10 ms·

Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to

253 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

raesene9 4y ago
Having seen the hiring model of a lot of these companies, this shouldn't surprise anyone. A lot of Big-4/management consultancy, revolves around hiring bright young people straight out of University and sending them into large companies with, at best, a canned methodology, and access to some more experienced people to ask questions of.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I do consulting. I’m always confused when people state that hiring new grads from top universities, having established frameworks, and having experienced people lead projects is a bad thing. I love hiring new grads.
  - Moissanite 4y ago
    Hiring them is fine - charging thousands of dollars per day for expertise they don't actually have is where people start to have a problem.
    - mousetree 4y ago
      They’re supervised by junior partners, partners and senior partners. By supervised I mean every proposed set of work and every resulting slide is inspected with a fine tooth comb. The 23 year olds are literally just crunching whatever data the senior tells them to. Disclosure: former consultant
      - raesene9 4y ago
        I'd guess that depends on the consultancy, but I think one of the complaints customers have is that the "data crunchers" hourly rates is often quite high, sometimes higher than you'd pay for an actual expert in the field working as an independent.
        mousetree 4y ago
        True, although the junior rates are almost a rounding error when you see the rate of a Senior Partner. Typically though a McKinsey engagement is billed for the entire project. Internally though the price is determined by the number of consultants and their internal rate
  - raesene9 4y ago
    If the chargeout rates and quality of frameworks and level of oversight is right, then fine. Unfortunately..... that's often (IME ofc) not the case. The financial model and incentives for these companies is to staff with as junior people as they can get away with.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      We do fixed price contracts but in my experience the accounting works out such that the partners leading the work are incentivized to negotiate internally to get the best people they can, not maximize the margin with the cheapest folks available. I can’t say staffing as many junior people as possible resonates. Maybe at a body shop like Accenture though.
  - NoPicklez 4y ago
    On a website that often complains about how difficult it is for graduates or juniors to get jobs in tech. Big 4 firms especially are well known for hiring people straight out of University. Surprising to see how people react when a company does use lots of junior staff. The difference being is that these junior staff are client facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  As someone who works at a big 4, you're quite right. They're huge employers of University graduates, however these graduates are usually supported by seniors, managers or partners. Each piece of work has a team around it. Yes you might have junior staff coming in to ask questions, but there is always someone more senior briefing the junior and reviewing their work. The growth that a graduate experiences in the first 2 years of their career is enormous. It's also very important to distinguish between consulting and assurance services. Both within a big 4, offer very different services and offerings.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  We’ve used McKinsey on a couple of projects. What you describe is exactly what we saw happen and the results were as expected from bright, motivated young workers being advised and led by more experienced senior staff: quite good. The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
  - flakeoil 4y ago
    "The only “knock” I could see is the presentations..." The presentations? Is that all you got for it? Is that the only or the most important outcome? I would say that's nothing. It's the actual implementation that counts and is difficult. It's as if a consultant would present in a powerpoint how to implement a piece of software and then leave it up to you to implement it and you have to hit and solve all the road blocks along the way. And on top of it they come up with that presentation without even having implementing anything similar themselves.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      There was both technical/business project delivery and executive update/briefing presentations. The knock I cited was on the second. The project part was fine (as suggested by the characterization that the results were "quite good".)
    - jen20 4y ago
      While I get (and likely agree!) what you’re saying with regards to the likely level of this kind of presentation, my experience is that knowing what to implement is much harder than actually slinging some code. This is true both at the product and engineering level.
      - flakeoil 4y ago
        Well, I kind of agree with you at some level, but it depends on how deep you go and how detailed the plan is. If one can follow the plan step by step and when you are finished, it's a success then maybe, but according to my experience that's not the case and you always have to revisit and fine tune along the way and it's in this process one learns the right way, not at the start. And one does not need consultants for this.
- mousetree 4y ago
  Big 4 = accounting firms (although most also do management consulting) MBB is typically used for the big 3 consultancies (McKinsey, Bain, BCG)
  - raesene9 4y ago
    Yeah I was suggesting both do it :) Big-4 do plenty of what would get classed as consultancy in areas like IT Security/Compliance, amongst others.
  - TuringNYC 4y ago
    The Big 4 accounting firms long ago (1999-2002) each spun off a management consulting division.
    - mousetree 4y ago
      You’re probably thinking of how Arthur Anderson spun off Anderson Consulting which became Accenture. The current Big 4 accounting firms do have management consulting divisions (not separate entities to my knowledge)
epolanski 4y ago
I hope that as an independent consultant myself, I'm not conflated with the low quality of "experts" in consulting companies.
- Manjuuu 4y ago
  Sometimes it will happen since people are full of silly bias, but it should not be a problem if the other side has still a few working brain cells.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  A business school case study on Disney would make for interesting reading. The last CEO got removed by the board of directors for wanting to call in a consultancy to re-organize the company. The previous CEO to that one made a $200B executive decision and then came back to layoff 7,000 workers as the latest CEO who'll sit for two years observing commenters expect.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Actually I think it's exactly the opposite - the ones who actually do something are the ones who are most likely to get blamed the most for the handful of oversights that they inevitably fall victim to, but it's the people who do absolutely nothing, but do it in a flashy way, that are remembered as the heroes and saviors.
- willi59549879 4y ago
  Smaller companies are usualky better in my experience.
madsbuch 4y ago
Seems like the real link should be: https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09fb4 https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09... What is the value the "link aggregator indirection provide" but a log of noise from the twitter thread? Btw. I love Mariana Mazzucato's books. Can recommend.
wafriedemann 4y ago
I think there is a misconception what 'advising' means. Seems to be like a marketing term that consultancies came up with to describe their work. I'd argue consultancy don't need a lot of expertise. They don't advise in the sense of 'sharing ones wisdom'. They are highly qualified temps with strong work ethic.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  Their real value prop is being able to provide cover for execs. They can act (emphasis on the word act) as a neutral third party who can lend credibility to an idea, and also become a scapegoat if it fails.
  - i_dont_know_ 4y ago
    This too. I've seen consultants hired for projects where everyone on the team (including leadership) basically knew what to do or what needed to be done, but they were only, say 75% certain about it. In a normal startup, they would've just done it, failed fast, moved on. But in a bigger corporate (non-startup) environment where they didn't know if their jobs would be on the line for taking risks, they could bring in consultants to verify but mostly echo back what they already wanted to do. Plus they come with certificates and stuff so everyone in the chain assumes that's worth something.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  I would rephrase that as: 'They are meant to be highly qualified temps with strong work ethics and experience but sometimes they are not so qualified or experienced and sometimes their hard work is not aligned with the company that is ultimately paying them to do something'
- terminal_d 4y ago
  They exist to propagate good feelings amongst management and to ensure a fat paycheck keeps coming though, even if it means sabotaging the company.
badcppdev 4y ago
The interaction between consultancies and companies is fascinating to me. It's like a weird mix of symbiosis/parasitism that occurs at so many different levels and between so many different types of companies. And it's tied into issues with hiring and retention of staff so that's interesting as well. Having said that I don't want anything to do with either side of the interaction. Happy to hear other peoples stories.
pjc50 4y ago
Twitter link to https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09fb4 https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09... (mm, GUIDs) McKinsey in particular have a lot of controversy. So much so that googling for "mckinsey controversy" to refresh my memory brought in several different scandals from the one I was thinking of. Here's them and the French state: https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scandal https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scan... , which seems similar to what the OP article is talking about. Here's a more general summary: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-has-been-embroiled-in-scandals-43996 https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-ha... The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is great for customer satisfaction and repeat business. It's just that occasionally this causes real problems.
- ianai 4y ago
  I hope the link gets changed to yours. It’s a better source and I’m boycotting twitter.
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    Shiver me timbers
- greenpresident 4y ago
  > The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is a feature. You get outside expertise that recommends cost cutting and reducing staff. It’s not your fault though, the expensive consultants with the nice suits were the ones recommending it!
froidpink 4y ago
Consultancies are a way of ensuring best practices get shared across an industry without engaging in monopolistic behaviour
- ljlolel 4y ago
  this is the true value of consultancies
- terminal_d 4y ago
  No, that's just the business tagline. Consultancies purity spiral on Goodhart's law. They're worse than useless, and it's their "cult"-like behavior that is the basis of their entire business. You HAVE to believe they bring in value because... well, you gotta believe.
- refurb 4y ago
  This. Management consultants are useful in a few ways: 1) you get a dedicated team that works full time on some issue and 2) you get people who have seen how a lot of other companies have done things.
  - piva00 4y ago
    > 2) you get people who have seen how a lot of other companies have done things. And the result of this at companies I've worked at that had management consultants change process was to just bolt on some processes with adaptations to the business, selling it as "BigCorp™ does it this way and you should too" which eventually backfired when these reorgs and processes don't pan out because they were made for the needs of BigCorp™, not the business they are consulting in. There is loads of cargo culting from management consultancies.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  Yes, we've all read the brochure too.
tgv 4y ago
I'm fortunately in a company where consultants have not entered, but the headline doesn't surprise me. It seems to be bog-standard advertising. "Detergent XYZZY, now with new extradirtase! Washes your clothes better and cheaper! Run to your supermarket! Now!!" In a previous job, there were several hired people, two DBAs among them. They were almost part of the furniture, but everybody seemed happy with the arrangement. Their IT consultancy company sent a fat bill every month, and the VP of IT could move part of the personnel costs to another part of the ledger, which made the CFO happy. I guess it takes two to tango.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  IT Consultants =/= Standard Consultants from Big4 and the like
  - NoPicklez 4y ago
    Exactly
intunderflow 4y ago
No paywall: https://on.ft.com/3HX5gzq https://on.ft.com/3HX5gzq https://archive.md/fUycW https://archive.md/fUycW
ketzu 4y ago
One project I was involved with, the value of the consultants was helping the clients work through their own process, because the client didn't fully understand the process themselves. Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.
- coding_unit_1 4y ago
  From my experience that is very very common. Client's hardly ever understand their own processes, everyone knows their little slice of it and where to hand-off work but nobody groks the big picture.
- KrugerDunnings 4y ago
  That is when they roughly know what they want, if they don't they hire an innovation consultant and organise competitions and grands for companies and universities to come up with work.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  From working with a bunch of ex management consultants, this is their special sauce. They’re often good at first principles thinking, learning a domain rapidly, and they don’t have any emotional connection to things in the business (people, processes, etc). This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on. Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    Agree. The secret sauce is very much in how they’re trained to quickly solve problems and synthesize information. In very short time frames. In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though. Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Consultants are a "management" sock puppet for "bad decisions".. one gets to respect managers way more, that tell you the reasons they got to the for you bad decisions.
harshreality 4y ago
Hasn't it been said that company executives bring in consultants to get cover to do things the executives already wanted to do?
- Lacerda69 4y ago
  It has been said.
ben30 4y ago
Large companies with middle managers often have a considerable budget but suffer from an internalised imposter syndrome that leaves them unsure about the challenges they face and the solutions they need. I believe that senior sales representatives from consultancies have a keen sense to detect this professional anxiety and leverage it to sell their services and put the manager's mind at ease, regardless of the quality of the consultancy's services. While it may seem that consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they appear to, managers may still seek comfort in their reassurances and take legal action if things go wrong.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  TL;DR: big corps are clueless and nobody there got fired for hiring equally clueless big-name consultancies who pretend to be confident
pelasaco 4y ago
How often I had to deal with some auditor from "a big 5", sold as senior engineer and he was simply going through checklists. Unix security analyst, reading a checklist, while trying to type "unix" commands on HP-UX, AIX.. was funny if we weren't paying for that. In another hand "no director get fired by going through auditing process with some big company, but some do get fired, exactly because they didn't want to"... I remember some "senior network analyst" having to go through a checklist while analyzing a network hub. Pathetic, but reality.
- eggsmediumrare 4y ago
  Pilots with 40 years of experience use checklists every time they fly.
  - netjiro 4y ago
    As long as the checklist catches more costly errors than the time to use it and the (very likely) negative secondary effects to critical thinking and innovation. Love tools that help, eg checklists, when used right. But over time they have a very strong tendency to become set-in-stone dogma, at which time they will create a priesthood and a very large dead zone where thinking and flexibility is no longer allowed.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    > Pilots with 40 years of experience use checklists every time they fly. I love when people just add comment for pure sake of commenting. The auditing companies don't get a "cyber security expert" with 40 years of experience, but get undergrads, suit them up and sell them as experts. Because of the checklists, that without knowing anything about the context, are almost useless and generate mostly noise.
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Can confirm boss, lscpu is GREEN on the no "iTLB multihit" vulns. We're clear. No I don't know what a VMM is but it's probably not relevant.
    - 4y ago
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Early in my career my employer felt the need to bring in a consulting firm for a particular effort. I, and my colleagues were not impressed with their work. Over time I've come to realize that it's less the what and more the who. That is, if the company could do it themselves they would. But internal politics and such make the needed what too difficult. I work at a (small) company now that desperately needs some "outside influence." Anyone who speaks up interally is marginalized. At this point, no one speaks up. The level of dysfunction is impossible. I can't imagine things changing without outside help.
codingdave 4y ago
I normally try not to just rant via negative anecdotes, but on this topic, it is difficult not to. I've repeatedly seen the pain of people who do well in consultancies but then go off and get leadership roles at a single company. As a general rule, they are horrible leaders. They'll talk well, make up pretty reports, build elegant org structures that also make up pretty reports, give awesome names to processes that sound like they'd make a real difference... they look and sound like great execs. But they never quite grasp what needs to happen to actually make the business work. So those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us. Part of it is that they never learned what truly mattered. They have experience swooping in, fixing one pain point, and leaving. They never have to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions. So they never learned what to look for and what to seek or avoid. They never learned depth. They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months. How it impacted business in 5-7 years wasn't "in scope". Obviously, this is all generalizations. I'm sure there are exceptional people who came from that environment. But that is exactly what they are - the exceptions to the rule.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Given how short employees tend to stay at companies, long term impact seems to be a founder only concern. As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me. I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.
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  - FL410 4y ago
    Wow. I appreciate the perspective, but it’s hard for me to even understand how a person could operate that way.
    - wccrawford 4y ago
      I think after enough companies treat you that way, it becomes a lot easier. I don't work that way, and I've been with my company for about 12 years now I think. But after watching the recent tech layoffs, it's pretty obvious that tech companies aren't thinking about their employees futures, just the present. The ones that don't give a generous severance are the worst, but even with that it can be rather difficult to find a new job... Especially one that you like. Many, many companies think of employees merely in terms of the money, and not how they're disrupting that person's life. It doesn't surprise me that there are non-managers that think and act the same way towards the company.
running101 4y ago
Is anyone surprised by this?
b3lvedere 4y ago
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem. https://despair.com/products/consulting https://despair.com/products/consulting
mpweiher 4y ago
In other surprising and breaking news: water wet! The sad part is that it shouldn't be this way. Consulting could and really should be highly valuable. In the times that I have done consulting work, I have tended to both make pretty good money and deliver far more value to my clients than I cost them. However, the factors that make that work seem pretty hard to commodify in the ways needed for a corporation to turn it into a business model, so consulting companies tend to optimise for being believable bullshit factories. Hello ChatGPT!
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temptemptemp111 4y ago
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a_c 4y ago
Not knowing is costly. Not knowing what you don't know, doubly so. Consultants are used for different reason. Sometimes for delegation of understanding, which never (rarely?) works.
nsoonhui 4y ago
The author misses the point: consultants are brought in more to buttress the position of the advocators and to squash dissent, less to offer genuine knowledge that the clients don't already know.
throwaway8689 4y ago
I was at an event run by one of our suppliers, a health tech firm. Discussing one of their products, their consultant told me they were 'learning as we go along'. Didn't have the heart to tell him his firm is supposed to bring expertise from day one.
segmondy 4y ago
A lot of folks in companies hire consultants for confirmation bias. They need someone to agree to what they want to to do. Furthermore it's harder to get in trouble when you can claim that you followed what a professional consultant suggested.
- zo1 4y ago
  Consultants want and need the business. Telling the client their software/processes/org is a steaming pile of garbage will quickly get you fired and replaced. Been there, had that happen. They also always see consultants as master-level uber expert geniuses that can swoop in and fix anything whilst doing it under their direction and code/management flavor, so you can't win.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    I’ve actually had the opposite experience. I had clients that suspected their software/processes/org were a steaming pile of garbage - ie the business folk saw long cycle times, high amount of bugs and wanted to bring in a consultant to get a second opinion (yes, in most cases confirm). It was a tough job to do fairly because as an engineer our natural inclination is to miss the context and only see the bad.
steveBK123 4y ago
You can see this in all areas of life. NYC has huge problems with transit capital projects because they basically have zero in-house expertise, from project planning down to digging the tunnels. This despite having decades of multiple continuous projects going since the 90s and onwards. It's all outsourced, and the state gets ripped off because they don't have the capacity to plan, or to cross check the outsourced plans, etc. In tech you see this all the time when senior management wants to move into some area that isn't a core competency and brings in their buddies outsourcing consulting body shop. The POC period skates by because everyone implicitly understands the consultant was brought in from the top. They then outsource the actual work to a 24 year old in a shiny US office to project manage 10 offshore 24 year olds. No one has any idea what they are doing, nothing gets done, and a few million go out the door.
- jimz 4y ago
  Oh god, the NYC transit issue is like the largest rancid lasagna of projects - multi-layered, affects tons of people, and so deeply entrenched across legal and technical aspects alike. I've literally lived in an unrecognized breakaway Narco-state of a Narco-state that broke away and has de facto control on the China-Myanmar border, and on the block where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in that boat when he was caught in 2013, but living and commuting in NYC, even as a (entry level, public interest) lawyer who worked in the financial district my final choices were an obviously illegal apartment in Chinatown in a basement with a low, uneven ceiling or a place in Flatbush that literally shared a wall with the tunnel leading into the Parkside Q station, which during weekdays also meant that the B was shaking up the place too so that none of my furniture stayed in place. NYC was great for the friends I had and the stuff to do and even the ultimately soul-crushing job that at least made a difference but man, I'll take the Narco-state-in-a-Narco-state any day now, all things considered. When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently. Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual. (Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)
cardosof 4y ago
IMO it's risky to hire management consultants to tell you what you should do. The value they provide is usually market research (providing data points you wouldn't gather yourself) and expert opinions (PhDs and SMEs, ex executives). With that, you can take an informed decision on something and move on. The other reason people hire them is less noble: ass covering. Can't be fired if you were just following the consultant's recommendations. CEOs do this from time to time.
pbj1968 4y ago
My experience has always been, “this problem is more complicated than we were lead to believe,” which is probably true, inevitably followed with, “and the solution is more consulting!”
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Dogbert: "We've analyzed your problem and determined that you spend too much money on consultants" PHB: "But you're a consultancy" Dogbert: "Ironic, isn't it?"
jack_riminton 4y ago
I did an MBA at a school which was basically a conveyer belt to get people into consulting (I didn't, couldn't stand it and I went into PM and engineering). The main thing they teach you is to "identify the hidden customer" i.e. the person who hired you to do a project will have a boss they're trying to please, figure out what *they* want. If you create a proposal which pleases them, you've done well. Note that none of this has any relation to whether what you're proposing makes sense or is a good solution.
- ballenf 4y ago
  Maybe the best course of action is establish your terms on that basis -- "if you hire us for a particular project or problem, we will not exclude solutions/responses that highlight or challenge underlying systemic causes outside the scope of the engagement." If not, then the advice you got could be summarized as "figure out what you're being paid to do and do it."
sklargh 4y ago
I have worked with consultants from BCG, McKinsey and Bain, sometimes while at the same company. On balance they’re charming, intelligent people. In a magical world where I was a COO,CFO I would bar employing them immediately. In a typical F500 setting strategy consultants aren’t on-hand to make anything better or improve anything meaningfully - in general consultants are on hand to validate a C or C-1’s personal belief and drive its execution. Why? First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering. “It’s not a land grab, Bain said said we had to do it.” “McKinsey told us we had to hollow out that one plant town to survive!” They’re also an emotional refuge and a great backchannel. The BCG principal talks to the CEO weekly, you might not, good to be on their good side. Look, I’m sure in certain niche, high-skill consultants (industrial process engineering?) are valuable. By random dart method they’ve probably driven a fair amount of value, but on average you should never let them in the door.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  In certain niche areas "consulting" is just another way of saying "I've gone freelance". Management consulting (aka the people that will say "I'm a consultant!") is a different set of tires and almost always used for 'idea laundering' and plausible deniability as you said. A lot of them are fresh grads from renowned universities, "skilled" in powerpoint, and that's about it. The big firms hire them in droves to give their advice the appearance of "intellectual superiority". It's a well known source of jokes amongst management consultants.
- everdrive 4y ago
  >First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering I completely agree with you, but if everyone knows this, then why does this ploy work?
  - hammock 4y ago
    “Yada yada yada if their job depends on it”
denton-scratch 4y ago
My experience of working with technical consultants was that they made things unnecessarily complicated. There were unnecessary meetings, and other unneccessary processes. The "main" job of a consultant was to find new business; for that, they got bonuses. For doing the job the client hired them for, they did not get bonuses. Unsurprisingly, jobs went on forever. There was no benefit to a consultancy firm in completing a contract; that would mean the end of the line for the gravy-train. So projects lasted years. This was a couple of decades ago; I hear less about technical consultancies these days, so perhaps the world has moved on. But I used to feel sorry for companies that had allowed a technical consultancy to get a foot in the door.
Lio 4y ago
"Consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then keep the watch". - Carl Ally
bigie35 4y ago
Case in point: Hertz paid Accenture 32 million dollars for a website design that, wait for it, NEVER WENT PUBLIC. https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-lawsuit/ https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-laws...
- bartread 4y ago
  I was tempted to feel bad for Hertz but then, on the flipside, what kind of deranged numbskull do you have to be to hire a bloody management consultancy[0] to build you a website and mobile app? [0] Yes, yes, I know Accenture have developers and development teams, but look at their history with publicised software development projects: it's not exactly a road paved with glittering diamonds of crystallised glory. I'm not suggesting Accenture are irredeemably awful at everything they do but it's evidently the case that software development isn't really their oeuvre even though they do seem to do quite a lot of it.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Exactly. That's so many levels of poor reasoning that it's hard to feel bad for anyone, other than maybe the developers whose work never saw the light of day. Plenty of people, including those with prestigious titles, who are detached from the reality of software development. In some cases they "hire some geeks" to solve a problem a big company already solved, and like in this case there are other times where they hire some big company with an official sounding name because, surely, they can get things done. Honestly, it gives me hope that my job as a web developer won't be wiped out by AI too soon. There's enough foolish management types out there hiring the wrong humans to work on futile projects that I figure I have at least another 5 years before I have to resort to food delivery or basket weaving.
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    Scale. I know of large banks that use Accenture because they can spin up 10 scrum teams overnight when they can’t attract that much (and good) talent themselves. Hertz is a pretty big company with a big transnational footprint. It’s not a Wordpress web site. That said, 32M $ for nothing is still bad.
itsdrewmiller 4y ago
dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34778954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34778954
synergy20 4y ago
I saw and worked with quite a lot consultants. Many of them are great at creating fancy diagrams and design documents, some of them are good at communications, but I have yet to find them that can deliver any real quality code in the end before they move to their next project somewhere else. I will avoid consultants, along with contractors in software field as much as I can.
TuringNYC 4y ago
I'm going to take the other side here -- there are very legitimate cases where consultancies make a lot of sense: cases where you need to do something that requires expertise way out of your business domain. Example 1: Pharma company wants to roll out SAP Payroll system Example 2: Telco wants to roll out billing system The problem with these situations is that: - SAP experts rarely want to work at a Pharma company - Billing system experts rarely want to work at a Telco - The company should not hire -- and then after a year, fire -- workers after a specific job (e.g., SAP implementation) is done. Also, if the company is in the middle of nowhere, and the job is only for a year or two, why would anyone relocate there? - You cant become an expert by being at one company and seeing it done (and fail) once. You become an expert by doing it at many places - You cant hire a bunch of recent grads and do these projects, they require mentorship from people who have done these projects many times. The consultancies provide that.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > you need to do something that requires expertise That's the way it should be - the problem is it's impossible to vet the consultancies that actually have that expertise against the consultancies that claim the experience and are good at using smoke and mirrors to trick somebody into thinking they have it.
  - TuringNYC 4y ago
    Depends on the competency. I'd venture Accenture has done half of all SAP major implementations in the world. For popular software packages, there are typically project testimonials from dozens of other fortune 500 companies, and there is usually a "Gold-Partner" type guarantee from the software vendor themselves. When the consultancy messes up, they risk losing the Partner label or tier. https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/profile/0000828182 https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand... Obviously this works for popular packages with defined success criteria, but that is a lot of business for consultancies already, and i'd argue, a great reason to go with a consultancy.
tristor 4y ago
I've worked with consultancies many times in my career. I have never seen them deliver good value for the dollars they cost. Never. This is at multiple levels, from low-level IC, to strategic high-level IC and mid-management. At every level within an org they haven't delivered value from my perspective. Maybe if I were a CXO I'd feel differently.
hestefisk 4y ago
Anyone remember Dilbert’s Booze Muhkidney?
FlacoJones 4y ago
https://archive.is/I8RJh https://archive.is/I8RJh
pwinnski 4y ago
I don't need to spend too much money on a consultancy to tell me that, it was obvious the first time I encountered a consultancy.
dwd 4y ago
Consultants are sales people first and foremost; upselling and maximising the consultancy firms profit will trump providing value every time.
timbritt 4y ago
I am very passionate about consulting because I have found a common, recurring situational problem that I have been able to develop a thoughtful, repeatable and iterative process around solving. There are some people who are exceptionally talented at making something from nothing, knowing how to apply the first steps towards a goal quickly and with great confidence and take great care to sow the seeds of sustainability and success into a project. A exceptional Consultant is basically like “The Wolf” in Pulp Fiction. Moving the needle from zero to ten (correctly and sustainably) is difficult. Getting it from ten to ninety is easy. Getting it from ninety to one hundred is almost a perpetual state. Consultants enjoy the perspective that working on a single project for 10 years is effectively spending a quarter of one’s career on a single project. To consultants, the life of the tenacious, loyal, unquestioning worker bee is naive and wasteful.

253 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

Having seen the hiring model of a lot of these companies, this shouldn't surprise anyone. A lot of Big-4/management consultancy, revolves around hiring bright young people straight out of University and sending them into large companies with, at best, a canned methodology, and access to some more experienced people to ask questions of.

oneoff786 4y ago
I do consulting. I’m always confused when people state that hiring new grads from top universities, having established frameworks, and having experienced people lead projects is a bad thing. I love hiring new grads.
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Hiring them is fine - charging thousands of dollars per day for expertise they don't actually have is where people start to have a problem.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    They’re supervised by junior partners, partners and senior partners. By supervised I mean every proposed set of work and every resulting slide is inspected with a fine tooth comb. The 23 year olds are literally just crunching whatever data the senior tells them to. Disclosure: former consultant
    - raesene9 4y ago
      I'd guess that depends on the consultancy, but I think one of the complaints customers have is that the "data crunchers" hourly rates is often quite high, sometimes higher than you'd pay for an actual expert in the field working as an independent.
      - mousetree 4y ago
        True, although the junior rates are almost a rounding error when you see the rate of a Senior Partner. Typically though a McKinsey engagement is billed for the entire project. Internally though the price is determined by the number of consultants and their internal rate
- raesene9 4y ago
  If the chargeout rates and quality of frameworks and level of oversight is right, then fine. Unfortunately..... that's often (IME ofc) not the case. The financial model and incentives for these companies is to staff with as junior people as they can get away with.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    We do fixed price contracts but in my experience the accounting works out such that the partners leading the work are incentivized to negotiate internally to get the best people they can, not maximize the margin with the cheapest folks available. I can’t say staffing as many junior people as possible resonates. Maybe at a body shop like Accenture though.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  On a website that often complains about how difficult it is for graduates or juniors to get jobs in tech. Big 4 firms especially are well known for hiring people straight out of University. Surprising to see how people react when a company does use lots of junior staff. The difference being is that these junior staff are client facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.
NoPicklez 4y ago
As someone who works at a big 4, you're quite right. They're huge employers of University graduates, however these graduates are usually supported by seniors, managers or partners. Each piece of work has a team around it. Yes you might have junior staff coming in to ask questions, but there is always someone more senior briefing the junior and reviewing their work. The growth that a graduate experiences in the first 2 years of their career is enormous. It's also very important to distinguish between consulting and assurance services. Both within a big 4, offer very different services and offerings.
sokoloff 4y ago
We’ve used McKinsey on a couple of projects. What you describe is exactly what we saw happen and the results were as expected from bright, motivated young workers being advised and led by more experienced senior staff: quite good. The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
- flakeoil 4y ago
  "The only “knock” I could see is the presentations..." The presentations? Is that all you got for it? Is that the only or the most important outcome? I would say that's nothing. It's the actual implementation that counts and is difficult. It's as if a consultant would present in a powerpoint how to implement a piece of software and then leave it up to you to implement it and you have to hit and solve all the road blocks along the way. And on top of it they come up with that presentation without even having implementing anything similar themselves.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    There was both technical/business project delivery and executive update/briefing presentations. The knock I cited was on the second. The project part was fine (as suggested by the characterization that the results were "quite good".)
  - jen20 4y ago
    While I get (and likely agree!) what you’re saying with regards to the likely level of this kind of presentation, my experience is that knowing what to implement is much harder than actually slinging some code. This is true both at the product and engineering level.
    - flakeoil 4y ago
      Well, I kind of agree with you at some level, but it depends on how deep you go and how detailed the plan is. If one can follow the plan step by step and when you are finished, it's a success then maybe, but according to my experience that's not the case and you always have to revisit and fine tune along the way and it's in this process one learns the right way, not at the start. And one does not need consultants for this.
mousetree 4y ago
Big 4 = accounting firms (although most also do management consulting) MBB is typically used for the big 3 consultancies (McKinsey, Bain, BCG)
- raesene9 4y ago
  Yeah I was suggesting both do it :) Big-4 do plenty of what would get classed as consultancy in areas like IT Security/Compliance, amongst others.
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  The Big 4 accounting firms long ago (1999-2002) each spun off a management consulting division.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    You’re probably thinking of how Arthur Anderson spun off Anderson Consulting which became Accenture. The current Big 4 accounting firms do have management consulting divisions (not separate entities to my knowledge)

epolanski 4y ago

I hope that as an independent consultant myself, I'm not conflated with the low quality of "experts" in consulting companies.

Manjuuu 4y ago
Sometimes it will happen since people are full of silly bias, but it should not be a problem if the other side has still a few working brain cells.
abudabi123 4y ago
A business school case study on Disney would make for interesting reading. The last CEO got removed by the board of directors for wanting to call in a consultancy to re-organize the company. The previous CEO to that one made a $200B executive decision and then came back to layoff 7,000 workers as the latest CEO who'll sit for two years observing commenters expect.
commandlinefan 4y ago
Actually I think it's exactly the opposite - the ones who actually do something are the ones who are most likely to get blamed the most for the handful of oversights that they inevitably fall victim to, but it's the people who do absolutely nothing, but do it in a flashy way, that are remembered as the heroes and saviors.
willi59549879 4y ago
Smaller companies are usualky better in my experience.

madsbuch 4y ago

Seems like the real link should be: https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09fb4 https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09... What is the value the "link aggregator indirection provide" but a log of noise from the twitter thread? Btw. I love Mariana Mazzucato's books. Can recommend.

wafriedemann 4y ago

I think there is a misconception what 'advising' means. Seems to be like a marketing term that consultancies came up with to describe their work. I'd argue consultancy don't need a lot of expertise. They don't advise in the sense of 'sharing ones wisdom'. They are highly qualified temps with strong work ethic.

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
Their real value prop is being able to provide cover for execs. They can act (emphasis on the word act) as a neutral third party who can lend credibility to an idea, and also become a scapegoat if it fails.
- i_dont_know_ 4y ago
  This too. I've seen consultants hired for projects where everyone on the team (including leadership) basically knew what to do or what needed to be done, but they were only, say 75% certain about it. In a normal startup, they would've just done it, failed fast, moved on. But in a bigger corporate (non-startup) environment where they didn't know if their jobs would be on the line for taking risks, they could bring in consultants to verify but mostly echo back what they already wanted to do. Plus they come with certificates and stuff so everyone in the chain assumes that's worth something.
badcppdev 4y ago
I would rephrase that as: 'They are meant to be highly qualified temps with strong work ethics and experience but sometimes they are not so qualified or experienced and sometimes their hard work is not aligned with the company that is ultimately paying them to do something'
terminal_d 4y ago
They exist to propagate good feelings amongst management and to ensure a fat paycheck keeps coming though, even if it means sabotaging the company.

badcppdev 4y ago

The interaction between consultancies and companies is fascinating to me. It's like a weird mix of symbiosis/parasitism that occurs at so many different levels and between so many different types of companies. And it's tied into issues with hiring and retention of staff so that's interesting as well. Having said that I don't want anything to do with either side of the interaction. Happy to hear other peoples stories.

pjc50 4y ago

Twitter link to https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09fb4 https://www.ft.com/content/fb1254dd-a011-44cc-bde9-a434e5a09... (mm, GUIDs) McKinsey in particular have a lot of controversy. So much so that googling for "mckinsey controversy" to refresh my memory brought in several different scandals from the one I was thinking of. Here's them and the French state: https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scandal https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scan... , which seems similar to what the OP article is talking about. Here's a more general summary: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-has-been-embroiled-in-scandals-43996 https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-ha... The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is great for customer satisfaction and repeat business. It's just that occasionally this causes real problems.

ianai 4y ago
I hope the link gets changed to yours. It’s a better source and I’m boycotting twitter.
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  Shiver me timbers
greenpresident 4y ago
> The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is a feature. You get outside expertise that recommends cost cutting and reducing staff. It’s not your fault though, the expensive consultants with the nice suits were the ones recommending it!

froidpink 4y ago

Consultancies are a way of ensuring best practices get shared across an industry without engaging in monopolistic behaviour

ljlolel 4y ago
this is the true value of consultancies
terminal_d 4y ago
No, that's just the business tagline. Consultancies purity spiral on Goodhart's law. They're worse than useless, and it's their "cult"-like behavior that is the basis of their entire business. You HAVE to believe they bring in value because... well, you gotta believe.
refurb 4y ago
This. Management consultants are useful in a few ways: 1) you get a dedicated team that works full time on some issue and 2) you get people who have seen how a lot of other companies have done things.
- piva00 4y ago
  > 2) you get people who have seen how a lot of other companies have done things. And the result of this at companies I've worked at that had management consultants change process was to just bolt on some processes with adaptations to the business, selling it as "BigCorp™ does it this way and you should too" which eventually backfired when these reorgs and processes don't pan out because they were made for the needs of BigCorp™, not the business they are consulting in. There is loads of cargo culting from management consultancies.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Yes, we've all read the brochure too.

tgv 4y ago

I'm fortunately in a company where consultants have not entered, but the headline doesn't surprise me. It seems to be bog-standard advertising. "Detergent XYZZY, now with new extradirtase! Washes your clothes better and cheaper! Run to your supermarket! Now!!" In a previous job, there were several hired people, two DBAs among them. They were almost part of the furniture, but everybody seemed happy with the arrangement. Their IT consultancy company sent a fat bill every month, and the VP of IT could move part of the personnel costs to another part of the ledger, which made the CFO happy. I guess it takes two to tango.

terminal_d 4y ago
IT Consultants =/= Standard Consultants from Big4 and the like
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  Exactly

intunderflow 4y ago

No paywall: https://on.ft.com/3HX5gzq https://on.ft.com/3HX5gzq https://archive.md/fUycW https://archive.md/fUycW

ketzu 4y ago

One project I was involved with, the value of the consultants was helping the clients work through their own process, because the client didn't fully understand the process themselves. Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.

coding_unit_1 4y ago
From my experience that is very very common. Client's hardly ever understand their own processes, everyone knows their little slice of it and where to hand-off work but nobody groks the big picture.
KrugerDunnings 4y ago
That is when they roughly know what they want, if they don't they hire an innovation consultant and organise competitions and grands for companies and universities to come up with work.
danpalmer 4y ago
From working with a bunch of ex management consultants, this is their special sauce. They’re often good at first principles thinking, learning a domain rapidly, and they don’t have any emotional connection to things in the business (people, processes, etc). This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on. Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.
- mousetree 4y ago
  Agree. The secret sauce is very much in how they’re trained to quickly solve problems and synthesize information. In very short time frames. In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though. Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Consultants are a "management" sock puppet for "bad decisions".. one gets to respect managers way more, that tell you the reasons they got to the for you bad decisions.

harshreality 4y ago

Hasn't it been said that company executives bring in consultants to get cover to do things the executives already wanted to do?

Lacerda69 4y ago
It has been said.

ben30 4y ago

Large companies with middle managers often have a considerable budget but suffer from an internalised imposter syndrome that leaves them unsure about the challenges they face and the solutions they need. I believe that senior sales representatives from consultancies have a keen sense to detect this professional anxiety and leverage it to sell their services and put the manager's mind at ease, regardless of the quality of the consultancy's services. While it may seem that consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they appear to, managers may still seek comfort in their reassurances and take legal action if things go wrong.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
TL;DR: big corps are clueless and nobody there got fired for hiring equally clueless big-name consultancies who pretend to be confident

pelasaco 4y ago

How often I had to deal with some auditor from "a big 5", sold as senior engineer and he was simply going through checklists. Unix security analyst, reading a checklist, while trying to type "unix" commands on HP-UX, AIX.. was funny if we weren't paying for that. In another hand "no director get fired by going through auditing process with some big company, but some do get fired, exactly because they didn't want to"... I remember some "senior network analyst" having to go through a checklist while analyzing a network hub. Pathetic, but reality.

eggsmediumrare 4y ago
Pilots with 40 years of experience use checklists every time they fly.
- netjiro 4y ago
  As long as the checklist catches more costly errors than the time to use it and the (very likely) negative secondary effects to critical thinking and innovation. Love tools that help, eg checklists, when used right. But over time they have a very strong tendency to become set-in-stone dogma, at which time they will create a priesthood and a very large dead zone where thinking and flexibility is no longer allowed.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  > Pilots with 40 years of experience use checklists every time they fly. I love when people just add comment for pure sake of commenting. The auditing companies don't get a "cyber security expert" with 40 years of experience, but get undergrads, suit them up and sell them as experts. Because of the checklists, that without knowing anything about the context, are almost useless and generate mostly noise.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Can confirm boss, lscpu is GREEN on the no "iTLB multihit" vulns. We're clear. No I don't know what a VMM is but it's probably not relevant.
  - 4y ago

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Early in my career my employer felt the need to bring in a consulting firm for a particular effort. I, and my colleagues were not impressed with their work. Over time I've come to realize that it's less the what and more the who. That is, if the company could do it themselves they would. But internal politics and such make the needed what too difficult. I work at a (small) company now that desperately needs some "outside influence." Anyone who speaks up interally is marginalized. At this point, no one speaks up. The level of dysfunction is impossible. I can't imagine things changing without outside help.

codingdave 4y ago

I normally try not to just rant via negative anecdotes, but on this topic, it is difficult not to. I've repeatedly seen the pain of people who do well in consultancies but then go off and get leadership roles at a single company. As a general rule, they are horrible leaders. They'll talk well, make up pretty reports, build elegant org structures that also make up pretty reports, give awesome names to processes that sound like they'd make a real difference... they look and sound like great execs. But they never quite grasp what needs to happen to actually make the business work. So those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us. Part of it is that they never learned what truly mattered. They have experience swooping in, fixing one pain point, and leaving. They never have to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions. So they never learned what to look for and what to seek or avoid. They never learned depth. They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months. How it impacted business in 5-7 years wasn't "in scope". Obviously, this is all generalizations. I'm sure there are exceptional people who came from that environment. But that is exactly what they are - the exceptions to the rule.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Given how short employees tend to stay at companies, long term impact seems to be a founder only concern. As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me. I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- FL410 4y ago
  Wow. I appreciate the perspective, but it’s hard for me to even understand how a person could operate that way.
  - wccrawford 4y ago
    I think after enough companies treat you that way, it becomes a lot easier. I don't work that way, and I've been with my company for about 12 years now I think. But after watching the recent tech layoffs, it's pretty obvious that tech companies aren't thinking about their employees futures, just the present. The ones that don't give a generous severance are the worst, but even with that it can be rather difficult to find a new job... Especially one that you like. Many, many companies think of employees merely in terms of the money, and not how they're disrupting that person's life. It doesn't surprise me that there are non-managers that think and act the same way towards the company.

running101 4y ago

Is anyone surprised by this?

b3lvedere 4y ago

If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem. https://despair.com/products/consulting https://despair.com/products/consulting

mpweiher 4y ago

In other surprising and breaking news: water wet! The sad part is that it shouldn't be this way. Consulting could and really should be highly valuable. In the times that I have done consulting work, I have tended to both make pretty good money and deliver far more value to my clients than I cost them. However, the factors that make that work seem pretty hard to commodify in the ways needed for a corporation to turn it into a business model, so consulting companies tend to optimise for being believable bullshit factories. Hello ChatGPT!

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temptemptemp111 4y ago

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a_c 4y ago

Not knowing is costly. Not knowing what you don't know, doubly so. Consultants are used for different reason. Sometimes for delegation of understanding, which never (rarely?) works.

nsoonhui 4y ago

The author misses the point: consultants are brought in more to buttress the position of the advocators and to squash dissent, less to offer genuine knowledge that the clients don't already know.

throwaway8689 4y ago

I was at an event run by one of our suppliers, a health tech firm. Discussing one of their products, their consultant told me they were 'learning as we go along'. Didn't have the heart to tell him his firm is supposed to bring expertise from day one.

segmondy 4y ago

A lot of folks in companies hire consultants for confirmation bias. They need someone to agree to what they want to to do. Furthermore it's harder to get in trouble when you can claim that you followed what a professional consultant suggested.

zo1 4y ago
Consultants want and need the business. Telling the client their software/processes/org is a steaming pile of garbage will quickly get you fired and replaced. Been there, had that happen. They also always see consultants as master-level uber expert geniuses that can swoop in and fix anything whilst doing it under their direction and code/management flavor, so you can't win.
- mousetree 4y ago
  I’ve actually had the opposite experience. I had clients that suspected their software/processes/org were a steaming pile of garbage - ie the business folk saw long cycle times, high amount of bugs and wanted to bring in a consultant to get a second opinion (yes, in most cases confirm). It was a tough job to do fairly because as an engineer our natural inclination is to miss the context and only see the bad.

steveBK123 4y ago

You can see this in all areas of life. NYC has huge problems with transit capital projects because they basically have zero in-house expertise, from project planning down to digging the tunnels. This despite having decades of multiple continuous projects going since the 90s and onwards. It's all outsourced, and the state gets ripped off because they don't have the capacity to plan, or to cross check the outsourced plans, etc. In tech you see this all the time when senior management wants to move into some area that isn't a core competency and brings in their buddies outsourcing consulting body shop. The POC period skates by because everyone implicitly understands the consultant was brought in from the top. They then outsource the actual work to a 24 year old in a shiny US office to project manage 10 offshore 24 year olds. No one has any idea what they are doing, nothing gets done, and a few million go out the door.

jimz 4y ago
Oh god, the NYC transit issue is like the largest rancid lasagna of projects - multi-layered, affects tons of people, and so deeply entrenched across legal and technical aspects alike. I've literally lived in an unrecognized breakaway Narco-state of a Narco-state that broke away and has de facto control on the China-Myanmar border, and on the block where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in that boat when he was caught in 2013, but living and commuting in NYC, even as a (entry level, public interest) lawyer who worked in the financial district my final choices were an obviously illegal apartment in Chinatown in a basement with a low, uneven ceiling or a place in Flatbush that literally shared a wall with the tunnel leading into the Parkside Q station, which during weekdays also meant that the B was shaking up the place too so that none of my furniture stayed in place. NYC was great for the friends I had and the stuff to do and even the ultimately soul-crushing job that at least made a difference but man, I'll take the Narco-state-in-a-Narco-state any day now, all things considered. When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently. Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual. (Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)

cardosof 4y ago

IMO it's risky to hire management consultants to tell you what you should do. The value they provide is usually market research (providing data points you wouldn't gather yourself) and expert opinions (PhDs and SMEs, ex executives). With that, you can take an informed decision on something and move on. The other reason people hire them is less noble: ass covering. Can't be fired if you were just following the consultant's recommendations. CEOs do this from time to time.

pbj1968 4y ago

My experience has always been, “this problem is more complicated than we were lead to believe,” which is probably true, inevitably followed with, “and the solution is more consulting!”

commandlinefan 4y ago
Dogbert: "We've analyzed your problem and determined that you spend too much money on consultants" PHB: "But you're a consultancy" Dogbert: "Ironic, isn't it?"

jack_riminton 4y ago

I did an MBA at a school which was basically a conveyer belt to get people into consulting (I didn't, couldn't stand it and I went into PM and engineering). The main thing they teach you is to "identify the hidden customer" i.e. the person who hired you to do a project will have a boss they're trying to please, figure out what *they* want. If you create a proposal which pleases them, you've done well. Note that none of this has any relation to whether what you're proposing makes sense or is a good solution.

ballenf 4y ago
Maybe the best course of action is establish your terms on that basis -- "if you hire us for a particular project or problem, we will not exclude solutions/responses that highlight or challenge underlying systemic causes outside the scope of the engagement." If not, then the advice you got could be summarized as "figure out what you're being paid to do and do it."

sklargh 4y ago

I have worked with consultants from BCG, McKinsey and Bain, sometimes while at the same company. On balance they’re charming, intelligent people. In a magical world where I was a COO,CFO I would bar employing them immediately. In a typical F500 setting strategy consultants aren’t on-hand to make anything better or improve anything meaningfully - in general consultants are on hand to validate a C or C-1’s personal belief and drive its execution. Why? First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering. “It’s not a land grab, Bain said said we had to do it.” “McKinsey told us we had to hollow out that one plant town to survive!” They’re also an emotional refuge and a great backchannel. The BCG principal talks to the CEO weekly, you might not, good to be on their good side. Look, I’m sure in certain niche, high-skill consultants (industrial process engineering?) are valuable. By random dart method they’ve probably driven a fair amount of value, but on average you should never let them in the door.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
In certain niche areas "consulting" is just another way of saying "I've gone freelance". Management consulting (aka the people that will say "I'm a consultant!") is a different set of tires and almost always used for 'idea laundering' and plausible deniability as you said. A lot of them are fresh grads from renowned universities, "skilled" in powerpoint, and that's about it. The big firms hire them in droves to give their advice the appearance of "intellectual superiority". It's a well known source of jokes amongst management consultants.
everdrive 4y ago
>First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering I completely agree with you, but if everyone knows this, then why does this ploy work?
- hammock 4y ago
  “Yada yada yada if their job depends on it”

denton-scratch 4y ago

My experience of working with technical consultants was that they made things unnecessarily complicated. There were unnecessary meetings, and other unneccessary processes. The "main" job of a consultant was to find new business; for that, they got bonuses. For doing the job the client hired them for, they did not get bonuses. Unsurprisingly, jobs went on forever. There was no benefit to a consultancy firm in completing a contract; that would mean the end of the line for the gravy-train. So projects lasted years. This was a couple of decades ago; I hear less about technical consultancies these days, so perhaps the world has moved on. But I used to feel sorry for companies that had allowed a technical consultancy to get a foot in the door.

Lio 4y ago

"Consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then keep the watch". - Carl Ally

bigie35 4y ago

Case in point: Hertz paid Accenture 32 million dollars for a website design that, wait for it, NEVER WENT PUBLIC. https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-lawsuit/ https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-laws...

bartread 4y ago
I was tempted to feel bad for Hertz but then, on the flipside, what kind of deranged numbskull do you have to be to hire a bloody management consultancy[0] to build you a website and mobile app? [0] Yes, yes, I know Accenture have developers and development teams, but look at their history with publicised software development projects: it's not exactly a road paved with glittering diamonds of crystallised glory. I'm not suggesting Accenture are irredeemably awful at everything they do but it's evidently the case that software development isn't really their oeuvre even though they do seem to do quite a lot of it.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Exactly. That's so many levels of poor reasoning that it's hard to feel bad for anyone, other than maybe the developers whose work never saw the light of day. Plenty of people, including those with prestigious titles, who are detached from the reality of software development. In some cases they "hire some geeks" to solve a problem a big company already solved, and like in this case there are other times where they hire some big company with an official sounding name because, surely, they can get things done. Honestly, it gives me hope that my job as a web developer won't be wiped out by AI too soon. There's enough foolish management types out there hiring the wrong humans to work on futile projects that I figure I have at least another 5 years before I have to resort to food delivery or basket weaving.
- hestefisk 4y ago
  Scale. I know of large banks that use Accenture because they can spin up 10 scrum teams overnight when they can’t attract that much (and good) talent themselves. Hertz is a pretty big company with a big transnational footprint. It’s not a Wordpress web site. That said, 32M $ for nothing is still bad.

itsdrewmiller 4y ago

dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34778954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34778954

synergy20 4y ago

I saw and worked with quite a lot consultants. Many of them are great at creating fancy diagrams and design documents, some of them are good at communications, but I have yet to find them that can deliver any real quality code in the end before they move to their next project somewhere else. I will avoid consultants, along with contractors in software field as much as I can.

TuringNYC 4y ago

I'm going to take the other side here -- there are very legitimate cases where consultancies make a lot of sense: cases where you need to do something that requires expertise way out of your business domain. Example 1: Pharma company wants to roll out SAP Payroll system Example 2: Telco wants to roll out billing system The problem with these situations is that: - SAP experts rarely want to work at a Pharma company - Billing system experts rarely want to work at a Telco - The company should not hire -- and then after a year, fire -- workers after a specific job (e.g., SAP implementation) is done. Also, if the company is in the middle of nowhere, and the job is only for a year or two, why would anyone relocate there? - You cant become an expert by being at one company and seeing it done (and fail) once. You become an expert by doing it at many places - You cant hire a bunch of recent grads and do these projects, they require mentorship from people who have done these projects many times. The consultancies provide that.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> you need to do something that requires expertise That's the way it should be - the problem is it's impossible to vet the consultancies that actually have that expertise against the consultancies that claim the experience and are good at using smoke and mirrors to trick somebody into thinking they have it.
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  Depends on the competency. I'd venture Accenture has done half of all SAP major implementations in the world. For popular software packages, there are typically project testimonials from dozens of other fortune 500 companies, and there is usually a "Gold-Partner" type guarantee from the software vendor themselves. When the consultancy messes up, they risk losing the Partner label or tier. https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/profile/0000828182 https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand... Obviously this works for popular packages with defined success criteria, but that is a lot of business for consultancies already, and i'd argue, a great reason to go with a consultancy.

tristor 4y ago

I've worked with consultancies many times in my career. I have never seen them deliver good value for the dollars they cost. Never. This is at multiple levels, from low-level IC, to strategic high-level IC and mid-management. At every level within an org they haven't delivered value from my perspective. Maybe if I were a CXO I'd feel differently.

hestefisk 4y ago

Anyone remember Dilbert’s Booze Muhkidney?

FlacoJones 4y ago

https://archive.is/I8RJh https://archive.is/I8RJh

pwinnski 4y ago

I don't need to spend too much money on a consultancy to tell me that, it was obvious the first time I encountered a consultancy.

dwd 4y ago

Consultants are sales people first and foremost; upselling and maximising the consultancy firms profit will trump providing value every time.

timbritt 4y ago

I am very passionate about consulting because I have found a common, recurring situational problem that I have been able to develop a thoughtful, repeatable and iterative process around solving. There are some people who are exceptionally talented at making something from nothing, knowing how to apply the first steps towards a goal quickly and with great confidence and take great care to sow the seeds of sustainability and success into a project. A exceptional Consultant is basically like “The Wolf” in Pulp Fiction. Moving the needle from zero to ten (correctly and sustainably) is difficult. Getting it from ten to ninety is easy. Getting it from ninety to one hundred is almost a perpetual state. Consultants enjoy the perspective that working on a single project for 10 years is effectively spending a quarter of one’s career on a single project. To consultants, the life of the tenacious, loyal, unquestioning worker bee is naive and wasteful.