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Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor

48 points by mgh2 4y ago

sharmin123 4y ago
anm89 4y ago
I wish I could go back to a time when this surprised or upset me.
Havoc 4y ago
Another reason: consultants provide an indirect office politics value add for the individual “wasn’t us - the consultants said that”. ie shield from accountability. Obviously not in the taxpayers interest
- janstice 4y ago
  Alternatively, it’s a good opportunity for staff that don’t get management cut-through to send messages upwards.
jeffrallen 4y ago
What's really a scandal is what's legal.
jshaqaw 4y ago
This again? McKinsey doesn’t really charge 3mm for that 23 year old. In reality the customer pays for a project what they pay. How that gets allocated over project staff is meaningless technicalities. As for the value of that 23 year old - my info is dated as of my actual McKinsey experience 20+ years ago - but other than me (who was a 25 year old particularly unsuited to the work) these were some of the most brilliant and hard working people I’ve met as it would pertain to doing that kind of work. But more importantly the job of the analyst and associate - despite a let’s trash the elite consultants article a day - is not to provide advice to corporate chieftains. It is to be the on the ground first point of interaction gathering data and running analyses so that the Partners and Directors who actually do know quite a lot can do their jobs. CEOs pay to get advice from Partners and Partners get the info they need to provide that advice from their on the ground teams. Finally, the actual cost relative to specific work product is a bit illusory. Like a banker who counsels a CEO for 10 years on the house to finally get paid with an M&A fee, Partners/Directors often provide constant counsel over many years to C level types and are intermittently given actual paid engagements. I feel like I write this response every 3-6 months on HN so I should just save it to Textexpander at this point. I hated working at McKinsey and left in under a year. It was a miserable fit for me and I have no illusions about the firm. But they are very effective in certain ways. Yes the costs are high but so are the costs of making a mistake or failing to capture an opportunity where impacts are in the billions. Why does McKinsey (sometimes) provide value? One - an organization may be facing something critical which it only faces once every 20 years or once ever. Meanwhile, McKinsey has institutional experience it can draw on dealing with that issue hundreds of times. Second, when the issue is more of a white page strategic question you frankly have more analytical horsepower and broader perspectives than most organizations can field internally. Are the results always great? Of course not. Bet some of you FAANG and co devs also know some ultra high paid developers and execs at your firms who sometimes strike out. The real world is messy and hard. People saying McK gets paid millions to have a snot nosed 23 year old tell grizzled veteran operators what to do is either click bait canard or doesn’t understand how this really works.
- alanwreath 4y ago
  sad reality is the "snot nosed 23 year old" probably is more technically versed than the "grizzled veteran" who's version control of choice is email threads or Teams.
  - spicymaki 4y ago
    That was a blatantly ageist comment. The beauty of ageism is one day you are going to be grizzled and have to read through these comments. Actually, worse than that, you are going to have to read these comments continuously every generation of hot shot kids that pop up who don't know they will be old one day. sigh!
    - alanwreath 4y ago
      I share your sentiment with regard to ageism. Thank you for bringing up this topic and highlighting how wrong and ugly it is! And, you are right, this comment seems pro-ageist. I am happy to clarify (especially if there are some ageists out there who would have felt emboldened in their prejudice having misinterpreted my observation)! I am not referring to the younger generation being magically more capable than a veteran technologist. I am referring to tech leadership in the government (say a general or colonel) being so technically inexperienced/naive that a novice technologist (the snot nosed kid) will probably be more capable in directing software projects. You can see a similar/identical sentiment mentioned during a scathing review of the military in the resignation letter of the pentagon’s first chief software officer as seen (bits and pieces at least ) here: Chaillan announced his resignation in a blistering letter at the start of September, saying military officials were repeatedly put in charge of cyber initiatives for which they lacked experience, decrying Pentagon “laggards” and absence of funding. “[W]e are setting up critical infrastructure to fail,” he said in his letter, which made only cursory reference to advances by China. “We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? [ . . .]While we wasted time in bureaucracy, our adversaries moved further ahead.” https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0 https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f... (If you are paywalled try this https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2Ff939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...)
alanwreath 4y ago
Will the government ever get a stable software team (and team leadership)? One not helmed by typical (non-technical) military personnel(colonel, general, staff sergeant), but teams dedicated to IT. Having worked as a contractor, what frustrated me was the planned "changing of the guard" and the ensuing reeducation of the government officials we worked with (that drove the project goals). The fact that we had to educate the government at all (with death by powerpoint) was frustrating in itself. But having to justify what we'd already justified and in some instances taking huge leaps backwards in progress because the current administration hadn't felt the pain we had already experienced with the passed administration and were trying to solve (and were convinced that this time, under their leadership, somehow it wouldn't be the same).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/projects https://usds.gov/projects Review their impact reports. Progress takes time.
Ken_At_EM 4y ago
This sort of just continues to cement my opinion that all large consulting firms are a scam and if your company employs them that’s not a “safe bet” but just shows that your company or division does not deserve to exist.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

48 points by mgh2 4y ago

sharmin123 4y ago

anm89 4y ago

I wish I could go back to a time when this surprised or upset me.

Havoc 4y ago

Another reason: consultants provide an indirect office politics value add for the individual “wasn’t us - the consultants said that”. ie shield from accountability. Obviously not in the taxpayers interest

janstice 4y ago
Alternatively, it’s a good opportunity for staff that don’t get management cut-through to send messages upwards.

jeffrallen 4y ago

What's really a scandal is what's legal.

jshaqaw 4y ago

This again? McKinsey doesn’t really charge 3mm for that 23 year old. In reality the customer pays for a project what they pay. How that gets allocated over project staff is meaningless technicalities. As for the value of that 23 year old - my info is dated as of my actual McKinsey experience 20+ years ago - but other than me (who was a 25 year old particularly unsuited to the work) these were some of the most brilliant and hard working people I’ve met as it would pertain to doing that kind of work. But more importantly the job of the analyst and associate - despite a let’s trash the elite consultants article a day - is not to provide advice to corporate chieftains. It is to be the on the ground first point of interaction gathering data and running analyses so that the Partners and Directors who actually do know quite a lot can do their jobs. CEOs pay to get advice from Partners and Partners get the info they need to provide that advice from their on the ground teams. Finally, the actual cost relative to specific work product is a bit illusory. Like a banker who counsels a CEO for 10 years on the house to finally get paid with an M&A fee, Partners/Directors often provide constant counsel over many years to C level types and are intermittently given actual paid engagements. I feel like I write this response every 3-6 months on HN so I should just save it to Textexpander at this point. I hated working at McKinsey and left in under a year. It was a miserable fit for me and I have no illusions about the firm. But they are very effective in certain ways. Yes the costs are high but so are the costs of making a mistake or failing to capture an opportunity where impacts are in the billions. Why does McKinsey (sometimes) provide value? One - an organization may be facing something critical which it only faces once every 20 years or once ever. Meanwhile, McKinsey has institutional experience it can draw on dealing with that issue hundreds of times. Second, when the issue is more of a white page strategic question you frankly have more analytical horsepower and broader perspectives than most organizations can field internally. Are the results always great? Of course not. Bet some of you FAANG and co devs also know some ultra high paid developers and execs at your firms who sometimes strike out. The real world is messy and hard. People saying McK gets paid millions to have a snot nosed 23 year old tell grizzled veteran operators what to do is either click bait canard or doesn’t understand how this really works.

alanwreath 4y ago
sad reality is the "snot nosed 23 year old" probably is more technically versed than the "grizzled veteran" who's version control of choice is email threads or Teams.
- spicymaki 4y ago
  That was a blatantly ageist comment. The beauty of ageism is one day you are going to be grizzled and have to read through these comments. Actually, worse than that, you are going to have to read these comments continuously every generation of hot shot kids that pop up who don't know they will be old one day. sigh!
  - alanwreath 4y ago
    I share your sentiment with regard to ageism. Thank you for bringing up this topic and highlighting how wrong and ugly it is! And, you are right, this comment seems pro-ageist. I am happy to clarify (especially if there are some ageists out there who would have felt emboldened in their prejudice having misinterpreted my observation)! I am not referring to the younger generation being magically more capable than a veteran technologist. I am referring to tech leadership in the government (say a general or colonel) being so technically inexperienced/naive that a novice technologist (the snot nosed kid) will probably be more capable in directing software projects. You can see a similar/identical sentiment mentioned during a scathing review of the military in the resignation letter of the pentagon’s first chief software officer as seen (bits and pieces at least ) here: Chaillan announced his resignation in a blistering letter at the start of September, saying military officials were repeatedly put in charge of cyber initiatives for which they lacked experience, decrying Pentagon “laggards” and absence of funding. “[W]e are setting up critical infrastructure to fail,” he said in his letter, which made only cursory reference to advances by China. “We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? [ . . .]While we wasted time in bureaucracy, our adversaries moved further ahead.” https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0 https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f... (If you are paywalled try this https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2Ff939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...)

alanwreath 4y ago

Will the government ever get a stable software team (and team leadership)? One not helmed by typical (non-technical) military personnel(colonel, general, staff sergeant), but teams dedicated to IT. Having worked as a contractor, what frustrated me was the planned "changing of the guard" and the ensuing reeducation of the government officials we worked with (that drove the project goals). The fact that we had to educate the government at all (with death by powerpoint) was frustrating in itself. But having to justify what we'd already justified and in some instances taking huge leaps backwards in progress because the current administration hadn't felt the pain we had already experienced with the passed administration and were trying to solve (and were convinced that this time, under their leadership, somehow it wouldn't be the same).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 4y ago
https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/projects https://usds.gov/projects Review their impact reports. Progress takes time.

Ken_At_EM 4y ago

This sort of just continues to cement my opinion that all large consulting firms are a scam and if your company employs them that’s not a “safe bet” but just shows that your company or division does not deserve to exist.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]