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For some reason, high level managers need very expensive consultants to tell them the obvious truths. As a very expensive consultant I am frequently appalled a

For some reason, high level managers need very expensive consultants to tell them the obvious truths. As a very expensive consultant I am frequently appalled at how management teams completely ignore their own employees. Forget about wasteful, these companies can afford consultants. It is just disrespectful to their own staff. Developers and operations guys already know the solution but can't get through layers upon layers of management. And so it takes a guy with salary high enough that he can be allowed to talk to the a high level manager directly, to get the message.

cyberpunk 6y ago
Ssssh! Don't give the game away ;)
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  it's okay, folks at that level of management don't tend to read hacker news.
freeopinion 6y ago
I was once in a uni class where the prof was a very expensive consultant. He said that a large % of his jobs for companies like GM or Ford was to grab a notepad and walk the floor. He would ask line employees why they did things the way they did and what they would change. He got reams of suggestions, typed them up, submitted them and collected a giant paycheck. Sometimes they were blindingly obvious things. One employee would drive two bolts, quickly change heads, then drive a third bolt. While the carcass advanced to the next station, the emloyee would change back to the original head and be ready for the next carcass. That employee's suggestion: Make all three bolts the same size so I don't have to change heads. Of course, that is just a fun anecdote. All such efficiencies have been implemented long ago... for auto assembly. But the point is still valid. Your employees know a ton about your business. Even the ones who do the most mundane tasks. Listen to them. Or... pay a very expensive consultant to listen to them.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Third generation expensive consultant here. Clients don't pay you for your time, they pay you for theirs. There's a level of abstraction in orgs that you need to be able to navigate and influence. The Twitter hire I get, it's strategic. Man, we all got old.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Consultants are often hired to sign-off on decisions already made but impossible communicate as such without causing internal division.
    - rahoulb 6y ago
      Absolutely this. One of my friends runs a market research firm that works for big retailers. She says 90% of their work is about producing evidence for the decisions that have already been taken - so they can be implemented without causing complaints.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  Today, those three bolts are done by robots. Perhaps a modern very expensive consultant builds the AI to "interrogate" the robots for useful suggestions.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Do you really put it past a big company to have two robots with different screw heads on them for the three bolts? Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen. There is still room for a highly paid consultant.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Is that actually true? My understanding is that there is still a lot of human labor necessarily baked in, and attempts to robotize everything largely have failed for a multitude of reasons (Tesla most famously so), but the most unsolvable is that of flexibility to change something fundamentally on a dime.
dionian 6y ago
> but can't get through layers upon layers of management i think you hit the nail on the head here. the problem is that the upper management usually arent clueless, they are just better leaders than they are doers...
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I used to think middle management was stupid and clueless. Now I understand that we are simply playing different games. I am trying to make a good product. They are trying to get promoted.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    I think you may be making a mistake tying those together the way you are. I've had highly effective managers before, who were trying to get promoted. Just like I've met highly effective developers, who were trying to get promoted. That's orthogonal to making a good product. They wanted to get promoted because they wanted to be able to be more effective; everything they had control of went very, very well (we were empowered to make decisions, he helped us navigate organizational obstacles, and was the sacrificial lamb for useless meetings). All the issues we ran into were from outside his circle of influence; product had its own reporting hierarchy and they were a mess. Integrations with the rest of the org were more bureaucratic and less capable, and getting them to do anything required getting VP level support on our side, etc. Had he had more sway, we could have executed faster. We directly benefited when he got a title bump. I think what you mean are those who are putting individual success over team success, and yes, those managers are either evil or incompetent.
rudolfwinestock 6y ago
The following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-... Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company. The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.” I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees. In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures—they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations. This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.
- mistermann 6y ago
  > I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees. I wonder if some parallels to this story (listening, without contempt) exist within the sphere of political polarization.
natalyarostova 6y ago
Leaders that make decisions that have ramifications that are trivially worth 9+ figures are willing to pay the extra 500k to take their trust in the word of a consultant from 95% to 99%.
ska 6y ago
Sometimes part of the service you are providing is cover. The outside/inside distinction can be important.
na85 6y ago
How did you get to be a very expensive consultant?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Kaze404 6y ago
> As a very expensive consultant I am frequently appalled at how management teams completely ignore their own employees. Tell me about it. On one of my previous jobs I would constantly speak out about what we were doing would cause people to lose hundreds of thousands of USD, and every time I was laughed out of the meeting for "overthinking" things (I guess that's what wanting to do things right is called these days). When one of our customers lost US$200k and nobody had any idea why or how or when I knew that company would be the death of me, and coincidentally I was on the same meeting I planned to use to quit my job. If anything it taught me that working in finance is not for me :p
bosswipe 6y ago
The problem is usually in-fighting between middle managers protecting their turf. Why can't the incentives for middle managers be fixed? Seems like if a company took anonymous performance reviews of Directors and VPs from lower-level employees it would prevent a lot of the bullshit.
manquer 6y ago
Lot of consultants commenting seem to think what they do is simple, it is really not. They have a long experience of asking the right questions to the right people , filtering out useless inputs, creating the right abstractions strategically from tactical inputs, there are very niche skills, it may be easy for us, but for the non technical manager it is black magic
- freyir 6y ago
  Isn’t that essentially a manager’s job? I’m not sure why any of that needs to be outsourced.
ramblerman 6y ago
> For some reason, high level managers need very expensive consultants to tell them the obvious truths. As a very expensive consultant I'm surprised the reason is not more clear to you. Most managers like to pay consultancy firms so that they can cover their asses. If they just followed the guidelines of what the McKinsey team said then surely they weren't in the wrong. Whilst if they followed the advice of a subordinate or god forbid made a decision it's on them.
shaneos 6y ago
I think your perception of what a high level person like Mudge does is a bit off. At Stripe he did amazing work, but it was mostly organizational. He built a world class team, defined a set of short, medium and long term goals that enabled the company to reduce risks over time, had his team build tools to measure that risk and held them accountable for moving the needle. That is to say, he did executive level work. I imagine he’ll do similarly great work at Twitter, setting them up for long term success, just as he did at Stripe
m463 6y ago
I think it's used to delegate unpopular decisions. You need tools for your group. IT wants to use tool MSFT. Everybody has been using tool X for a while. They like it, but there is issue Y. How does upper management resolve this?

cyberpunk 6y ago

Ssssh! Don't give the game away ;)

TheRealPomax 6y ago
it's okay, folks at that level of management don't tend to read hacker news.

freeopinion 6y ago

I was once in a uni class where the prof was a very expensive consultant. He said that a large % of his jobs for companies like GM or Ford was to grab a notepad and walk the floor. He would ask line employees why they did things the way they did and what they would change. He got reams of suggestions, typed them up, submitted them and collected a giant paycheck. Sometimes they were blindingly obvious things. One employee would drive two bolts, quickly change heads, then drive a third bolt. While the carcass advanced to the next station, the emloyee would change back to the original head and be ready for the next carcass. That employee's suggestion: Make all three bolts the same size so I don't have to change heads. Of course, that is just a fun anecdote. All such efficiencies have been implemented long ago... for auto assembly. But the point is still valid. Your employees know a ton about your business. Even the ones who do the most mundane tasks. Listen to them. Or... pay a very expensive consultant to listen to them.

motohagiography 6y ago
Third generation expensive consultant here. Clients don't pay you for your time, they pay you for theirs. There's a level of abstraction in orgs that you need to be able to navigate and influence. The Twitter hire I get, it's strategic. Man, we all got old.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Consultants are often hired to sign-off on decisions already made but impossible communicate as such without causing internal division.
  - rahoulb 6y ago
    Absolutely this. One of my friends runs a market research firm that works for big retailers. She says 90% of their work is about producing evidence for the decisions that have already been taken - so they can be implemented without causing complaints.
freeopinion 6y ago
Today, those three bolts are done by robots. Perhaps a modern very expensive consultant builds the AI to "interrogate" the robots for useful suggestions.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Do you really put it past a big company to have two robots with different screw heads on them for the three bolts? Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen. There is still room for a highly paid consultant.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Is that actually true? My understanding is that there is still a lot of human labor necessarily baked in, and attempts to robotize everything largely have failed for a multitude of reasons (Tesla most famously so), but the most unsolvable is that of flexibility to change something fundamentally on a dime.

dionian 6y ago

> but can't get through layers upon layers of management i think you hit the nail on the head here. the problem is that the upper management usually arent clueless, they are just better leaders than they are doers...

ALittleLight 6y ago
I used to think middle management was stupid and clueless. Now I understand that we are simply playing different games. I am trying to make a good product. They are trying to get promoted.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  I think you may be making a mistake tying those together the way you are. I've had highly effective managers before, who were trying to get promoted. Just like I've met highly effective developers, who were trying to get promoted. That's orthogonal to making a good product. They wanted to get promoted because they wanted to be able to be more effective; everything they had control of went very, very well (we were empowered to make decisions, he helped us navigate organizational obstacles, and was the sacrificial lamb for useless meetings). All the issues we ran into were from outside his circle of influence; product had its own reporting hierarchy and they were a mess. Integrations with the rest of the org were more bureaucratic and less capable, and getting them to do anything required getting VP level support on our side, etc. Had he had more sway, we could have executed faster. We directly benefited when he got a title bump. I think what you mean are those who are putting individual success over team success, and yes, those managers are either evil or incompetent.

rudolfwinestock 6y ago

The following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-... Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company. The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.” I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees. In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures—they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations. This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.

mistermann 6y ago
> I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees. I wonder if some parallels to this story (listening, without contempt) exist within the sphere of political polarization.

natalyarostova 6y ago

Leaders that make decisions that have ramifications that are trivially worth 9+ figures are willing to pay the extra 500k to take their trust in the word of a consultant from 95% to 99%.

ska 6y ago

Sometimes part of the service you are providing is cover. The outside/inside distinction can be important.

na85 6y ago

How did you get to be a very expensive consultant?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Kaze404 6y ago

> As a very expensive consultant I am frequently appalled at how management teams completely ignore their own employees. Tell me about it. On one of my previous jobs I would constantly speak out about what we were doing would cause people to lose hundreds of thousands of USD, and every time I was laughed out of the meeting for "overthinking" things (I guess that's what wanting to do things right is called these days). When one of our customers lost US$200k and nobody had any idea why or how or when I knew that company would be the death of me, and coincidentally I was on the same meeting I planned to use to quit my job. If anything it taught me that working in finance is not for me :p

bosswipe 6y ago

The problem is usually in-fighting between middle managers protecting their turf. Why can't the incentives for middle managers be fixed? Seems like if a company took anonymous performance reviews of Directors and VPs from lower-level employees it would prevent a lot of the bullshit.

manquer 6y ago

Lot of consultants commenting seem to think what they do is simple, it is really not. They have a long experience of asking the right questions to the right people , filtering out useless inputs, creating the right abstractions strategically from tactical inputs, there are very niche skills, it may be easy for us, but for the non technical manager it is black magic

freyir 6y ago
Isn’t that essentially a manager’s job? I’m not sure why any of that needs to be outsourced.

ramblerman 6y ago

> For some reason, high level managers need very expensive consultants to tell them the obvious truths. As a very expensive consultant I'm surprised the reason is not more clear to you. Most managers like to pay consultancy firms so that they can cover their asses. If they just followed the guidelines of what the McKinsey team said then surely they weren't in the wrong. Whilst if they followed the advice of a subordinate or god forbid made a decision it's on them.

shaneos 6y ago

I think your perception of what a high level person like Mudge does is a bit off. At Stripe he did amazing work, but it was mostly organizational. He built a world class team, defined a set of short, medium and long term goals that enabled the company to reduce risks over time, had his team build tools to measure that risk and held them accountable for moving the needle. That is to say, he did executive level work. I imagine he’ll do similarly great work at Twitter, setting them up for long term success, just as he did at Stripe

m463 6y ago

I think it's used to delegate unpopular decisions. You need tools for your group. IT wants to use tool MSFT. Everybody has been using tool X for a while. They like it, but there is issue Y. How does upper management resolve this?