Comment by antipropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antipropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants.

The losers are only

(a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures.

(b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc.

(c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc.

We should all get MBAs and enjoy the gravy train.

As someone who works at McKinsey I get kind of irritated by this meme. It is objectively and obviously not true for external blame because all work by McKinsey is NDA’d. you’re almost never allowed to share that McKinsey helped on anything because we want to maintain firewalls between teams working for competitors / vendors / customers internally and externally as much as possible.

I don’t really buy it for internal blame either.

I thought the advice was NDA'd to hide the fact that exactly the same advice was being sold to different organisations?

No, not at all. It should not surprise anyone that hiring the same people to solve the same problem at different places will result in similar outcomes frequently.

Having the same project name and having pretty much the same materials with different customer names was apparently a bit of a give away...

I’m not clear what you mean by project name. Perhaps you mean “product” name? In which case… well yeah. Of course.

I have several decades of experience as a software engineer and have worked at several different companies that hired management consultants to rubber stamp decisions they had clearly already made. In each case, the company proceeded to deflect blame to the consultants internally, when employees got mad about the decisions. I have heard similar stories from friends and colleagues. So at least your skepticism about internal blame is unfounded.

I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.

Are you sure your experience really maps to McKinsey? There are countless garden-variety Office Space bean counter management consultancies that are called in as RIF shock troops etc. My experience with McKinsey is them being strategic consultants to C-suite where nobody is looking to "shift blame" or a docile rubber stamp. They're far too expensive if that's what you're looking for.

I don't recall if my experiences involved McKinsey or not. I do understand that not everyone looking for a rubber stamp needs to involve a firm as expensive as McKinsey, however I disagree with the general assertion that they're always too expensive for this.

If there are very large amounts of money or very risky behavior involved (e.g. behavior that could trigger an investigation by a government agency), it's sometimes worth paying for the best of the best, so you can avoid any questions along the lines of "why did you use JoeSchmoe's RubberStampsRUs Consulting, when you could have used one of the big firms?"

I can’t guarantee that my experience scales to the entire firm but this doesn’t really resonate. I’ve never come into a project with a day one answer. I think the archetypal example of what you describe is organizing layoffs, in which case the company needs to shed heads and needs to know where it can do so. Which is sort of a day one answer. I’ve never touched this sort of thing Personally.

I’m not sure who the rubber stamp would be for either. Your subordinates I guess? But that seems not particularly important tbh.

I'll just reiterate what I said above, I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.

I’d rather work on something I believe to be good at a big decentralized company like McKinsey than something like what many / most large tech companies do. There’s basically no relationship to the other parts of the firm

Sure, I get that it's a big company and that not everything it does involves selling people dangerous drugs that ruined their lives [1], while simultaneously consulting for the government regulators that regulated those drug companies [2], or aiding government corruption [3], or assisting dictators with their assassinations of pesky journalists [4]. But it's all the same company. I wouldn't want to work for big tech either, but to imply that McKinsey can be better than them in _any way_ is completely laughable.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/25/politics/mckinsey-justice-dep...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1126202801/mckinsey-consultin...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/world/africa/mckinsey-cor...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-...

When I worked with McKinsey folks (in a group directly under a C-suite who was ex-McKinsey themselves), it seemed pretty clear that for mega-large companies, external consultants can call shots and "get things done" because they don't have to "play politics" and are thus "objective" and thereby, weirdly, more loyal to the company's mission ... than its own employees.

It's pretty wild to watch the McKinsey folks break out their lexicon of mental tools and jargon, "design thinking" etc, and often pretty nauseating. But ultimately, it's the fault of big organizations being pathetically ineffective that they write the big checks to McKinsey and others.

McKinsey in particular seems to have done a good job projecting themselves as the "strategic" folks in these strategy groups that advise the top brass, pilot innovation groups etc. The other big consultancies seem to specialize differently, for instance Accenture I associate with big ERP integrations and such.

Mostly accurate. Big expensive C suite mandated consulting group can make things happen when the org is so shibari’d in its own red tape that it can’t do anything. That is the number one reason to hire a consulting team.

The projecting thing is, imo, not about optics. It’s just a different product. Accenture is a body shop. McKinsey is mostly just getting a strategy done. It’s transparent in both firms marketing and proposals.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that corporations are an elaborate scheme to provide some people with money and status without them actually providing value to society. Mainly the MBA class. "You know what this rowboat with two people rowing and six managing needs? Another management layer." Leeches like McKinsey are right at the heart of it.

If you add enough indirection and shared responsibility, the most atrocious outcomes become palatable.

Another way to view them, is as slow AIs directly driving the sixth mass extinction event.

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