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I guess I'm glad you enjoyed my prose so much. All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to empl

• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Consultancy sounds fancy, but when it comes down to it it's fairly mundane. I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing. Does not sexy mean they are not willing to spend the tons of money they have on internal employees?
    • Balgair 6y ago
      One more piece of the puzzle: Consultants are easy to fire. Depending on the company's policies, local laws, and the internal politics of the organization, a 'real' employee may be a lot harder to get rid of. Consultants are also time/task limited (in theory), while a 'real' employee is not (again, in theory).
      • Closi 6y ago
        I think this is mixing up 'Management Consultants' vs 'Engineering Consultants/Contractors'. I'm a (supply chain) consultant which is similar and have a full time contract and full worker protections with my employer. Projects are sold on a fixed price basis, so there isn't anybody to fire - clients are buying the work output or report, not the person or set hours. Some projects are time & materials, but if the project gets cancelled I'm still getting paid - I have a full time contract. As an example of the value prop - I come with information that your company doesn't necessarily have. Let's say you need to expand your existing (15 year old) miniload ASRS and are locked in with the incumbent provider - I know up-to-date market rates for miniloads and racking, and will be better able to credibly negotiate it down to market rates (particularly as I have probably done a project with the vendor before). I will also be better able to tell you if there is a better solution to expanding the ASRS because, while this is a '1 in 10' year activity for the client, this is what I do every day. Maybe they would be better putting some shuttles in a separate ASRS fed by the miniload because the actual bottleneck is throughput/accessions instead of storage, and their stock profile is different to what it was 15 years ago? They are better than me at running their warehouses, but (hopefully!) I'm better at specifying automation. So that's the value proposition of consulting - you can get access to very specific expertise that you don't need for long. Most companies don't need a full time expert on specifying warehouse automation!
        • Workaholic_87 6y ago
          Second this. Supply Chain tech consultant with one of the big guys here.
    • toong 6y ago
      They usually want their tech outcomes to be more like Netflix, but they don't want to have a tech-culture. So they bring in the consultants to implement "the digital transformation"!
    • dannyphantom 6y ago
      Exactly.
  • arethuza 6y ago
    Being a software "consultant" and a management consultant are pretty different things.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • ska 6y ago
    Management consulting is a really different thing to consulting as a developer or specialist..
• runamok 6y ago
  You are probably getting paid less than you could be but your billable rate is likely substantially higher. Not great links but you get the gyst... https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partners-charge-16-000-a-day-before-discounts-20190808-p52f2a https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partn... https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    True. I'd note a couple things here though. The per/hour rates are for creating the contract. Actual prices are fixed. The partner rates aren't likely to be charging every day of a project either, and are comparable to lawyer rates. They're expensive, no disagreement there.
  • snowwrestler 6y ago
    Everything you buy has a markup to pay for expenses and make a profit. Consultants sell their time, so of course their time is marked up.
• jancsika 6y ago
  > It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. The article points to McKinsey's task to "turbocharge" opioid sales, for a company that sold them for "improper use." So there are obviously a few outstanding questions attorneys general are currently asking about what people at McKinsey knew from "listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings" on that campaign. If you're simply saying that your day to day isn't that, point taken.
• ves 6y ago
  > Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company. This in a thread about McKinsey settling for over half a billion dollars over its role in causing the opioid crisis, which is just one of the many, many arrows in McKinsey’s “aiding and abetting horrible shit” quiver. This was literally a conspiracy and a scheme. On just the basis of “harm caused” alone, McKinsey is far from a normal company.
  • tarsinge 6y ago
    No, this sub-thread is a response to: > The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.
    • silexia 6y ago
      There are a lot of scammy consultants, but there are also tons of bad employees and whole bad divisions in companies. I run a website design and SEO firm that is highly successful because we actually do the work of building a website and the work of doing the online marketing. Many clients have internal IT or online marketing divisions that are incapable of even making a change to their own website. I find small consulting companies that actually do the work are actually much more valuable per dollar spent than internal employees whose main goal is just to hold on to their job as long as possible and do as little work as they can.
  • abduhl 6y ago
    If we were to rank large companies based on how horrible they are to society then certainly McKinsey is indeed “far from a normal company.” They’re far lower than the normal company, in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say they’re not even in the top 75%. Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking have caused objectively (and subjectively) orders of magnitude more harm to our society than a bunch of reviled white collar consultants whose only real power is to give a voice to and action plan for all the bad ideas that a company has. It’s easy to sit here and talk shit about management consultants while forgetting that management consultants aren’t coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn’t the common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like McKinsey do is “parrot back something a lower level grunt already knows”? Someone at the company gave them every idea they’ve ever had, or so the argument goes. They can’t both be totally useless mouth pieces while also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.
• Maarten88 6y ago
  There was a discussion on the experiments by Stanley Milgram about obedience to authority, and it applies here. When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff done", and the result of this is massive profits with a secondary effect of death and destruction, then the consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but let me guess nobody goes to jail). The consultant may have been hired only for the first part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The minute you understand the possible consequences of the things that you contribute to, you become partly responsible for it. As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial crimes, or worse.
  • aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible Turns out this isn't accurate. See https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-obey-authority-but-we-do-love-drama-36604 https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-obey-a... But as my detective work in the Yale Archives has revealed, in the filmed version of the experiment 65% of participants disobeyed. Yet Milgram edited his film to show the opposite: that two-thirds will do as they’re told.
    • arethuza 6y ago
      That still means 35% of people are happy giving others serious electric shocks if told to by an authority figure? Not as bad as 65% but still pretty bad!
    • btilly 6y ago
      Given the many replications of variations of Milgram's experiments, any flaws in his original experiment don't detract from the overall result. See https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-milgrams-experiment-today/ https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-m... for some of that replication data.
• stuaxo 6y ago
  Just because there are ordinary employees at the bottom doing ordinary boring jobs, doesn't mean that this is not a company that has done all sorts of damage. Most of the huge profits don't go to people like you, but there are huge profits. The opioid crisis has caused untold suffering and death. The amount of money they were fined is a joke that couldn't make a tiny dent in what fixing this. It's small enough that it it's unlikely to stop them being involved in something similar in future.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    To give some color, the revenue from the perdue work was probably (much) less than 10M, profits, less so. McKinsey's total revenue (not profit (based on a google search)), is like $10B. Losing half a billion is a lot.
• ramraj07 6y ago
  In this instance I'm more than happy to bring in Godwins rule, but yeah I'm pretty sure there were janitors in the Nazi party as well just doing their job.
• Geminidog 6y ago
  >It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence But it is a crime the company is responsible for that caused many people to die and become addicted to opioids. You think Kim Jong Un walks among the people he starves to death on a daily basis in North Korea? No. He's too high up. He's in his palace in the capital and he doesn't even see the real state of his country. He just hears about it in reports and goes to do his day to day job like any other person in a company disconnected from the consequences of their actions. Does this mean Kim Jong Un is not guilty? No. Not. at. all. Does this mean McKinsey's is not guilty? Does this mean you're not guilty?
  • smabie 6y ago
    Sounds like everyone is guilty? Not a very useful perspective imo
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • Geminidog 6y ago
      It's very possible for everyone to be guilty. We don't live in a world where if something isn't "useful" it isn't true. Your statement ends up reading sort of like "Is every Nazi guilty of the holocaust?" Technically maybe not, doesn't change the fact that of the matter that overall all Nazis are guilty. You can't run away from this with some garbage statement of "Not a very useful perspective." This incident literally killed an amount of people that is equivalent to a genocide. Imagine if you were a Nazi and you said that. If you were just a mere guard at one of these concentration camps could you say what you just said to me to a victim who lived through the atrocity? Think about what you should say to the parents of a man/woman who died from an opioid overdose. Literally, I think you're unaware of the magnitude of the crime that was committed here. Watch these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcKURD_osM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcKURD_osM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXL3F5HvCr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXL3F5HvCr8
      • smabie 6y ago