I'm current McKinsey. I tend to have a different pitch. A lot of people complain that they've been saying something for X years. Then a consultant comes in, tal

I'm current McKinsey. I tend to have a different pitch. A lot of people complain that they've been saying something for X years. Then a consultant comes in, talks to them, reports the idea, and then it actually happens and everyone celebrates. They perceive this as the consultants being full of shit, but really it's just that their own organization is deeply ineffective, communication is poor, or they are not as clear or persuasive in their own communications. If you work at a tightly wound bureaucracy, it can be really difficult to do anything without a third party coming in and just stepping over all the red tape to get things done with a mandate from the top. I'm a data scientist. I HAVE pitched ideas directly to fortune 500 ceo's in my early 20's. But it's a weird thing to assume this is hubris. Fortune 500 CEO's are not gods. They're just people. And often times they have some pretty important questions that one dude with a python script can answer that they just don't really have the organizational capability to answer otherwise. It would be great if they could do this in house, but many times they can't, and almost always we don't leave until there's someone on their side who's been upskilled to do it going forward. I would recommend looking into it if you're on the ML side and don't care for FAANG. edit: also fwiw, the marginal cost of a BA / ASC in the provided rate table in this article is $1.7M / year, not $3M.