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My Bosses at McKinsey Made Us Get on 2 A.m. Zoom Calls
- dredmorbius 5y agoTime for a management consultants union, it seems.
- geodel 5y agoI shudder to think if they go on strike and decide not to play golf for one day. This would surely bring worker revolution that we've been talking lately.
- okamiueru 5y agoEvery time unions come up on hacker news, I feel I step into a surreal dystopia. I live in a country where almost everyone is part of some union. It's not "if", it's mostly "which". I was once part of an oncall rotation at work. We got 100% overtime, and a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how time consuming the actual issue was. Answer an email? Two hours overtime pay. The idea that an individual stands a chance against a company, and that unions somehow don't change this dynamic for the better of the workers is so detached from reality, that I'm almost impressed at how effective propaganda campaigns must have been in the US. The last epoch US workers had decent working conditions was in a time when unions were a lot more common. People fought and died for this. They didn't piss off and go golfing for a day. This is also just.. History. It shouldn't be hard to look this up,so here is one of the first websearches that seemed to cover the trends: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/union-membership-middle-class-income_n_3948543.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/union-membership-mi...
- pyuser583 5y agoWhich country?
- niij 5y agoWhat's the PPP pay per hour and hours worked per week compared to the US?
- okamiueru 5y agoFrom som cursory searching for stats: OECD 2016, 27 hours per week vs 34 in the US. They are from different years, so not sure how comparable they are. Also, PPP probably also matters little unless you take into account the cost of living? And doesn't capture polarized inequality.
- niij 5y ago> PPP probably also matters little unless you take into account the cost of living The point of PPP vs raw GDP is to take cost of living into account. Without knowing the country you're referring to, I can't really compare or discuss further. > And doesn't capture polarized inequality The Gini coefficient does.
- vmladenov 5y agoIn the US, the UAW union has been fighting electrification of vehicles due to concerns about job losses. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-environment-and-nature-environment-ap-fact-check-729167555cfc4b62df17ffbf43e51e9a https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-environment-an...
- euroderf 5y ago"Are you or are you not a professional ?"
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago"Is you is, or is you ain't, my baby?"
- burntoutsophos 5y agoI empathize with her situation as I've been in similar situation at a Big 4 organization - An onshore manager (not my direct manager) from my team called me up at 2.30am (his afternoon time) during the first week of our engagement. I did not receive the call but fretted over whether he had an emergency at the Client site. Turns out, that the next day, he mentioned he had simply called up at the unearthly hour to ask about details that I had already mailed him the previous evening. His lame excuse - 'Sorry dude, I don't read mails' I'm not sure if I should feel proud or ashamed (or maybe both) that I was able to pull off 60-80 hour weeks and weekend work far too long for my corporate overlords without resorting to exotic stuff that the interviewee in this article used for staying up late/battling stress. As long as people are enamored by such workplaces (including 24 year old past 'me'), not much will change - at least not soon. Edit: Forgot to mention that the manager showed no remorse for a situation that was never an emergency. Guess I should simply be grateful that he didn't reprimand me for failing to be his 24 hour little helper/Verbal Email reader. :) Regards, ~Burned out Corporate Slave
- pknomad 5y agoSorry that you had to experience something like this. While it never happened to me, but apparently one of my colleague's manager got a direct phone call from his manager because "he was not responding to slack messages fast enough." I suspect places that house managers like yours and mine has no interest in dis-incentivizing these behavior and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
- burntoutsophos 5y agoApart from lack of interest in dis-incentivizing this behavior, two possible reasons come to mind - why managers like these exist: 1. (Nature) Some of them were just tuned that way since childhood. 2. (Nurture) When these managers were junior employees, some/all of their past managers micro-managed them similarly, which built up resentment inside them and instead of rejecting these traits & becoming a better human, these junior employees decided to 'Pay it forward' in the worst way possible and ergo, continue the vicious cycle.
- unstatusthequo 5y agoWelcome to consulting and working across time zones. Let’s not forget that in management consulting, dedication definitely pays off if you operate efficiently and consistently deliver results. It’s not a work/life balance job, but it’s one with interesting challenges that does give a lot of flexibility even though demands can be high sometimes.
- cowanon22 5y agoLol, spoken like a true corporate slave. Sad thing is anyone who works in McKinsey has more than enough talent to succeed without sacrificing their personal life. I guess the saying is true, McKinsey is filled will people who used to be interesting.
- Redsquare 5y agoWhat are you on about?
- mxuribe 5y agoRecently I learned of a quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (among other things, the science fiction writer and futurist): "...the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system..." [0] So, if Mr. Clarke is to be believed, does that mean that organizations like McKinsey - and for that matter capitalism in general - represent old fashioned ways of thinking? Then, why do orgs like McKinsey get paid so much??? /s [0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#cite_ref-127 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#cite_ref-127
- dekhn 5y agoer, no. The idea is that we currently do not have a post-scarcity society, and will maintain the existing system to develop technology until we do, at which point, what's the point of a political-economic system?
- Viliam1234 5y agoPerhaps we will never achieve literal post-scarcity. Some people will always want to fly to another galaxy, and there might be not enough fuel to make all of them happy. But if instead of yes-or-no we take it as a scale, I'd say we moved a lot on this scale during the last hundred years. So, how about reducing the work-week to 30 hours? Or perhaps keep it at 40 hours, but after each two years of work you get one year of vacation?
- pylua 5y agoAfter being on pager duty at all hours plus working I sadly do not find her experience that different from the usual. That’s just the way it works these days .
- chromatin 5y agoSounds terrible, but all the US medical resident physicians are playing the world’s tiniest violins for this article, because they keep worse hours, get paid less (like half to 60%), and if they mess up, someone dies or is maimed. edit: downvoted for truth — witness the medical resident physician reply below confirming exactly what I observed. To clarify, I support raising the standards for all junior people and do not advocate abusive employment and training practices.
- david-gpu 5y agoI believe that is called "crab bucket mentality". Resident doctors deserve better than that. Their situation should be improved rather than dismissing everybody else's struggles.
- chromatin 5y agoSorry it came across as dismissal, because it wasn’t. I don’t condone abusive employment or training conditions for anyone. It was merely an honest observation that society writ large, and especially of note young physicians, will find it hard to sympathize with Ivy League grads making double their salary at a younger age with far less responsibility.
- mint2 5y agoIt came across as “stop complaining because xyz has it worse”
- et2o 5y agoI was thinking exactly this. They get all kinds of perks at McKinsey, I just get dumped on by everyone. We don’t get retirement benefits, travel expenses, anything that is standard in corporate America and we have essentially no freedom to switch teams or move between specialties etc. like they do in the corporate world. Not to mention their salaries go up dramatically in 1-2 years of training. They would easily be making 5x what we make in a few years. Not that they have it great, but I just have difficulty feeling too much empathy. Ok, I’m going to go back to trying not to kill anyone today.
- theonlybutlet 5y agoSo in reality they were earning $40 000 and just doing two jobs with hours like that.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoThis is very true and more peope should be aware of that
- alexfromapex 5y agoCame here to say this. If you’re working over 40 hours per week and salaried, you’re diluting your pay.
- philwelch 5y agoThe people who work at McKinsey are, in the context of the American class system, members of the elite. They are not the oppressed proletariat. They're soft-handed, Ivy League educated elites fighting to climb the top rungs of the status ladder. That's always been difficult throughout human history, and if the biggest hardship of our elite is 2 AM Zoom calls, we should find a more deserving elite. Don't get me wrong. I certainly don't want to be on any 2 AM Zoom calls. But I also don't aspire to be a member of the elite. And if I did, I would probably be willing to endure hardship in order to achieve that goal. But there's another level to this. At one point, the left advocated for the working class, and a leftist rag like Mother Jones wouldn't be caught dead publishing entitled whining from members of the soft-handed elite class complaining about how difficult their lives are. But now, for some reason, the McKinsey class has managed to co-opt the left and cast themselves as the victims.
- secondaryacct 5y agoDividing people in classes and showing no empathy for those you dislike is supposed to be what's bad with the "elite" fantasy (everyone, with a bit of work, can get a slave job anywhere)
- Viliam1234 5y agoYes, this "from my perspective, you are elite, so it is okay to abuse you for a while" will quickly backfire on people lower on the social ladder. It is okay to wake up McKinsey employees at 2AM, because hey, they make more money than most of us. It is okay to make software developers work 60 hours a week, because hey, they make more money than most of us (from the perspective of someone outside the Hacker News audience). It is okay to... mistreat people in some sweatshop, because hey, they make slightly more money than... people working in some other sweatshop. How about instead adopting the rule "40 hours a week, not a second more, full stop, no exception". Yeah, some rich kids would benefit from that, too. But you wouldn't have to worry that the lack of empathy will trickle down to you, so maybe it's a smarter strategy in long term. (Especially for the Hacker News readers, who are often not that far from the top.)
- Tarucho 5y agoShe should not worry. After 1.5-2 years of 60-hour workweeks at McKinsey she will be qualified to get a comfy 40-hour work-week management position at a software company and will make us devs work 60-hour work-weeks until she retires us at 35 because who needs that much experience to program a computer. And unless this is in FAANG, we will get paid as seniors the same she did as a junior.
- audiometry 5y agoMcKinsey just sounds like another tournament -- 64 people start, puke blood, and and try to be the final survivor who becomes a partner and becomes hugely wealthy. The rest rinse away to other places over time. No different than working at Goldman Sachs, etc. If you decide to enter a tournament, fine, but adjust your expectations accordingly. This author sounds naive and self-pitying.
- mrlonglong 5y agoLet me put this short and sweet, they're over privileged and overpaid asshats.