12 ms·

The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell (2010)

237 points by praptak 4y ago

davidguetta 4y ago
The guy has 2 cognitive dissonance 1/ the fact that his full belief of free market contraicts his job of lying to the client and 2/ the fact that he had to producz bogus reports. One is hard to handle, two when your are younf and full of drive is downright impossible
superchroma 4y ago
Honestly not a very surprising story. Maybe it wasn't even worth skipping the $16k. Looking at the endless list of boondoggles undertaken by some of the middle eastern countries awash with oil, one can only surmise that there is a well staffed consultant class there who are very talented at never saying no, I can say I'm completely unsurprised about that. If you believe that as an employee of BCG, you're offering next to no value (as a yes man who makes snappy powerpoints to help squash the fleeting doubts of some architecturally aspirational minor royal), and that the actions of your clients are broadly unethical (destroying the planet, facilitating other people destroying the planet, cutting up diplomats, etc.), arguably, is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite for such clients to increase inertia in their operations and drain their ill-gotten gains?
- sudobash1 4y ago
  No, it's not a surprising story, but I don't think that is why he passed on the $16k. Rather I think that he was done being payed to suppress his conscience. And $16k to give up the freedom to discuss your life doesn't sound like a good deal to me (especially if you are not hurting for cash).
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  It was surprising to me.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  > is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite If you're surrounded by a transparently evil organization AND you profit from it, even if you think you are doing good, you will likely be corrupted and trapped in a web of your own justifications that just happen to support the continuation of a fat pay check.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  It may have been a bit more surprising in 2010 when this was written, before there were a lot more stories like this one being published.
  - superchroma 4y ago
    For me the shoe dropped after Palm Island #2 in Dubai, when they announced The World. It looked silly, didn't sell well and it didn't succeed cleanly and was immediately followed by the announcement of The Universe, where even the renders looked sloppy.
- lozenge 4y ago
  If you want to undertake a boondoggle, why not skip the consulting and get right into it?
  - umeshunni 4y ago
    The consulting provides it with a veneer of legitimacy.
andreareina 4y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 (1y ago, 261 points, 182 comments)
- runnerup 4y ago
  Top comment there is: > The experience taught me a lot about business and business leadership. Many times I’d ask myself “what would McKinsey or BCG do here?” Then I’d go do the exact opposite. That’s proven a good course of action at many critical junctures. While this agrees with my personal impression “in bulk” it’s worth noting that there are exceptions. McKinsey is currently focusing heavily on hiring actually accomplished top engineers from production environment…specifically targeting those with 6-10 YOE who may have hired into a “lesser” company during a recession or market downturn than they should have qualified for their graduation year of college. They’re hiring engineers who have had outsized / personally unexpected (by the engineer) success with changes to processes or best engineering practices that ended up being rolled out to wide swaths of their company, or globally across the org. They are also specifically looking among those effective engineers for who can also speak competently with many layers of an org - not just the business people but also lend help and expertise on the technical side and gain trust through competence. The experienced engineers I know that they’ve picked up are among the best industrial / process / manufacturing engineers that I’ve ever known and are insanely technically competent. But I also think these are hired into relatively small, niche groups and offices. The bulk of the consultant pool are still fresh MBAs, maybe with limited but glamorous resume fillers.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Yes even McKinsey had to realise at some point that the bulk of the money was now in IT consulting, prestige be damned. But I have to give you that they have spun a good tale around it as usual.
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      Current McKinsey. It's a big decentralized firm so it's hard to say definitively what other groups are doing but I don't think we're doing "IT consulting" if you mean the body shops that do implementation work like Accenture. The engineers and folks are mostly because we need to do a lot of stuff with analytics and working with different platforms as needed.
wpietri 4y ago
I appreciate the brutal truth here about consulting. It took me a long time to realize that the goal wasn't to make something better or solve problems real. It was mostly about executive feelings, flattering people with money, and competition in dominance hierarchies. I don't do much consulting anymore. And I salute anybody who turns down hush money. When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement. This guy really got his money's worth.
- willhinsa 4y ago
  > When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement. Thank you for the chuckle this gave me!
- tootie 4y ago
  I spent a long time working in what you might call mid-tier consulting. We did a lot 6-8 figure consulting gigs at large corps mostly for digital and marketing projects, but also did some business strategy and product development. Sometimes we cross paths with Big 4 consultants who were embedded with the same client. We absolutely lived and died on our reputation and word of mouth for successful projects. The best engagements were the ones where we told clients they were asking for the wrong thing and needed to rethink their strategy. These were probably lower-level decisions than what Big 4 were doing, but still expensive things to get wrong. I've never seen or heard of anyone who has a positive opinion from the inside or out of the Big 4. It's like they are hired explicitly to draw up presentations to provide cover for knowingly wrong decisions that are already made.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    You certainly won't get any contradiction from me. My one encounter with a big-4 consultancy shocked me. It was a software project with a hard deadline; the client had contractual obligations to a lot of state and local governments. The consultants said it would take them $5m to do it and the client happily signed. The consultant deployed a lot of bright young people with very little experience. As the deadlines were near, nothing worked. At which point, the consultants downed tools and said the money was spent. The client paid them another $5 million to come back and clean up the mess they made. It was the most brazen theft I'd ever seen. I would never be able to do such a thing, and if I had been working for the consultancy I would have quit, stammering apologies to the client as I left.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
I'm currently suing my previous employers for unfair dismissal in what is honestly a compliation of some of the most craziest work stories people I tell them to have heard. At the first settlement offer had a boilerplate clause that I could saying bad things about the employer and considering the nature of all the stories it would be a non-disclosure covering some epic stories. Reality is, I would rather be able to tell those stories than take any settlement. The stories while super stressful to go through are super fun to tell to people, they're just that crazy.
- tsunamifury 4y ago
  Well?
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    It's still going through the courts. But I feel bad not giving something and this isn't part of the legal case so, the CEO kicked my french bulldog puppy, called a former employee a slut, implied the only reason to respect the COO was to have sex with her, and by the end of it we highly suspected he beat his wife.
    - tsunamifury 4y ago
      Was this a small startup? I’ve seen these terrible antics in smaller ones where the CEOs can hide better.
      - that_guy_iain 4y ago
        A startup that was acquired and operating as its own entity. So basically still a small startup.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Unless you tell us right now I’m going to assume you were in the wrong ;) Edit: saw your response, sounds crazy!
rendall 4y ago
> It was clear that the client was going to go forward with their decision regardless of how I acted. How could I be responsible for a foregone conclusion? I wonder if it was NEOM. But that's going to destroy a lot more than only $1 billion when all is said and done. Edit: Oh, 2010. Never mind.
- zinglersen 4y ago
  Do you have any insights on Neom?
  - rendall 4y ago
    Just public info. This is quite a sober and reasonable analysis from an architect https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o A comment from a consultant, on Astral Codex Ten https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8112867?r=536t2 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122... Not to mention Scott Alexander's writeup: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122
- lordgrenville 4y ago
  Also a different country...
  - rendall 4y ago
    Their clients were only Emiratis? I did not see that in the article.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work. That's pretty profound, and indeed I think it's not uncommon for people to get very burned out on very light workloads, as in OP, which OP has explained neatly.
- dspillett 4y ago
  I think this mis-characterises where the burn-out often comes from. If you have an outwardly light task with onerous implications (just feeling you are being dishonest, as in these examples, can easily be enough) or very stressful segments, you aren't just dealing with the stress during the hours you are officially clocked-on, you will be thinking about it throughout chunks of the rest of your day. It may even inhibit sleep to an extent. Time away from a stressful situation is often not stress free time. Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times, mentally shift responsibility ("not my job to keep that correct, guv'ner") without guilt, or lack the awareness for these issues to even present themselves at all. See "how do politicians and lobbyists sleep at night"!
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    > Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times I have no evidence or considrations one way or the other, but I wonder if people without an internal dialogue, without an inner voice, have less stress or anxiety because they never switch those thoughts on or off.
    - stavros 4y ago
      As someone like that, maybe? I'm much less stressed than other people I know, though work does sometimes piss me off, bleeding well into non-work time.
- rib3ye 4y ago
  In my experience this is a highly underrated statement. In my day job, I work with Roblox developers, all whom either dropped out or never went to college to be full-time Roblox devs. They are so motivated by being on the platform that they will happily spend 8+ hours a day re-creating MS Office products on Roblox for our clients.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> This is the third in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai. Anyone found the others? I haven't but I only tried a little bit.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  Sure: #1 https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16 https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16 #2 https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17 https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17 #4 https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19 https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19
rsweeney21 4y ago
Clickbait. The author was offered a standard severance package when he was terminated. Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement. Severance helps people make the transition to their next job, but it also serves the company by preventing you from suing for wrongful termination or saying bad things about the company.
- pydry 4y ago
  >Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement. Ive seen ones that do and ones that dont. For the ones that do they all had a very good reason to want it.
- legohead 4y ago
  My conclusion after reading: $16,000 blog post
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  @dang, this person is right. The title is clickbait; the author wasn't offered hush money to not report or blog about something. They were offered money for signing a severance agreement with NDA: > What did surprise me was the offer BCG made to me as I was on the way out the door. In exchange for me signing an agreement, BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams. Much of it looked boilerplate, like any common compromise agreement used in Europe — in return for some money, I would stipulate that I hadn’t been discriminated against on the basis of race or gender, etc. > But the rest was very clearly a non-disclosure agreement Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure.
  - quadrifoliate 4y ago
    You are omitting the sentences immediately afterwards. "Non disclosure agreement" is just a word, the provisions are what are important. > Not only did it bar me from making any disparaging comments about BCG or my work experience, but I wouldn’t even be allowed to reveal the existence of the non-disclosure agreement itself. I concede that the title is a bit sensationalist, but it is essentially accurate. BCG did offer the author $16k to not write anything about them, including this story. > Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure. I am not at MIT or even loosely affiliated with MIT. I know that BCG stands for Boston Consulting Group in the context of consulting. Also, it's kind of like IBM, you don't really need to know that it stands for International Business Machines, that cluster of initials has an identity all by itself in a certain context.
blantonl 4y ago
50% of consulting work as a business consultant can be summed up in one phrase: "Shut up and color"
lordnacho 4y ago
This is pretty much what every consultant I've met in a personal setting has ever said to me. MBB, Big 4, boutique, all of them. The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided. You get put into awkward positions. Someone close to me ended up doing a presentation to the governor of the Bank of England, at age 23. Clearly this person did not know much that the boss didn't already know, but the consultancy charged the Bank nonetheless. Perhaps just one of dozens of people I've spoken to about this career thinks it was a good choice.
- verisimi 4y ago
  > The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided. ... which is all you need to realise to see how conspiracies occur, how politics is a dog and pony show, how finance is just the execution of pre-determined strategies. Reality is not unfolding naturally - there is a clear plan, to which a veneer of 'natural unfolding' is applied to carry most people along.
  - rendall 4y ago
    I'm not sure how you get there from the quote
    - verisimi 4y ago
      > you're NOT really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  It’s not that bad. Plenty of boutique do genuine very specialised work and both MBB and Big 4 have both interesting missions and rubber stamping ones. Consulting is very uneven and as a new hire, being assigned to one or the other is mostly down to luck. That’s fine because at its heart consulting is mainly about managing your clients and their expectations and that’s something you can learn in both kind of jobs. A big difference between small and prestigious consulting firms will be how insufferably full of themselves your colleagues are however. It has a significant impact on how the job feels on a daily basis.
kn100 4y ago
https://archive.ph/VavYg https://archive.ph/VavYg
anonu 4y ago
Great Podcast and Great podcast episode on Mckinsey: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34553310/sheth-mckinsey-company-the-first-management-consultants?tab=transcript https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34553310/sheth-mckinse... Gives a bit more background on consulting. I've always thought of it as a fluffy business but its still big business and the podcast breaks it down. Interesting factoid: the "Chief of Staff" role in the White House was created thanks to McKinsey.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
"I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others." I still can't believe there are people this naive. Just reading a newspaper for a year should dispel these myths. A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless free-market train crashes. It's like those economists who thought most people were rational. Crazy stuff.
- refurb 4y ago
  Saying "train wrecks" to disprove the point is like saying "A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless modern medicine train crashes." I don't know about you, but despite the "train wrecks" in modern medicine, I'm still a believer.
- digb 4y ago
  I mean they're basically a college student given the YOE and where this was published, sounds like the kid got mugged by reality. But yea, definitely jaw-droppingly naive.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > sounds like the kid got mugged by reality It's curmudgeonly of me, but he got mugged by MIT; which operated very much like the consultancy he went to work for. Promise everything, give the client what they want, ignore the obvious problems in the proposal and let the client take the hit if that's what they want so desperately.. just give them the rubber stamp. So, he took his MIT rubber stamp out into the real world and found out how much "double class load" was NOT like "actual paid work."
- lozenge 4y ago
  Well, he did mention monopoly effects and negative externalities, but only as if they are minor "extra terms" rather than completely disproving his starting point.
pjsg 4y ago
When I was a consultant, the saying was A consultant is someone who borrows the client's watch, tells them the time, and keeps the watch. In doing consulting, my biggest failure was turning down a class A network for the client (the client ended up with 6 /16s equivalents -- worth far more than what they paid me). I turned down $600M worth of IPv4 space at today's prices.
- AndrewStephens 4y ago
  I started my career as a programmer in the late 90s, the golden age of consultants. Two jokes from that era that reveal how they were viewed by the rank-and-file: --- A young zookeeper walks into the zoo on her first day of work. As she was being given the tour she notices 3 cages each containing a monkey and a computer. "What's with these monkeys?" she asked her new boss. "An amazing experiment. Look at this one" he said, pointing at the first cage. The monkey was sitting beside a small pile of bananas while happily typing on the keyboard - occasionally stopping to take a bite. "This monkey will produce over 200 lines of Visual Basic a day so long as it gets a few bananas." "Wow! What about this one", said the new hire, pointing the to second cage where the monkey was typing faster next to a larger pile of bananas. "That monkey eats more but produces over 300 lines of fully debugged Java a day" The trainee was astounded and pointed to the last cage, where the monkey was sitting on top of a huge pile of bananas, seemingly asleep. "What about that last monkey? He has the most bananas but doesn't appear to be doing anything." "We don't know what that monkey does," explained the boss, "but he calls himself a consultant" --- What is the difference between a shopping cart with a broken wheel and a consultant? The shopping cart seems to have a mind of its own but you can fit a lot more food and drink inside the consultant.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    Sounds like the third monkey had the most apeeling job.
paxexmect 4y ago
veryunlikely 4y ago
- sweettea 4y ago
  As a MIT alum, 'worked hard' understates the difficulty of that many classes. There are a few people per class who do such incredible feats, and it's entirely reasonable to believe Keith Yost is one of them.
npilk 4y ago
Based on my own experience at McKinsey and what I heard from coworkers, I think the author’s experience comes from a mixture of the realities of management consulting and the realities of working in the Dubai office. For whatever reason, my colleagues who spent time in that office described poorly-defined projects, unmotivated clients, and rubber-stamping that went well beyond anything I experienced in the US.
- jollybean 4y ago
  People vastly overstate the implications from one-sided anecdotes. Not only are these firms 'different at every office' even within the same office it varies a lot.
anon291 4y ago
Happy to talk about my experiences at Bain & Co (very similar to this). After four years of undergrad in Math & CS, and four summers of internships, I decided I no longer wanted to do software engineering. Thus, I applied and was accepted to strategy consulting. I lasted six months, and am now happily employed in SW. Just wasn't worth it.
tptacek 4y ago
The story is interesting, but the grabber in the headline is overblown: a severance tied to an exit agreement with an NDA is bog standard in consulting, especially if you're leaving due to a RIF, as this person seems to have been.
throwaway713 4y ago
I work at one of the well-known tech companies. We have recently gone on a consultant hiring spree after previously having avoided external contractors for years. With a team of five consultants and their manager, months of useless hour long meetings to answer simple questions that can be looked up in the documentation, and plenty of slideshows and design docs that are mostly filled with fluff, they’ve produced... a dashboard that I could have put together in about 30 minutes. Whatever social purpose this contract fulfills is a total mystery to me, but all I can think of is what a waste of human time this is.
- junofan 4y ago
  Facebook? Layoffs homie.
capableweb 4y ago
Not mentioned here in the comments (and slightly unclear if you only read the title) is that the $16,000 was not USD but $16,000 AED, so about ~$60,000 USD.
- philsnow 4y ago
  > BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams I read that as enough AED to be equivalent to ~$16k USD.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    Agreed. Dirhams is the unit, so it would be "16,000 dirhams," not $16,000 in dirhams.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  USD/AED is 3.67, so 16K AED is USD 4360
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- grech 4y ago
  1 USD = 3.6 AED Also, the article states that the offer was for $16,000 in equivalent local currency, so ~AED60,000.
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
I think the headline is misleading. The author was offered a standard corporate severance deal, which had a standard non-disclosure, in return for a very standard (even low) severance package. He was not offered money for silence on his specific story.
beachy 4y ago
> Analytical skills were overrated, for the simple reason that clients usually didn’t know why they had hired us. They sent us vague requests for proposal, we returned vague case proposals, and by the time we were hired, no one was the wiser as to why exactly we were there. Achieving this zen state is a primary goal of consulting firms working with public sector. After winning an initial brutal low balling battle with competitors, the goal is to transition to a model of a steady conveyor belt of non-competitive fluffy proposals for changes going one way to the client, and money flowing back the other way back to the firm.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
Hmmm... I have a really hard time accounting with the MIT course load, which throws shade onto the rest of the article. Yes, I have no doubt large firms offer NDAs at separation. I regularly sign NDAs when I start a new job, and when I exit them. Each time, I am compensated. The exit NDAs are reasonably narrow, and limited in time. If I do not like them, I do not sign them or ask for changes. It is just as much "hush money" or "not to tell" money about the company culture, as it is about intellectual property. It does not read like the OP was forced, threatened or coerced. If so, it is abhorrent and should be trumpeted to all. > I worked hard at MIT. I routinely took seven to ten classes per semester and filled whatever hours were left in the day with part-time jobs and tutoring. MIT uses a combination of lectures/recitations, labs/design/field, and outside prep in 'units'. I converted the units to credits. Overall, a 1-credit course is 3 hours a week work. Most courses are 3 and 4 credit. If we take 50% of the ten classes at 3 credit, and 50% at 4 credit, that comes out to be 335 and 345, or 105 hours. At max that 120 hours a week (10 courses @ 4 creds/class), and at minimum is still 63 hours a week (7 courses @ 3 creds/class). Full time load at MIT is 36 or more units, or 12 credits.[0] Three MIT units is approximately equal to one "semester hour" or credit.[1][2] First year students are limited to 60 units (20 credits)[3] and >you should note 48-54 units is still considered a typical load and advisable for most students. Requirements at MIT are structured so that you do not need to exceed 54 units per semester (or 48 in many cases) to successfully complete your degree in 4 years. [4] [0] https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/student-status/registration-load-light-load https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/student-sta... [1] https://ospa.utdallas.edu/semester-credit-hours-fall-2019-average-student-course-load-by-classification/ https://ospa.utdallas.edu/semester-credit-hours-fall-2019-av... [2] https://registrar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/calculating_instructional_units.pdf https://registrar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/calcul... [3] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limits-grading/first-year-credit-limits/ https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit... [4] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limits-grading/ https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit...
e2e4 4y ago
Highly recommend watching management consulting tv drama/comedy - House of Lies Trailer for season 1: https://youtu.be/pNLlHYJnj8I https://youtu.be/pNLlHYJnj8I
curiousllama 4y ago
Former consultant here. I once got staffed on a project to "predict the economy" Not an exaggeration - it failed (obviously) to the tune of $2M. And then the client bought another $5M extension on a different project. Consulting is so insane sometimes.
mring33621 4y ago
I think the author of this went to MIT. But I can't be sure.
nickdothutton 4y ago
Market for lemons.
kingkongjaffa 4y ago
>The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” >in Munich. I expected instruction in Excel programming, data analysis, and >business theory. Imagine signing up for MBB and thinking it was this. Completely misguided. This post is ridiculous, the writer thought the business world was an academic meritocracy like (MIT). Also a silly notion. Totally out of depth and naïve.
- the_af 4y ago
  Not everybody has experience with consultancy work, and this doesn't make them or what they write "ridiculous".
dandigangi 4y ago
Really enjoyed this article. Old business partner was at McKinsey and shared a lot of similar things with me. One oddity is how low $16k is. Their salaries are above average big by comparison. Could be they just cheaped out and thought it was adequate but it feels quite small to what I'd expect.
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
Anyone who wants more consulting stories like this should read "House of Lies."
inkcapmushroom 4y ago
>I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder such questions, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the children test. This particular sentence struck a nerve. You can justify literally anything self-serving in this way; I had to beat that old man up and take his wallet, it was to pay for my hypothetical kids' college!
- scotty79 4y ago
  That's why you need to look at the deeds first and take justifications into account only optionally.
rejor121 4y ago
Good article. Looking forward to the next part
- ahmadss 4y ago
  this was written in 2010. here are all of Keith's articles https://thetech.com/authors/keith-yost https://thetech.com/authors/keith-yost but not sure if he ever wrote a followup. here's his AMA on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kde8s/iama_former_business_consultant_for_bcg_dubai_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kde8s/iama_former_bus...
glonq 4y ago
In 2010ish, I worked at a place that did various things for a Dubai gov't-owned development company that had invested in us. What exactly did we do? I'm not sure. There was lots of meetings. And proposals. And trips to Dubai. And nice dinners. And executives with vague titles like "VP Special Projects". I think Dubai's economy fizzed out at about the same time that we discovered our owner was squandering/embezzling their investments in us.
xpe 4y ago
> My moral system is organized around a utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number — that which adds value cannot be wrong. It did not bother me therefore when I was handed consulting reports that had been stolen from our competitors. If the information in those reports would help us improve our client, then who could say we were doing wrong? Like downloading MP3s, it was a victimless crime. My reply is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson [1]: > A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. [1] https://www.bartleby.com/5/104.html https://www.bartleby.com/5/104.html
camillomiller 4y ago
>> I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it. This author is thoroughly analytical, and explains in such good detail why consulting is the work of the devil. Yet, he doesn’t apply any of that to the tenets of American Free Market Capitalism, which proved over and over to be the enabler of both the business model he’s decrying, and the end reason for most of his misery. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how efficiently capitalism is able to self-preserve itself. Free market as a framework for the definition of value has proven to create distorsions and inequalities never before seen in society, but we still gotta drink the cool aid because… because there just nothing better than free market and it’s a dogma! So the criticism stops at BCG, and not at the freaky system that made BCG possible.

237 points by praptak 4y ago

The guy has 2 cognitive dissonance 1/ the fact that his full belief of free market contraicts his job of lying to the client and 2/ the fact that he had to producz bogus reports. One is hard to handle, two when your are younf and full of drive is downright impossible

superchroma 4y ago

Honestly not a very surprising story. Maybe it wasn't even worth skipping the $16k. Looking at the endless list of boondoggles undertaken by some of the middle eastern countries awash with oil, one can only surmise that there is a well staffed consultant class there who are very talented at never saying no, I can say I'm completely unsurprised about that. If you believe that as an employee of BCG, you're offering next to no value (as a yes man who makes snappy powerpoints to help squash the fleeting doubts of some architecturally aspirational minor royal), and that the actions of your clients are broadly unethical (destroying the planet, facilitating other people destroying the planet, cutting up diplomats, etc.), arguably, is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite for such clients to increase inertia in their operations and drain their ill-gotten gains?

sudobash1 4y ago
No, it's not a surprising story, but I don't think that is why he passed on the $16k. Rather I think that he was done being payed to suppress his conscience. And $16k to give up the freedom to discuss your life doesn't sound like a good deal to me (especially if you are not hurting for cash).
ElijahLynn 4y ago
It was surprising to me.
tmpz22 4y ago
> is it not ethically appropriate to act as a parasite If you're surrounded by a transparently evil organization AND you profit from it, even if you think you are doing good, you will likely be corrupted and trapped in a web of your own justifications that just happen to support the continuation of a fat pay check.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
It may have been a bit more surprising in 2010 when this was written, before there were a lot more stories like this one being published.
- superchroma 4y ago
  For me the shoe dropped after Palm Island #2 in Dubai, when they announced The World. It looked silly, didn't sell well and it didn't succeed cleanly and was immediately followed by the announcement of The Universe, where even the renders looked sloppy.
lozenge 4y ago
If you want to undertake a boondoggle, why not skip the consulting and get right into it?
- umeshunni 4y ago
  The consulting provides it with a veneer of legitimacy.

andreareina 4y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 (1y ago, 261 points, 182 comments)

runnerup 4y ago
Top comment there is: > The experience taught me a lot about business and business leadership. Many times I’d ask myself “what would McKinsey or BCG do here?” Then I’d go do the exact opposite. That’s proven a good course of action at many critical junctures. While this agrees with my personal impression “in bulk” it’s worth noting that there are exceptions. McKinsey is currently focusing heavily on hiring actually accomplished top engineers from production environment…specifically targeting those with 6-10 YOE who may have hired into a “lesser” company during a recession or market downturn than they should have qualified for their graduation year of college. They’re hiring engineers who have had outsized / personally unexpected (by the engineer) success with changes to processes or best engineering practices that ended up being rolled out to wide swaths of their company, or globally across the org. They are also specifically looking among those effective engineers for who can also speak competently with many layers of an org - not just the business people but also lend help and expertise on the technical side and gain trust through competence. The experienced engineers I know that they’ve picked up are among the best industrial / process / manufacturing engineers that I’ve ever known and are insanely technically competent. But I also think these are hired into relatively small, niche groups and offices. The bulk of the consultant pool are still fresh MBAs, maybe with limited but glamorous resume fillers.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Yes even McKinsey had to realise at some point that the bulk of the money was now in IT consulting, prestige be damned. But I have to give you that they have spun a good tale around it as usual.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Current McKinsey. It's a big decentralized firm so it's hard to say definitively what other groups are doing but I don't think we're doing "IT consulting" if you mean the body shops that do implementation work like Accenture. The engineers and folks are mostly because we need to do a lot of stuff with analytics and working with different platforms as needed.

wpietri 4y ago

I appreciate the brutal truth here about consulting. It took me a long time to realize that the goal wasn't to make something better or solve problems real. It was mostly about executive feelings, flattering people with money, and competition in dominance hierarchies. I don't do much consulting anymore. And I salute anybody who turns down hush money. When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement. This guy really got his money's worth.

willhinsa 4y ago
> When I was laid off from Twitter they offered me something like $40k to sign a non-disparagement clause. It's been years, but I still owe them at least $30k of disparagement. Thank you for the chuckle this gave me!
tootie 4y ago
I spent a long time working in what you might call mid-tier consulting. We did a lot 6-8 figure consulting gigs at large corps mostly for digital and marketing projects, but also did some business strategy and product development. Sometimes we cross paths with Big 4 consultants who were embedded with the same client. We absolutely lived and died on our reputation and word of mouth for successful projects. The best engagements were the ones where we told clients they were asking for the wrong thing and needed to rethink their strategy. These were probably lower-level decisions than what Big 4 were doing, but still expensive things to get wrong. I've never seen or heard of anyone who has a positive opinion from the inside or out of the Big 4. It's like they are hired explicitly to draw up presentations to provide cover for knowingly wrong decisions that are already made.
- wpietri 4y ago
  You certainly won't get any contradiction from me. My one encounter with a big-4 consultancy shocked me. It was a software project with a hard deadline; the client had contractual obligations to a lot of state and local governments. The consultants said it would take them $5m to do it and the client happily signed. The consultant deployed a lot of bright young people with very little experience. As the deadlines were near, nothing worked. At which point, the consultants downed tools and said the money was spent. The client paid them another $5 million to come back and clean up the mess they made. It was the most brazen theft I'd ever seen. I would never be able to do such a thing, and if I had been working for the consultancy I would have quit, stammering apologies to the client as I left.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

I'm currently suing my previous employers for unfair dismissal in what is honestly a compliation of some of the most craziest work stories people I tell them to have heard. At the first settlement offer had a boilerplate clause that I could saying bad things about the employer and considering the nature of all the stories it would be a non-disclosure covering some epic stories. Reality is, I would rather be able to tell those stories than take any settlement. The stories while super stressful to go through are super fun to tell to people, they're just that crazy.

tsunamifury 4y ago
Well?
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  It's still going through the courts. But I feel bad not giving something and this isn't part of the legal case so, the CEO kicked my french bulldog puppy, called a former employee a slut, implied the only reason to respect the COO was to have sex with her, and by the end of it we highly suspected he beat his wife.
  - tsunamifury 4y ago
    Was this a small startup? I’ve seen these terrible antics in smaller ones where the CEOs can hide better.
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      A startup that was acquired and operating as its own entity. So basically still a small startup.
reidjs 4y ago
Unless you tell us right now I’m going to assume you were in the wrong ;) Edit: saw your response, sounds crazy!

rendall 4y ago

> It was clear that the client was going to go forward with their decision regardless of how I acted. How could I be responsible for a foregone conclusion? I wonder if it was NEOM. But that's going to destroy a lot more than only $1 billion when all is said and done. Edit: Oh, 2010. Never mind.

zinglersen 4y ago
Do you have any insights on Neom?
- rendall 4y ago
  Just public info. This is quite a sober and reasonable analysis from an architect https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o A comment from a consultant, on Astral Codex Ten https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8112867?r=536t2 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122... Not to mention Scott Alexander's writeup: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122
lordgrenville 4y ago
Also a different country...
- rendall 4y ago
  Their clients were only Emiratis? I did not see that in the article.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work. That's pretty profound, and indeed I think it's not uncommon for people to get very burned out on very light workloads, as in OP, which OP has explained neatly.

dspillett 4y ago
I think this mis-characterises where the burn-out often comes from. If you have an outwardly light task with onerous implications (just feeling you are being dishonest, as in these examples, can easily be enough) or very stressful segments, you aren't just dealing with the stress during the hours you are officially clocked-on, you will be thinking about it throughout chunks of the rest of your day. It may even inhibit sleep to an extent. Time away from a stressful situation is often not stress free time. Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times, mentally shift responsibility ("not my job to keep that correct, guv'ner") without guilt, or lack the awareness for these issues to even present themselves at all. See "how do politicians and lobbyists sleep at night"!
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  > Unless of course you are one of those lucky people who can reliably switch these thoughts on and off at appropriate times I have no evidence or considrations one way or the other, but I wonder if people without an internal dialogue, without an inner voice, have less stress or anxiety because they never switch those thoughts on or off.
  - stavros 4y ago
    As someone like that, maybe? I'm much less stressed than other people I know, though work does sometimes piss me off, bleeding well into non-work time.
rib3ye 4y ago
In my experience this is a highly underrated statement. In my day job, I work with Roblox developers, all whom either dropped out or never went to college to be full-time Roblox devs. They are so motivated by being on the platform that they will happily spend 8+ hours a day re-creating MS Office products on Roblox for our clients.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> This is the third in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai. Anyone found the others? I haven't but I only tried a little bit.

mherdeg 4y ago
Sure: #1 https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16 https://thetech.com/2010/04/02/dubai-v130-n16 #2 https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17 https://thetech.com/2010/04/06/dubai-v130-n17 #4 https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19 https://thetech.com/2010/04/13/dubai-v130-n19

rsweeney21 4y ago

Clickbait. The author was offered a standard severance package when he was terminated. Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement. Severance helps people make the transition to their next job, but it also serves the company by preventing you from suing for wrongful termination or saying bad things about the company.

pydry 4y ago
>Nearly all severance packages ask for non-disparagement. Ive seen ones that do and ones that dont. For the ones that do they all had a very good reason to want it.
legohead 4y ago
My conclusion after reading: $16,000 blog post
KennyBlanken 4y ago
@dang, this person is right. The title is clickbait; the author wasn't offered hush money to not report or blog about something. They were offered money for signing a severance agreement with NDA: > What did surprise me was the offer BCG made to me as I was on the way out the door. In exchange for me signing an agreement, BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams. Much of it looked boilerplate, like any common compromise agreement used in Europe — in return for some money, I would stipulate that I hadn’t been discriminated against on the basis of race or gender, etc. > But the rest was very clearly a non-disclosure agreement Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure.
- quadrifoliate 4y ago
  You are omitting the sentences immediately afterwards. "Non disclosure agreement" is just a word, the provisions are what are important. > Not only did it bar me from making any disparaging comments about BCG or my work experience, but I wouldn’t even be allowed to reveal the existence of the non-disclosure agreement itself. I concede that the title is a bit sensationalist, but it is essentially accurate. BCG did offer the author $16k to not write anything about them, including this story. > Also, maybe everyone at MIT knows who "BCG" is, but nobody outside MIT does, that's for sure. I am not at MIT or even loosely affiliated with MIT. I know that BCG stands for Boston Consulting Group in the context of consulting. Also, it's kind of like IBM, you don't really need to know that it stands for International Business Machines, that cluster of initials has an identity all by itself in a certain context.

blantonl 4y ago

50% of consulting work as a business consultant can be summed up in one phrase: "Shut up and color"

lordnacho 4y ago

This is pretty much what every consultant I've met in a personal setting has ever said to me. MBB, Big 4, boutique, all of them. The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided. You get put into awkward positions. Someone close to me ended up doing a presentation to the governor of the Bank of England, at age 23. Clearly this person did not know much that the boss didn't already know, but the consultancy charged the Bank nonetheless. Perhaps just one of dozens of people I've spoken to about this career thinks it was a good choice.

verisimi 4y ago
> The work isn't what it says on the tin. You may learn something about some area of business, that much is true, but you're not really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided. ... which is all you need to realise to see how conspiracies occur, how politics is a dog and pony show, how finance is just the execution of pre-determined strategies. Reality is not unfolding naturally - there is a clear plan, to which a veneer of 'natural unfolding' is applied to carry most people along.
- rendall 4y ago
  I'm not sure how you get there from the quote
  - verisimi 4y ago
    > you're NOT really advising people, you're producing slides that give your firm's rubber stamp on whatever has already been decided
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
It’s not that bad. Plenty of boutique do genuine very specialised work and both MBB and Big 4 have both interesting missions and rubber stamping ones. Consulting is very uneven and as a new hire, being assigned to one or the other is mostly down to luck. That’s fine because at its heart consulting is mainly about managing your clients and their expectations and that’s something you can learn in both kind of jobs. A big difference between small and prestigious consulting firms will be how insufferably full of themselves your colleagues are however. It has a significant impact on how the job feels on a daily basis.

kn100 4y ago

https://archive.ph/VavYg https://archive.ph/VavYg

anonu 4y ago

Great Podcast and Great podcast episode on Mckinsey: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34553310/sheth-mckinsey-company-the-first-management-consultants?tab=transcript https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34553310/sheth-mckinse... Gives a bit more background on consulting. I've always thought of it as a fluffy business but its still big business and the podcast breaks it down. Interesting factoid: the "Chief of Staff" role in the White House was created thanks to McKinsey.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

"I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others." I still can't believe there are people this naive. Just reading a newspaper for a year should dispel these myths. A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless free-market train crashes. It's like those economists who thought most people were rational. Crazy stuff.

refurb 4y ago
Saying "train wrecks" to disprove the point is like saying "A glance through history shows the aftermath of countless modern medicine train crashes." I don't know about you, but despite the "train wrecks" in modern medicine, I'm still a believer.
digb 4y ago
I mean they're basically a college student given the YOE and where this was published, sounds like the kid got mugged by reality. But yea, definitely jaw-droppingly naive.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > sounds like the kid got mugged by reality It's curmudgeonly of me, but he got mugged by MIT; which operated very much like the consultancy he went to work for. Promise everything, give the client what they want, ignore the obvious problems in the proposal and let the client take the hit if that's what they want so desperately.. just give them the rubber stamp. So, he took his MIT rubber stamp out into the real world and found out how much "double class load" was NOT like "actual paid work."
lozenge 4y ago
Well, he did mention monopoly effects and negative externalities, but only as if they are minor "extra terms" rather than completely disproving his starting point.

pjsg 4y ago

When I was a consultant, the saying was A consultant is someone who borrows the client's watch, tells them the time, and keeps the watch. In doing consulting, my biggest failure was turning down a class A network for the client (the client ended up with 6 /16s equivalents -- worth far more than what they paid me). I turned down $600M worth of IPv4 space at today's prices.

AndrewStephens 4y ago
I started my career as a programmer in the late 90s, the golden age of consultants. Two jokes from that era that reveal how they were viewed by the rank-and-file: --- A young zookeeper walks into the zoo on her first day of work. As she was being given the tour she notices 3 cages each containing a monkey and a computer. "What's with these monkeys?" she asked her new boss. "An amazing experiment. Look at this one" he said, pointing at the first cage. The monkey was sitting beside a small pile of bananas while happily typing on the keyboard - occasionally stopping to take a bite. "This monkey will produce over 200 lines of Visual Basic a day so long as it gets a few bananas." "Wow! What about this one", said the new hire, pointing the to second cage where the monkey was typing faster next to a larger pile of bananas. "That monkey eats more but produces over 300 lines of fully debugged Java a day" The trainee was astounded and pointed to the last cage, where the monkey was sitting on top of a huge pile of bananas, seemingly asleep. "What about that last monkey? He has the most bananas but doesn't appear to be doing anything." "We don't know what that monkey does," explained the boss, "but he calls himself a consultant" --- What is the difference between a shopping cart with a broken wheel and a consultant? The shopping cart seems to have a mind of its own but you can fit a lot more food and drink inside the consultant.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  Sounds like the third monkey had the most apeeling job.

paxexmect 4y ago

veryunlikely 4y ago

sweettea 4y ago
As a MIT alum, 'worked hard' understates the difficulty of that many classes. There are a few people per class who do such incredible feats, and it's entirely reasonable to believe Keith Yost is one of them.

npilk 4y ago

Based on my own experience at McKinsey and what I heard from coworkers, I think the author’s experience comes from a mixture of the realities of management consulting and the realities of working in the Dubai office. For whatever reason, my colleagues who spent time in that office described poorly-defined projects, unmotivated clients, and rubber-stamping that went well beyond anything I experienced in the US.

jollybean 4y ago
People vastly overstate the implications from one-sided anecdotes. Not only are these firms 'different at every office' even within the same office it varies a lot.

anon291 4y ago

Happy to talk about my experiences at Bain & Co (very similar to this). After four years of undergrad in Math & CS, and four summers of internships, I decided I no longer wanted to do software engineering. Thus, I applied and was accepted to strategy consulting. I lasted six months, and am now happily employed in SW. Just wasn't worth it.

tptacek 4y ago

The story is interesting, but the grabber in the headline is overblown: a severance tied to an exit agreement with an NDA is bog standard in consulting, especially if you're leaving due to a RIF, as this person seems to have been.

throwaway713 4y ago

I work at one of the well-known tech companies. We have recently gone on a consultant hiring spree after previously having avoided external contractors for years. With a team of five consultants and their manager, months of useless hour long meetings to answer simple questions that can be looked up in the documentation, and plenty of slideshows and design docs that are mostly filled with fluff, they’ve produced... a dashboard that I could have put together in about 30 minutes. Whatever social purpose this contract fulfills is a total mystery to me, but all I can think of is what a waste of human time this is.

junofan 4y ago
Facebook? Layoffs homie.

capableweb 4y ago

Not mentioned here in the comments (and slightly unclear if you only read the title) is that the $16,000 was not USD but $16,000 AED, so about ~$60,000 USD.

philsnow 4y ago
> BCG would give me the rough equivalent of $16,000 in UAE dirhams I read that as enough AED to be equivalent to ~$16k USD.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  Agreed. Dirhams is the unit, so it would be "16,000 dirhams," not $16,000 in dirhams.
umeshunni 4y ago
USD/AED is 3.67, so 16K AED is USD 4360
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
grech 4y ago
1 USD = 3.6 AED Also, the article states that the offer was for $16,000 in equivalent local currency, so ~AED60,000.

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago

I think the headline is misleading. The author was offered a standard corporate severance deal, which had a standard non-disclosure, in return for a very standard (even low) severance package. He was not offered money for silence on his specific story.

beachy 4y ago

> Analytical skills were overrated, for the simple reason that clients usually didn’t know why they had hired us. They sent us vague requests for proposal, we returned vague case proposals, and by the time we were hired, no one was the wiser as to why exactly we were there. Achieving this zen state is a primary goal of consulting firms working with public sector. After winning an initial brutal low balling battle with competitors, the goal is to transition to a model of a steady conveyor belt of non-competitive fluffy proposals for changes going one way to the client, and money flowing back the other way back to the firm.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

Hmmm... I have a really hard time accounting with the MIT course load, which throws shade onto the rest of the article. Yes, I have no doubt large firms offer NDAs at separation. I regularly sign NDAs when I start a new job, and when I exit them. Each time, I am compensated. The exit NDAs are reasonably narrow, and limited in time. If I do not like them, I do not sign them or ask for changes. It is just as much "hush money" or "not to tell" money about the company culture, as it is about intellectual property. It does not read like the OP was forced, threatened or coerced. If so, it is abhorrent and should be trumpeted to all. > I worked hard at MIT. I routinely took seven to ten classes per semester and filled whatever hours were left in the day with part-time jobs and tutoring. MIT uses a combination of lectures/recitations, labs/design/field, and outside prep in 'units'. I converted the units to credits. Overall, a 1-credit course is 3 hours a week work. Most courses are 3 and 4 credit. If we take 50% of the ten classes at 3 credit, and 50% at 4 credit, that comes out to be 335 and 345, or 105 hours. At max that 120 hours a week (10 courses @ 4 creds/class), and at minimum is still 63 hours a week (7 courses @ 3 creds/class). Full time load at MIT is 36 or more units, or 12 credits.[0] Three MIT units is approximately equal to one "semester hour" or credit.[1][2] First year students are limited to 60 units (20 credits)[3] and >you should note 48-54 units is still considered a typical load and advisable for most students. Requirements at MIT are structured so that you do not need to exceed 54 units per semester (or 48 in many cases) to successfully complete your degree in 4 years. [4] [0] https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/student-status/registration-load-light-load https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/student-sta... [1] https://ospa.utdallas.edu/semester-credit-hours-fall-2019-average-student-course-load-by-classification/ https://ospa.utdallas.edu/semester-credit-hours-fall-2019-av... [2] https://registrar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/calculating_instructional_units.pdf https://registrar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2018-12/calcul... [3] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limits-grading/first-year-credit-limits/ https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit... [4] https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limits-grading/ https://firstyear.mit.edu/academics-exploration/credit-limit...

e2e4 4y ago

Highly recommend watching management consulting tv drama/comedy - House of Lies Trailer for season 1: https://youtu.be/pNLlHYJnj8I https://youtu.be/pNLlHYJnj8I

curiousllama 4y ago

Former consultant here. I once got staffed on a project to "predict the economy" Not an exaggeration - it failed (obviously) to the tune of $2M. And then the client bought another $5M extension on a different project. Consulting is so insane sometimes.

mring33621 4y ago

I think the author of this went to MIT. But I can't be sure.

nickdothutton 4y ago

Market for lemons.

kingkongjaffa 4y ago

>The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” >in Munich. I expected instruction in Excel programming, data analysis, and >business theory. Imagine signing up for MBB and thinking it was this. Completely misguided. This post is ridiculous, the writer thought the business world was an academic meritocracy like (MIT). Also a silly notion. Totally out of depth and naïve.

the_af 4y ago
Not everybody has experience with consultancy work, and this doesn't make them or what they write "ridiculous".

dandigangi 4y ago

Really enjoyed this article. Old business partner was at McKinsey and shared a lot of similar things with me. One oddity is how low $16k is. Their salaries are above average big by comparison. Could be they just cheaped out and thought it was adequate but it feels quite small to what I'd expect.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago

Anyone who wants more consulting stories like this should read "House of Lies."

inkcapmushroom 4y ago

>I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder such questions, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the children test. This particular sentence struck a nerve. You can justify literally anything self-serving in this way; I had to beat that old man up and take his wallet, it was to pay for my hypothetical kids' college!

scotty79 4y ago
That's why you need to look at the deeds first and take justifications into account only optionally.

rejor121 4y ago

Good article. Looking forward to the next part

ahmadss 4y ago
this was written in 2010. here are all of Keith's articles https://thetech.com/authors/keith-yost https://thetech.com/authors/keith-yost but not sure if he ever wrote a followup. here's his AMA on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kde8s/iama_former_business_consultant_for_bcg_dubai_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kde8s/iama_former_bus...

glonq 4y ago

In 2010ish, I worked at a place that did various things for a Dubai gov't-owned development company that had invested in us. What exactly did we do? I'm not sure. There was lots of meetings. And proposals. And trips to Dubai. And nice dinners. And executives with vague titles like "VP Special Projects". I think Dubai's economy fizzed out at about the same time that we discovered our owner was squandering/embezzling their investments in us.

xpe 4y ago

> My moral system is organized around a utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number — that which adds value cannot be wrong. It did not bother me therefore when I was handed consulting reports that had been stolen from our competitors. If the information in those reports would help us improve our client, then who could say we were doing wrong? Like downloading MP3s, it was a victimless crime. My reply is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson [1]: > A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. [1] https://www.bartleby.com/5/104.html https://www.bartleby.com/5/104.html

camillomiller 4y ago

>> I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it. This author is thoroughly analytical, and explains in such good detail why consulting is the work of the devil. Yet, he doesn’t apply any of that to the tenets of American Free Market Capitalism, which proved over and over to be the enabler of both the business model he’s decrying, and the end reason for most of his misery. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how efficiently capitalism is able to self-preserve itself. Free market as a framework for the definition of value has proven to create distorsions and inequalities never before seen in society, but we still gotta drink the cool aid because… because there just nothing better than free market and it’s a dogma! So the criticism stops at BCG, and not at the freaky system that made BCG possible.