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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Strange article. Headline is deeply negative, but the content is a bunch of vaguely related neutral-ish facts.

I’m at McK and it’s just a bit slower than average imo.

They should hire a consultant to help get those numbers back up.

Cute. But it’s just the breaks. Consulting is good when the economy is good or bad. It’s not good when the economy is uncertain.

but it’s not that bad

I'm not sure if I understand your logic here. Do you mind putting it in a slide deck with more details?

I’m afraid I cannot dumb it down any further for you

What was the impact of "When McKinsey Comes to Town" internaly?

Ehhh a little hard to say because pandemic killed office culture for me but I’m gonna guess negligible. I thought it was a weak article personally.

The previous ones were much, much more substantial. Mostly on a liberal leaning east coast folks don’t want the firm to be doing conservative or foreign authoritarian work basis.

Edit: authoritarian lite, let’s say. E.g. no Russia fwiw

I was refering to the book before I realized it was also a serie of articles.

There were a few stories about the involvment of the company in tobacco, the opioid crisis, and some geopolitical stories that made it quite a bit more than just something about a liberal POV.

That’s fine but the impactful stuff was just a rehash of stuff that people had already dealt with a year or two prior. So no, it wasn’t very impactful from my perspective.

Why are you engaging them? Rule number one of McK, you don't speak about McK.

Shrug. People hype that up to be a “shadowy evil org” but it’s really just because you want absolute firewalls to avoid problems when solving both sides of a vendor and customer and competitor

I wasn't facetious; honestly, why bother? You're in a forum where half the people work for Big Tech or nastier satellites of them.

You're hardly arguing with volunteers to the Sisters of Charity.

I think working on some big tech thing where you’re actively constructing a product with huge negative ramifications is way more evil than working in a big decentralized org where some people far removed from you do something you think is evil tbh.

But I don’t care. I’m just commenting out of mild interest. It’s not exactly a big cost to comment.

I've heard from someone on your side they are hiring as they always do to give a show of strength, but a lot of the new hires aren't being assigned much work or are given pretty far out start dates. I get the sense that there are a lot of silos though and people only really know what is going on that they can directly see.

The silo thing is extremely true. Different pockets will have different stories. Hiring as a show of strength sounds a bit silly.

We aren’t talking about your bookings. You can’t add value when none of the tricks are secret anymore.

Part of the value is that your competitor is also using McKinsey. So when Ford brings them in and they want to know what is cutting edge, they can spy on GM and Toyota using the consultancy, with a little fig leaf being "this is what we see the industry doing" instead of "this is what Toyota is literally doing." Corporate espionage by proxy.

Ehhh. I think that is a stretch.

Corporate espionage implies theft of secrets. McKinsey isn’t handing out secrets. They’re handing out largely public info that’s a pain to compile for high level strategic stuff.

There’s literal benchmarks and industry reports that are more like products. There’s also just chatting with well connected people who know an industry. But most of the time it’s a junior hire using Google to fill out the basic rundown of what peers are doing on a problem.

But imo it’s just basic context setting.

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