Hacker Remix

Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

167 points by godelmachine 5 days ago | 177 comments

nelblu 5 days ago

OptionOfT 5 days ago

It was a really interesting place to work at a Software Engineer. It made me understand the business. It made me understand that doing the right thing isn't valued. You do the thing that has the shortest ROI.

It also made me realize that it is horrible to build software with people who expect short term deliveries like the usual McKinsey engagement. People who expect that the automation of an Excel file takes the same time as getting a BA to do it.

I am now in a full time engineering position. I don't talk to clients anymore.

What I miss the most is coming into contact with people with a huge variety of backgrounds.

Which surprisingly were the people with who I had to spent the most amount of time explaining how software works.

Maybe I'm bad at it? Who knows. But I learned a lot, and I'm happy where I'm at now, so any bitterness would be misplaced.

Not to mention they paid for my GC.

burnte 4 days ago

I work with a guy who used to be at McKinsey. He's literally the worst coworker I've ever had. Everything needs to be done yesterday, except he takes weeks between responses. He delegates nothing to his people, and constantly tries to take over things from other departments, making himself an INCREDIBLE constraint and burden. They have an insanely toxic culture there.

squiffsquiff 4 days ago

It's funny I worked with someone for a few months who was ex McKinsey. You could be describing him.

weard_beard 3 days ago

Not at McKinsey, but one of their competitors. I have to say there is a lot of unhealthy behavior being rewarded in lots of ways across the spectrum of consulting.

There is real work to be done in the consulting world. Its just that there are perverse incentives to not be the one doing it.

Whether an engagement is successful or goes down in flames isn't obviously apparent until it is nearly completed. Everything feels like a high school class project where the goal is to DO as little as possible and if its successful to grab as much credit as you can, and if it fails, to distance yourself from it.

godelmachine 4 days ago

I heard the same about McKinsey

aswanson 4 days ago

That cant be good for his health.

burnte 2 days ago

I had to develop an entirely new way of dealing with him in order for it not to affect _my_ health. I literally went to a therapist for a bit to create a plan for working with him.

ambicapter 5 days ago

> What I miss the most is coming into contact with people with a huge variety of backgrounds. > Which surprisingly were the people with who I had to spent the most amount of time explaining how software works.

How is this surprising? I read this as "huge variety of backgrounds", meaning, all kinds of backgrounds which are NOT software. It would make sense to me they don't understand how software works.

1123581321 5 days ago

I took it to mean that you’d think it would have been annoying to have to repeatedly explain things, but he misses them.

mtlynch 5 days ago

>Not to mention they paid for my GC.

What does GC mean in this context?

hammock 5 days ago

Green card

davidcalloway 4 days ago

Thank you I was literally wondering what garbage collection needs to be paid for.

bitwize 4 days ago

Garbage collection always needs to be paid for -- in working set size and CPU time. That's why you never see production kernels, databases, video codecs, or high performance games written in GC languages.

davidcalloway 4 days ago

Yes but it would still feel weird for me to thank my employer for that.

pfannkuchen 3 days ago

General contractor. GP made some changes to his house using the money his employer paid him.

ainiriand 5 days ago

[flagged]

ljm 5 days ago

I had a hard time working for an ex-McKinsey/Deloitte/MBA type a while ago for similar reasons: it was always favourable to push a quick hack to resolve an immediate issue, and literally nothing else mattered.

If you had to fight fires all hours day, night and weekend to keep on top of it, then so what? That’s the job. Getting heart palpitations because the red circle came up on the Slack icon on your screen? That’s the job.

Even with a clear path to a mid-term or even sustainable solution, it was like you weren’t building software but in a constant race to keep ARR ahead of churn, like in Wallace and Gromit where Gromit is frantically laying down track to keep his train going. Does the software even work? Who cares… it’s the $$$ that count.

I wasn’t really built for that, I felt like I was at odds with my own passion and I didn’t really want to put my name to the work I was doing.

Discordian93 4 days ago

Other than code related data annotation for LLMs, this is the only kind of work I've ever been able to find in software development, all the consulting shops big or small work like that here. When I read about people having proper testing, code review, product managers setting actual expectations of what the software should do... It sounds like a wonderland to me.

throw4950sh06 4 days ago

Yeah, unfortunately you need a proper startup culture at your location to have access to companies small and big like that. I don't think there is a single place like that in Europe. Fortunately, it's quite easy to find work for American companies. And well paid.

ljm 4 days ago

There’s plenty like it, but you won’t find it if you’re looking only for body shops. Of course, startups have similar problems of their own and you have to put some work into finding the right team and right product niche for you (e.g for me, sales and ad tech aren’t my thing).

I’d call it product engineering over agency work. Keep an eye out for positions in your typical SaaS setup, as well as financial institutions - not glamorous but better than being an arse on a seat.

Can’t speak for outside of Europe and UK though.

Discordian93 4 days ago

I haven't found it easy but my credentials... Could be better. I guess I'll have to pick s niche and really get to contributing to GitHub issues for it.

FactKnower69 4 days ago

>If you had to fight fires all hours day, night and weekend to keep on top of it, then so what?

Same type of person who is completely incapable of understanding that doing more methodical, higher quality work now saves you the time wasted putting out fires later

ned_at_codomain 5 days ago

Used to be at BCG. I think it's worth bearing in mind that relatively little consulting revenue -- even at the top strategy shops -- comes from pure strategy work anymore.

You can push much, much more volume and absolute impact through by running big merger integrations, digital transformation, and other large scale change projects at big companies.

It is basically a better business to become something like a premium Accenture, a "get stuff done" kind of consultancy. You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.

It's just not that easy to keep people staffed on 5-6 person teams solely on 8-12 week pure strategy engagements.

These kinds of projects are also the first discretionary spending yo get cut when times get tough.

If you're going to be focused on the pure strategy work, you'll probably want to stay really really small. We've seen some of this in investment banking with firms like Allen & Co or Qatalyst. Challenge is that consulting doesn't come with scalable monetization via success fees.

It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.

chasd00 4 days ago

> It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.

You bill per hour and there’s only so many hours to bill and your rate can only be so high. The only way to scale revenue is headcount so you can bill more hours.

It’s like handling radioactive dynamite but I think a boutique firm specializing in fixed price projects could make a decent amount of money. You have to be really really good though because one bad project contracted at a fixed price could mean lights out.

ghaff 5 days ago

It’s true in the IT analyst business too. While there are people in 1-10 person firms who earn a living, they’re mostly not getting rich and this is a long term trend line with a lot of consolidation of medium sized firms over time. To be reasonably successful you probably need a real focus and be good at selling.

Had a conversation with an ex-Gartner analyst—now at a product company—and his comment is that even at the big analyst firms, comp isn’t great at least below senior management.

cpeterso 4 days ago

> You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.

Given this is a common business model and has known bad outcomes, what would a Blub programming language and rapid development environment designed to improve the quality and maintainability of an army of rising junior engineers look like? (I originally wrote “productivity”, but reducing billable hours is not a positive outcome for the consultancy. They surely still want to produce quality software like to reduce customer-impacting bugs and negative headlines.)

Go was supposedly designed for a similar audience, inexperienced engineers at Google, but it is pretty low level and still has its own gotchas. I’m imagining some hybrid of Go, Python, and Visual Basic with strong static typing, strong functional orientation with little shared state (to reduce the blast radius of each junior engineer), easy unit and integration testing, excellent post mortem debugging, big ints by default to avoid integer overflow bugs, FFI for integration with clients’ legacy code, and portability to mobile apps, desktop apps, and web front and back end.

Discordian93 4 days ago

F#?

mentalgear 5 days ago

It's not just that they're too big—it's that they're morally corrupt and largely unregulated. These firms have been involved in everything from tobacco lobbying to the 2008 financial crisis to pushing opioids, and that’s just scratching the surface. Despite their role in these crises, they’ve faced zero accountability and continue to rake in massive profits.

As for their supposed value (which comes directly from ex-employees): big consulting firms are essentially hired as a liability shield for the C-suite. Their main job is to back up whatever the CEO already wants to do (usually cost-cutting). This way, executives can claim: a) "McKinsey recommended it, so it must be right," and b) "If it goes wrong, it’s on McKinsey, not us."

throw4950sh06 4 days ago

How do you want to regulate somebody giving advice to people for money?

VHRanger 4 days ago

Correct.

The word here is not "regulate" it's "enforcement".

People doing illegal things should face personal responsibility on the actions. So do managers who approved it.

The issue with enforcement is the same thing that happened in 2008: enforcing white collar crimes is expensive and high risk for prosecutors who want slam dunks to advance their careers

terminalbraid 5 days ago

> they’ve faced zero accountability

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2024/10/18/79...

Is that not an example of accountability directly for the things you're complaining about?

eesmith 5 days ago

How much did they make from helping lying drug dealers? The article doesn't say. If damages weren't at least 3x revenue + attorney fees, it's the cost of doing business. It's not like every shady thing they do gets caught.

Better would be if people faced jail time.

ziptron 4 days ago

Since this is reported on by "Insurance Journal" it makes wonder how much of this fine was paid for by their liability insurer. Does anyone know? Presumably they have no coverage for illegal activities, but they never agreed they did anything illegal.

FactKnower69 4 days ago

Don't forget fixing bread prices!

fuzzfactor 4 days ago

>Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

Do they still exist?

Then, yes.