Having known a McKinsey consultant in the past, my general heuristic is that everything negative reported in the media about it is completely true, along with a heap of insider trading and conflict of interest that doesn’t get reported in the media.
I have skepticism of management consulting in general, and concern about the opioid thing, but I don't want people lumped in with that undeservedly.
That's fairly recent, though.
They play ball with all sorts of shitty regimes (including the united states) McKinsey has way more crimes than the opioid epidemic.
This is a company that has fueled (among other things) the Enron scandals, opioid epidemic, Saudi repression of dissidents.
Some of this is--as a big consulting company--it has its hands in a lot of things, so some of those things are bound to be unpleasant. But it's also clear that there doesn't appear to be much of an ethical filter for what work it takes on. I honestly would be more surprised at this point if McKinsey hasn't helped plan out a genocide.
so the ones that left?
Probably a lot easier to keep their salaries relatively low as well?
(1) being absolutely intoxicated by their own old-money-fueled prestige academic/career path, which gave them a
(2) vastly overrated sense of their own knowledge, ability, wisdom, capability, importance, and general superiority to anyone not in possession of these stellar academic/prestige institutional credentials which was
(3) completely unfounded in every way.
I'm no longer impressed by Ivy League or any of these prestige institutional credentials.
Having seen it first-hand, I can only agree. There's so much privilege at these institutions, it's almost sickening sometimes. I don't want to throw everyone in one pot, there's certainly genuine, decent people there. But there is so much self-importance and arrogance floating around, and just this casual and unquestioned attitude of superiority.
What I do want to say is that pretty much everyone I met there had a base-level above average smartness and/or work ethic. But I also mostly hung out with STEM people. Didn't get to know many managerial or related types.
We do love to keep our historical memes alive despite the economy having nothing to do with them. Physical statistics are what keep enough TP and food on shelves so the people do not riot.
Not an endorsement for Mentava, but there’s an indictment of our education system when their program is resulting in kids being fluent in AP math by 5th grade (or so they claim): http://mentava.com
I sure wish the rest of the firm made the same choice. But it’s a decentralized company with partners doing their own thing in their own corners. If you want to work on green energy, are you accountable for the folks doing Chinese mining? Or German agriculture? Or American pharma? I’d say it’s ambiguous at best. It’s not like working for a tech product where, say, the QA team for Facebook is still actively enabling Facebook.
so how many unethical projects can you decline before they fire you? Also hypothetically, what would they do if every one refused (eg:projects like the opiod one)?