to fire the guy, and that's just one step too far.

So the ryan's are untouchable because of politics, they want to keep their scope and budgets. If nobody wants to decrease their budget, no money is saved sadly

I worked for two separate Fortune 500 companies that had byzantine internal political struggles like that. My hypothesis is that large organizations inevitably accrue that sort of cruft.

> Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look for.

Anybody in charge for long enough loses the muscle of being able to accept questions or criticism. You buried the lede.

In a way it's sad when they've hired consultants because they at some level acknowledge they need help, but when it comes to looking at their own actions or behaviors nothing is wrong or needs fixing.

Which one is it, do you need help or not? If you don't need help and know it all why are the consultants here?

To give a bit of defense to consultants, there are a lot of parallels between hiring a consultant for a business and a therapist for yourself. Both are expensive in their own ways. And both focus on helping you help yourself with your own resources. I wouldn't think of you as an idiot for admitting you needed help to look at your own actions or choices.

But I think the difference is that you can't just fix yourself by swapping out pieces of your brain, but a business can! Why would you keep around executives or teams that need constant, regular intervention?

> Anybody in charge for long enough loses the muscle of being able to accept questions or criticism.

Perhaps, but more importantly anyone inclined to accept questions or criticism rather than assuring that they get credit for success and someone else gets blame for failure just doesn’t get to be in charge at all, because they end up getting stuck with the blame for other people’s failure while the credit for their success is stolen.

One of my mantras to my associates and consultants was that our job was to be one part therapist, one part sociologist, and one part accountant. As you say, if the client could fix their own problem, they wouldn't have called in a consultant, and, if the problem could be fixed by throwing developers and designers at it, they would have called someone cheaper. The implication of getting that phone call is that there's a gap between what the client's asking for and what the client needs, which has led them to bring in an outsider. Generally the answer to what the client assumed was a technical or design issue actually lay somewhere in the organizational structure, interpersonal relations, or the cash flow and balance sheets.

It's true that consultants generally (certain kinds of expertise-led consulting aside) don't do anything an organization can't do for themselves, but it's also true that a therapist doesn't do anything an individual or couple can't do themselves. Bringing somebody in to ask both the stupid questions and the hard questions, without being beholden to internal power and communication structures, can often be very helpful, as long as -- big "if" here -- you can trust the consultant isn't going to featherbed for the sake of the SoW.

Having said all that, I've seen some terrible, terrible work from consultancies, including some big screwups from my old firm (which, to their credit, the cost of which we ate rather than our clients). More than once I've seen large clients outsource strategy, innovation, or the entirety of execution to a Big Three/Big Four firm, and waste tens of millions on work that delivered a couple dozen binders but not any tangible value. The common thread is usually that the company abdicates responsibility for overseeing and critiquing the work, rather than taking a firm hand. That never turns out well.

Every problem is a people problem. Especially when you're told by your client that it's not a people problem.

I look back on my time as a consultant, and I think we largely did good work. I just personally found it frustrating how much time we spent spinning our wheels vs making progress. I spent 6 months on a slide deck that no one ended up looking at.

If I had one takeaway, it's that our clients were entirely too risk averse. Rather than just start executing on something and learn along the way, they would rather front-load every business decision with 500 hours of coordination and planning meetings. And as consultants, we were incentivized to enable this type of behavior.

I think it's pretty telling that, while I believe consultants can provide value and do good work, I have to admit that I never would have hired myself on any of the projects that I worked on.

I expect the company was too risk averse, but the individual players, familiar with how blame and credit were distributed there, were pretty finely calibrated in their behavior.

The implication of getting that phone call is that there's a gap between what the client's asking for and what the client needs, which has led them to bring in an outsider.

That's the apparent answer. Underneath it, the real answer is someone in the org, most likely whoever approved spend hiring the consultant, knows the answer but needs insulation from the political fallout from saying it out loud.

Or someone to blame if things go sideways.

Sounds like a lack of leadership is driving this.

That doesn’t necessarily seem true. Many professions rely on peer review and mentoring even at the highest levels so everyone can make fewer mistakes and continually improve. We don’t assume a generalist doctor is incompetent because they refer a patient to an appropriate specialist. We don’t assume a pilot is incompetent because they have a copilot with them and they run down a checklist before taking off. We don’t assume a software developer is incompetent because their work goes through code reviews. Why should business leaders be expected to know everything and make the right judgement every time without the same kind of peer support?

The difference here is that the major consulting firms are not specialists in anything. To the extent that companies rely on consultants, it's for a blank slate or neutral party. But trying to rely on these external parties for expertise would be akin to a doctor referring you to an urgent care center.

I was similarly a consultant and I agree - in those projects (~25%) where I felt that we actually "created value" it was simply by talking to a bunch of junior people (not ICs, but ~managers of managers), kind of piecing together what was wrong (not very hard), and presenting that to the CEO. The CEO never heard this shit by themselves because everything was polished before being reported up the management chain.

I literally had one guy saying that a big problem was that the device's battery life was very low, and we should include a second battery. This kind of budget ask would have never gotten off the ground without us, we took it to the CEO and said it would cost $m and he said "sure" and that was that.

>Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the company more money?

Come all ye good workmen beware the command. That comes down on high from the desk of a man. Who's never held steel or torch in his hand.

I worked previously at one of these places. It's quite interesting, they create solutions that are really only 'happy path' solutions that work in a perfect world and it's honestly kind of expected.

You pay $100k a week for a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck and some recommendations so they don't have any real liability, a 21 year old grad can't navigate a lay off round properly and can only provide these 'happy path' recommendations, similar to how a lottery winner won't make good business owner, they have all the money but not the knowledge, the Mckinsey junior has all the knowledge but no experience. Execs hire them because they don't want to be the decision maker only the proxy decision maker and can say 'McKinsey advised this was the only solution to do layoffs/restructure/unpopular thing and they're the ones that know' when in reality all the exec needed was a short stop to back them up.

Obviously this only relates to their management consulting/advisory arms

My understanding was they were brought in to validate the opinion of the hirer. As I once said before

"This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart. 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."

I think I saw this the first time you wrote it. It’s genius, and I think perfectly accurate.

(Although, speaking as a consultant, we are not all like that. It is of course the big consulting companies being hired into the big-end-of-town companies. Some of us little guys really do care about our customers.)

Copying my favorite quote from a different thread about data scientists: it's 'decision-based evidence-making'

They're also an acceptable form of corporate espionage. Mid- and higher-level consultants (there's usually one with relevant experience at least advising a team remotely, at least providing some background documents for them) will provide sets of "best practices" for you to adopt... that they learned from your competition. Anything you're doing well, they'll note, and those will be "best practices" when your competition engages them again.

  a 21 year old grad

I hope this is hyperbole or using the term "consultant" when really meaning "pawn from a staff enhancement agency" (as is often done). Because the accusation seems to be that consultancies sell merely the appearance of expertise and nobody would buy into the appearance of a 21 year old.

My experience working with teams from Anderson (now Accenture) and Deloitte was that they heavily favored youth and attractiveness over knowledge and experience.

The consultants doing the selling and schmoozing with the client's upper brass are rarely if ever the same as the grunts on the ground doing the work, who are often fresh grads.

When McKinsey/Bain/BCG goes to a client, the project is usually sold to the CEO or senior exec by a 40-50 year old Director or Senior Partner at the consulting firm. The project kicks off with a "case team leader" who is the only full time person on staff, they are usually like 30, running a group of 22-28 year olds, who are doing the work with the client executives who are usually 2-4 levels down from the CEO. The partners from the consulting firm are not full time on the project and their job is to keep the project on track, present the conclusions to the client at the end, but most importantly to keep the money flowing from the client.

Well that makes more sense. Having a couple of senior-looking people come once, drop a bunch of fresh grads "taking notes" to rake up the billable hours, then come back to deliver a "report" -and by come back I mean just forward the email- is more believable, at least in the plausible deniability sense.

I was responding to this quote by OP here:

  ultimately only deliver a slide deck and some recommendations so they don't have any real liability , a 21 year old grad can't navigate a lay off round properly and can only provide these 'happy path' recommendations

And the thought of a 21 year old dispensing some recommendations just like that was hilarious. "you should like, synergize some more, you feel me? okay bye!"

Consulting doesn't really use the "billable hours" model, not to the client. The client is billed a fixed fee. Hours are accounted for internally, with each person in the consulting firm trying to bill their hours "to the project" -- a case team leader might need to bill $6,000 a day for example, a senior partner $15,000, a junior person $3,000. The juniors don't really have to worry about this, everyone knows they're full-time and powerless to do anything else, so they bill all their hours to the project. The senior partners are in charge and bill however many hours they want to their projects. Usually whatever cash is left over is not enough for the mid-tier people, so they politick and fight over the scraps to show high utilization and survive to bill another day.

> And the thought of a 21 year old dispensing some recommendations just like that was hilarious. "you should like, synergize some more, you feel me? okay bye!"

Unironically, this is what takes place. Have seen it as an IT consultant.

Some kid out of GA Tech or VA Tech or some tech school that isn't Ivy or MIT/Stanford throws out middle-brow wisdom about steps to take which includesball the right buzzwords, and then passes it on me to twist it into a coherent narrative with steps for the client to take.

The client sees a hip young 20-something (actually just 23) throwing out buzzwords that they've seen via YouTube ads or occasional blurbs in The Economist and feel satisfied -- this all lines up. Containers are a thing, everyone is talking about them, therefore we make everything a container. The HIP NEW THING has been laid bare, and I throw out buzzwords tell folks to "leaning in" to it and other management-smooth-over-techniques, and then bill $900/hr and collect a bonus at the end of the year.

Easily 60% of the engagement could have been cribbed from a Docker / Mirantis sales video, with bits from Sandler Sales Mgmt videos. I could probably get 90% of you to a point where you could do this, regardless of background.

They were paying $900/hr.

Always amusing to see people view consulting like that.

It does nominally bring expertise yes but the primary benefit is ass covering and sounding board. If you're an exec that needs to implement something new & complicated you can either wing it and then the blame is on you if it goes wrong. Or you can bring in consultants and lean on their advice. That gives you someone to blame. And the consultants happily absorb said blame cause they're getting paid either way.

And finally - cross pollination. If you ask them how to do XYZ there is a good chance that the answer is at least in part inspired what they saw at other places/competitors.

Classical Weinberg: https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consul...

Common reason to hire consultants:

- Already made decision and want to blame it on outside agent

- Already made decision but want to say considered alternative

I work for the government and a lot of the consultants I've come across have been hired by incompetent leadership to try and fix broken processes that said leaders truly can't solve. The government regularly hires consultants to try and fill deficits caused by poor/weak leadership.

We have a consultant right now doing 'process improvement' on one of the easiest processes I can think of, simply because no one wants to handle a difficult conversation with some powerful people who are gumming up the works with their inane power maneuvering.

Of course, no consultant is ever going to point out that the problem is leadership to the people who hired them.

Government (here at least) also hires consultants to given them the answer/solution they want so they can claim that they aren't just pushing their own ideology, or making decisions in their own interest (rather than in the public interest) when they actually are.

The consultants not only provide the "cover your ass" service, they also provide the "sunk cost fallacy" service. If anyone critiques the answers, they have to argue against X millions of dollars of "expertise". Choose X large enough that no one dares to dissent.

We're currently working with a McKinsey consultant, seems like a great guy - really polished fella, but I'm not sure why he was brought in. We're working on a organization-wide project, so there's lots of moving parts - and he's mostly just joining in on our meetings, taking notes. One boss said he's there to develop strategy for a part of the organization, another said he's there to help with developing project management, so I don't know - someone above them brought McKinsey in. Looked him up on LinkedIn, and it seems he graduated last year. Probably costs a pretty penny.

They're getting paid to drive a narrative for whomever's budget is being charged against.

sharemywin provides more depth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586

You'll get a lot of cynical takes on the internet because a lot of people have had bad experiences with consultants. Or more accurately, bad experiences with management who hire consultants for some goal.

The underlying goal in a lot of consultant engagements like you describe is to get something done outside of the inertia of your org structure. As companies grow, people get set in their roles and become resistant to change. Trying to make change things, start new initiatives, or shake things up will often fail if it doesn't fall neatly into the inertia of the company.

Hiring a consultant is like inserting someone out-of-band who can generate some outside analysis without feeling obligated to respect all of the hidden politics, histories, and strong personalities that can come to shape a company.

Now whether or not that goal is inline with your own goals at this company is a different question. It could be that the outcome involves a new initiative that makes your work better by removing some of the painful organizational cruft that has built up over the years. Or it could become an effort to reshape the parts of the organization that you personally liked. Or maybe the consultant is taking notes for some entirely unrelated initiative that you'll never see.

You don't know, but I would suggest making a good faith effort to work with this person while they're in your company.

Well, in theory yeah

In practice, he'll most likely go for the most basic solution (which a lot of people probably noticed already) and try to package this in a "report that cost a lot of money"

Institutional inertia is bad, but feel-good/turnkey "solutions" to undefined problems (think stuff like 6 sigma, "agile consultants" etc) don't help neither

People put out a lot of words about management as a science. In reality companies are ruled by politics and accounting.

Or just feed them your line and work to discredit any opposition.

They're often extremely impressive people. Sometimes you don't find out what they're really working on for a long time, sometimes you never do.

Sometimes you find out after it's too late.

If you can’t figure that out you aren’t looking. Once you know who hired them you already know what the outcome will be

Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of that expertise is not in the industry domain.

They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that.

These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.

The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.

> These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.

That would certainly be valuable to those people; would it actually help the organization though?

Professor Mazzucato's argument is that the big three are weakening government's ability to innovate because that function is outsourced.

Although she is confident this can be remedied by bringing more innovative projects in house the reality is the same as in large companies: entrenched cultures, fiefdoms, silos, budgets make change very hard due to entrenched interests.

It takes outsiders to be the Piñata in the room at some point, they can say things FTE management can't. I'm a consultant, my beef with the big three is the 'nobody gets fired for hiring Mckinsey/Deloitte/x' syndrome.

You will get a lot of cut and paste boilerplate slide deck read outs from the big players, smaller more specialized consultants tend to provide a lot more value for much lower costs.

Ironically government departmental efforts at innovation/change/evolution are typically expensive, big players too...

It's substantially true, at least in part. Source: I worked at one of them for a few years.

In my preferred niche I was surrounded by a mixed bag of peers senior and junior. In turn I wrote proposals, sold work, and was staffed on projects outside my niche I wasn't experienced or qualified in, but if you squinted hard enough you could say I had transferable skills toward.

For the most part my projects were successful, in the sense of we didn't get fired overall and the customer paid for the work. The biggest ways to screw up were the easily caught stuff like missing deadlines, exceeding the expenses policy or padding hours, which was harder to catch but some folks were brazen and/or cunning about it.

"Yes we're an expert in that" was a phrase that wasn't ever taught but I heard often. Saying yes to anything buys you time to find the solution either by skilling up or connecting to someone with actual knowledge across the very large and well-connected employee base, or fake it if you can't. Saying no ends the opportunity.

Some of the work was mutually convenient, hey can you take care of this one weird project for me, cheaper and easier to go with a fudged service from an existing and recognizable supplier than to wade into an unfamiliar niche, go through the trouble of onboarding the supplier, and not know whether you're getting good service or not. Go with the big 4 and you'll likely get a solid C or if you're lucky a B grade service. Just the act of getting a new consultant onboarded as a supplier can take months or years at large companies. The big 4 are on the supplier lists everywhere already.

Tbh a lot of this contract and relationships stuff is valuable, you're much less likely to get a complete service delivery or billing nightmare out of one of these large firms. You can call them up in the middle of the night and they'll sell you anything. It's a little like Alibaba or Amazon but for business services.

Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts. Basically quid pro quo, but none of it made explicit or overtly conditional, more an open handed game theory type of thing.

I took this mentality with me to a boutique shop. It works pretty well.

> Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b" personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady stream of contracts.

Like geopolitical spycraft? How far did the playbooks go?

Probably a lot of the same emotional manipulation that goes into spycraft? IDK all I know about spycraft comes from novels.

Hey we see your true potential, we know your exec team and we can help shape the company so you and the company succeed together. And we can coach you so that you know how and when and who to deliver your message to when the time is right.

It worked both ways. Revolving door with clients was absolutely encouraged wherever it wasn't forbidden by law or regulation. Implicitly as an employee in good standing it felt like this was a standing offer should you decide to switch to an industry role, and I saw it often.

https://archive.ph/0fi0K

Thank you for the link!

Consultants do seem kind of useless. But then why are CEOs constantly hiring them? There must be some political/internal dynamic reason for this if you can't find an external/efficiency reason.

I'd be interested in seeing a list of consultants' greatest wins. I mean the projects proposed by consultants that enhanced company values by the most. There's plenty of stories of consultant-driven disasters ... but I wonder how many of those are just the rank and file grousing about over-paid outsiders.

But if there's anything worse than consultancies, its bureaucracies. I have a lot of experience dealing with bureaucracies in health care and aviation. And my god, bureaucrats can be some of the worst of human capital. Nowhere else can you get such a marriage of apathy, laziness, and unchecked power as you see in bureaucracies. At least in the private sector one has to be an avaricious asshole and possess a type of animal cunning at the very least to climb to the very top of the power hierarchy. In bureaucracies you might find a guy with absolute power over regulatory decisions and he has the motivation and intellectual capacity of a well-fed water buffalo. How did he get there? He just stuck around longer than everyone else.

In my experience, consultants are a good, easy CYA policy, as well as being able to look good for promotions and whatnot if you get the big names.

Maybe if company politics outweigh objective facts!? Or you need someone to give you an independent perspective? For companies it can be like a bit of therapy…

That's how you sell the Board on a project. You know Jon from IT thinks this will save us a bunch of money.

versus

We engaged Deloitte and if we allocate $XXM on this project to using XYZ solution which is part of the "gartner magic quadrant" we can see a ROI of XX.

the point of a consultant is to get you money from who ever holds the purse stirngs.

It's often more to provide backup and justification for a decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte told me to do it".

While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the value an independent view can bring, especially to a big company suffering from group think - secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.

> secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.

This is basically our business model, combined with a B2B product that supports it. We have developed a very good recipe for a few clients and are now applying it everywhere.

Today, about 80% of our business is a consulting package. The 20% technology setup piece comes after we figure out how to conform the customer to our capabilities.

Yep, do a successful project, write a case study, and resell it to everyone.

"We here at [consulting inc] have previously implemented [solution] for [fortune 500] in [the same industry] and they experienced [big number]% increase in [metric] as a result."

I don't buy this argument at all. At the end of the day, consultant backed or not, you're responsible for the implementation. If it fails it's not on the consultants. They're long gone. And someone needs to carry the blame.

John from it has a job doing critical stuff. He’s not going to work 60 hrs a week polishing a PowerPoint presentation on why we need to do x to save 10million dollars. Even if you save that 10mil John probably doesn’t really care that much, it’s not his money.

Some companies (mainly those which actually produce physical stuff) may lack the knowledge for fairly elementary process optimization. That's the stuff they teach the upcoming consultants at school. And that's the stuff that actually saves everybody's money.

If that's all, we can simply add a couple Operations Research classes to ant engineering curriculum and we'd be done.

That’s not all, and that might be true, but that’s an example of how consultants in some cases do earn their pay. That being said, they generally don’t seem to.

To be fair, CEOs are also kinda useless... on a more serious notes, these consultants are more like priests of capital, there to prosletize whatever new cargo-cult framework is popular (without actually making any real change mind you).

I kind of like some old consulting literature from the 70s and 80s,especially the cybernetics stuff, as it seems like it's genuinely scientific and trying to improve things. Just the quality of writing in i.e. "Brain of the Firm", is so much more complex and erudite than what you see coming out in the field now.

Charlie Munger: "I've never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with 'What this situation really needs is more management consulting.'”

Charlie used a quote from George Bernard Shaw's play “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

I personally wonder how many therapists say “you’re fixed, I don’t need any more of your money”.

The quote on management consultants was just one example of how many professionals act this way towards businesses, and how it wasn't only about money but also a subconscious, psychological tendency.

“The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY

Transcript: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...

At F100_NAME we have piles of developers from Deloitte. They put a couple of them on this medium-sized Python project that a now-retired employee created. The first one re-wrote a lot of it and screwed it up, the next one started fixing it (not sure why they didn't just roll it back), the one after that didn't do anything for 4 months (then they left), and I recently spent two afternoons with the current one where they were trying to trick me into doing their job. I'm from another contractor/consulting firm.

Haven't heard from them in a while so I'm not sure what the current status is.

In the past consultants were paid well since they were the experienced people. They worked on the interesting projects, they saw things, they really were good at something - so they would bring best practice from one company to another.

Now the business model has changed. It is much easier to know what is the best practice. So what they do is hire juniors and sell them as mids or seniors.

Good programmers dont really go to consulting firms anymore. It is not worth their time. Why work at BIG4 when you will get paid better in FAANG?

If you say are a developer at crypto (ignoring that it is a scam) all the good projects are at crypto companies. Best that consultants can do is some slides or trick some company to implement blockchain instead of a database. Consulting companies lost their edge. They dont really play the game anymore. They can take some bad project and then outsource it to a cheap team. Or get a very bad project that is a total mess - ans then fail to repair that mess.

If you want good software you go to a software house (that can still deliver crap).

Apart from very specific skills, consultant programmers mostly do the shit projects - that nobody wants to touch. Or they are "staff augmentation" - headcount outside of salary budget.

Also the consulting lifestyle just sucks: constant overtime, burnout, travel. Some people like it. Most dont.

Most people in consulting search for an exit opportunity after few years. Programmers can exit faster, so the good programmers will leave consulting firms fast (it is different for business consultants - they have it much harder to leave, so they stay longer).

But coming back: if you are in finance, or project management then sure - consulting can help your career at big personal cost. For skills like programming it is completely not worth it. If you are a junior programmer just try to go to a FAANG to earn 3x more. A "normal" company will pay you similar as big4. So why bother with all the travel and stress?

If you are really experienced programmer, say 15 years - again you dont want to go to consulting. You can land a senior job, be paid well and not travel at all.

So all those companies take people who are still smart but couldnt get better. Also consulting companies lie all the time: juniors are sold as seniors (especially programmers, but normal consultants too). And the development there is hard - due to travel and overtime they have it jard to learn on their own (no spare time). They also focus on closing a project, not on doing it well.

What I try to write is that if you want to be a programmer nowadays it is better to do it in a software company from day one. Being a programmer at a consulting company is not worth the stress. Also doesnt pay better. It is a bit different if you are in finance or project managent, but even here it seems that the ability to boost your career by doing few years of consulting is becoming less worth it. The exit opportunities seem to happen less. Consulting is much less elite as it used to be. The consulting companies dont really have much edge anymore.

McKinsey is currently hiring a lot more for experience than they used to. My ex-wife works there as a manufacturing expert based on her decade of on-the-ground experience inside chemical plants. Internal teams really fight to get her on their projects so that its not just "a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who ultimately only deliver a slide deck".

The culture may be changing, at least at McKinsey.

Quite seriously, they capitalize at both the corporate world and the public sector being brain-dead, cost insensitive organisations (somebody else pays: the clients of the business entity, the taxpayer etc) and culturally unable to embrace concepts such as open source and collaborative platforms.

Think about it, their main service is moving around and promoting "best practices" by copy pasting and incrementally improving (at high cost) what ultimately is solved via diffusion by the sector / domain as a whole. Essentially an expensive, backdoor way to engineer consensus.

One thing for sure, if you want to understand how billing/invoicing/payments work at a company go talk to the consultants that feed on them. I'm sure they know the names of every clerk, mail room person, and admin assistant on the payables team.

The role of these companies is to be corporate sin eaters for the board.

Through consultants they can blame all the bad/immoral/incompetent decisions on the consultant. This is why every corruption story in the West features a McKinsey or a Deloitte grad.

My previous executive come from one of those companies. She was the worst leader that I ever had, she left after less than 2 years with a completed failure from organizational standpoint and many people disgruntled.

She probably got an awesome new role though.

Of course. She moved from an F500 to an F100 company in a global leadership position. It's crazy how a person like that, without any kind of skills (neither human), can have an amazing career only for the right name on the resume.

But at least my company replaced her with someone better.

The most interesting part about consultants to me is something I heard the CEO of my current company say once to a bunch of product leadership:

"I think I know the answer they're going to give, and I think you all know it, but if I have to pay a consultant a bunch of money to get you to listen to it and do it then so be it."

I've found this true in current and past companies, when was the last time you had a consultant tell you something you COMPLETELY didn't know yourself? Something surprising?

She could have listed the others too.

Well...no shit. Consultants aren't hired for expertise, as a rule. They're hired to cover for unpopular decisions.

I'm convinced this industry runs on kickbacks. There is literally no other reason to hire these people.

Reading comments sums to: management is useless - they fail exactly on what they suppose to do - no value added to company.

- flatten org chart

- make CEOs talk to low level workers a lot so things will came up

- hire yo-corporation-domain specialists as managers, not suits specialists

Why do people who think it makes perfect sense to hire a website consultant or a database consultant or a thousand different SaaS plugins for optimizing their app, but think it's crazy to hire a management consultant to help improve management?

Consultants are paid to be the fall guys in the games of corporate politics.

My org has found that we are preferred over consultancies for certain classes of work, exactly for this reason, consultancies produce garbage systems.

They have extensive expertise at selling very large consulting engagements. If they needed other expertise they'd develop it, but they don't need it

i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project.

mind you, i've been a consultant myself (and i used to work for deloitte, though not as a consultant). not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest in my recommendations.

the only thing i've found them useful is passing compliance like soc2. which is really just busy work. back during the in the office days, it was always funny to see a group of 20 of them crammed into some conference room doing tedious compliance work.

i've come across any number of consultants who simply conspire with management to get what management wants in the short-term, usually to the ultimate detriment of the project.

mind you, i've been a consultant myself. not my favourite job, but i like to think i was honest.

I guess that’s part of their business: make who hire them believe that they are experts

Where would customers be without 4x4 decision tables for prioritization, though?

They're experts at getting money out of large corporations.

The problem isn't public vs. private or in-house vs. consultants, the problem is bad or missing metrics. In most situations where work gets distributed to other entities there's also a lack of understanding the problem space and an inability to measure progress. The article mentions that for the vaccine rollout - who's to say that it would have worked out better done in a different way?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com