[HN Gopher] Mariana Mazzucato: "The McKinseys and the Deloittes ...
___________________________________________________________________
Mariana Mazzucato: "The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no
expertise "
Author : taubek
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-02-13 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| lesdeuxmagots wrote:
| Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of
| that expertise is not in the industry domain.
|
| They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling
| arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining
| an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the
| industry (or across industries). They have expertise in
| parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are
| associated with that.
|
| These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your
| organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting
| forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond
| their own area of practice.
|
| The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired
| to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry,
| society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be
| valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more
| compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes
| deeply problematic over time, or at scale.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Charlie Munger: "I've never seen a management consultant's report
| in my long life that didn't end with 'What this situation really
| needs is more management consulting.'"
| robocat wrote:
| Charlie used a quote from George Bernard Shaw's play "In the
| last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the
| laity."
|
| I personally wonder how many therapists say "you're fixed, I
| don't need any more of your money".
|
| The quote on management consultants was just one example of how
| many professionals act this way towards businesses, and how it
| wasn't only about money but also a subconscious, psychological
| tendency.
|
| "The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn't
| recognize that he's doing anything wrong any more than that
| doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal
| gallbladders."
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY
|
| Transcript: https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-
| of-human-mi...
| TrackerFF wrote:
| We're currently working with a McKinsey consultant, seems like a
| great guy - really polished fella, but I'm not sure why he was
| brought in. We're working on a organization-wide project, so
| there's lots of moving parts - and he's mostly just joining in on
| our meetings, taking notes. One boss said he's there to develop
| strategy for a part of the organization, another said he's there
| to help with developing project management, so I don't know -
| someone above them brought McKinsey in. Looked him up on
| LinkedIn, and it seems he graduated last year. Probably costs a
| pretty penny.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| You'll get a lot of cynical takes on the internet because a lot
| of people have had bad experiences with consultants. Or more
| accurately, bad experiences with management who hire
| consultants for some goal.
|
| The underlying goal in a lot of consultant engagements like you
| describe is to get something done outside of the inertia of
| your org structure. As companies grow, people get set in their
| roles and become resistant to change. Trying to make change
| things, start new initiatives, or shake things up will often
| fail if it doesn't fall neatly into the inertia of the company.
|
| Hiring a consultant is like inserting someone out-of-band who
| can generate some outside analysis without feeling obligated to
| respect all of the hidden politics, histories, and strong
| personalities that can come to shape a company.
|
| Now whether or not that goal is inline with your own goals at
| this company is a different question. It could be that the
| outcome involves a new initiative that makes your work better
| by removing some of the painful organizational cruft that has
| built up over the years. Or it could become an effort to
| reshape the parts of the organization that you personally
| liked. Or maybe the consultant is taking notes for some
| entirely unrelated initiative that you'll never see.
|
| You don't know, but I would suggest making a good faith effort
| to work with this person while they're in your company.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well, in theory yeah
|
| In practice, he'll most likely go for the most basic solution
| (which a lot of people probably noticed already) and try to
| package this in a "report that cost a lot of money"
|
| Institutional inertia is bad, but feel-good/turnkey
| "solutions" to undefined problems (think stuff like 6 sigma,
| "agile consultants" etc) don't help neither
| namaria wrote:
| People put out a lot of words about management as a
| science. In reality companies are ruled by politics and
| accounting.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They're getting paid to drive a narrative for whomever's budget
| is being charged against.
|
| sharemywin provides more depth:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779586
| skottk wrote:
| They're often extremely impressive people. Sometimes you don't
| find out what they're really working on for a long time,
| sometimes you never do.
|
| Sometimes you find out after it's too late.
| Havoc wrote:
| Always amusing to see people view consulting like that.
|
| It does nominally bring expertise yes but the primary benefit is
| ass covering and sounding board. If you're an exec that needs to
| implement something new & complicated you can either wing it and
| then the blame is on you if it goes wrong. Or you can bring in
| consultants and lean on their advice. That gives you someone to
| blame. And the consultants happily absorb said blame cause
| they're getting paid either way.
|
| And finally - cross pollination. If you ask them how to do XYZ
| there is a good chance that the answer is at least in part
| inspired what they saw at other places/competitors.
| guhidalg wrote:
| The consultants not only provide the "cover your ass" service,
| they also provide the "sunk cost fallacy" service. If anyone
| critiques the answers, they have to argue against X millions of
| dollars of "expertise". Choose X large enough that no one dares
| to dissent.
| belter wrote:
| Classical Weinberg:
| https://learnbusinessfaster.com/2018/09/15/secrets-of-consul...
|
| Common reason to hire consultants:
|
| - Already made decision and want to blame it on outside agent
|
| - Already made decision but want to say considered alternative
| cmh89 wrote:
| I work for the government and a lot of the consultants I've
| come across have been hired by incompetent leadership to try
| and fix broken processes that said leaders truly can't solve.
| The government regularly hires consultants to try and fill
| deficits caused by poor/weak leadership.
|
| We have a consultant right now doing 'process improvement' on
| one of the easiest processes I can think of, simply because
| no one wants to handle a difficult conversation with some
| powerful people who are gumming up the works with their inane
| power maneuvering.
|
| Of course, no consultant is ever going to point out that the
| problem is leadership to the people who hired them.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| https://archive.ph/0fi0K
| taubek wrote:
| Thank you for the link!
| runnerup wrote:
| McKinsey is currently hiring a lot more for experience than they
| used to. My ex-wife works there as a manufacturing expert based
| on her decade of on-the-ground experience inside chemical plants.
| Internal teams really fight to get her on their projects so that
| its not just "a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates who are
| very intelligent but lack any real world experience who
| ultimately only deliver a slide deck".
|
| The culture may be changing, at least at McKinsey.
| legitster wrote:
| "A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the
| time." During my time as a consultant I can affirm that this is
| 100% true. But it cuts both ways - you are only there because
| someone doesn't know how to look at their wrist.
|
| Most of my time as a consultant was asking low-level employees
| very obvious questions: What are you wasting your time on? What's
| the bottleneck on X? What could you be doing that made the
| company more money? Then we would compile a bunch of squishy
| numbers into some fancy looking charts in a slide deck for the
| executives.
|
| In my mind this is more of a symptom of a crisis of leadership in
| business. Absolutely none of the value we provided couldn't have
| been replaced if executives actually learned to trust their own
| teams. But MBAs are trained to be drawn to the shiny allure of
| "data" over quality insight. Or they are so myopic that they need
| outside help to find solutions they are not bothering to look
| for.
| kube-system wrote:
| > you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look
| at their wrist.
|
| Or there was a political battle over who would wear the watch,
| and whose budget it would come out of. And the only person who
| owned a watch lived in a different time zone and didn't want to
| change it to a timezone they didn't live in.
| legitster wrote:
| Pretty much. Lol.
|
| It's unbelievable how many expensive reports we generated
| that said "fixing X would result in $Y revenue" and the
| business response would be "well, that would piss off Ryan so
| we can't do that".
| efsavage wrote:
| In Ryan's defense, the firm he hired wrote an even prettier
| and more expensive report supporting his decision.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Consultants pay attention: this is how you're perceived.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Lucky bastards, I'd love to be perceived as "work product
| is linearly related to compensation."
| fragmede wrote:
| Better yet, Jeff's been yelling that we should do X for
| months and now that we have an expensive report says that
| we should do X, we're gonna do X. But not at all because
| Jeff thought it was a good idea. And then wonder why Jeff
| up and leaves the business.
| squokko wrote:
| I was similarly a consultant and I agree - in those projects
| (~25%) where I felt that we actually "created value" it was
| simply by talking to a bunch of junior people (not ICs, but
| ~managers of managers), kind of piecing together what was wrong
| (not very hard), and presenting that to the CEO. The CEO never
| heard this shit by themselves because everything was polished
| before being reported up the management chain.
|
| I literally had one guy saying that a big problem was that the
| device's battery life was very low, and we should include a
| second battery. This kind of budget ask would have never gotten
| off the ground without us, we took it to the CEO and said it
| would cost $m and he said "sure" and that was that.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| > Or they are so myopic that they need outside help to find
| solutions they are not bothering to look for.
|
| Anybody in charge for long enough loses the muscle of being
| able to accept questions or criticism. You buried the lede.
|
| In a way it's sad when they've hired consultants because they
| at some level acknowledge they need help, but when it comes to
| looking at their own actions or behaviors nothing is wrong or
| needs fixing.
|
| Which one is it, do you need help or not? If you don't need
| help and know it all why are the consultants here?
| legitster wrote:
| To give a bit of defense to consultants, there are a lot of
| parallels between hiring a consultant for a business and a
| therapist for yourself. Both are expensive in their own ways.
| And both focus on helping you help yourself with your own
| resources. I wouldn't think of you as an idiot for admitting
| you needed help to look at your own actions or choices.
|
| But I think the difference is that you can't just fix
| yourself by swapping out pieces of your brain, but a business
| can! Why would you keep around executives or teams that need
| constant, regular intervention?
| HillRat wrote:
| One of my mantras to my associates and consultants was that our
| job was to be one part therapist, one part sociologist, and one
| part accountant. As you say, if the client could fix their own
| problem, they wouldn't have called in a consultant, and, if the
| problem could be fixed by throwing developers and designers at
| it, they would have called someone cheaper. The implication of
| getting that phone call is that there's a gap between what the
| client's _asking for_ and what the client _needs_ , which has
| led them to bring in an outsider. Generally the answer to what
| the client assumed was a technical or design issue actually lay
| somewhere in the organizational structure, interpersonal
| relations, or the cash flow and balance sheets.
|
| It's true that consultants generally (certain kinds of
| expertise-led consulting aside) don't do anything an
| organization can't do for themselves, but it's also true that a
| therapist doesn't do anything an individual or couple can't do
| themselves. Bringing somebody in to ask both the stupid
| questions and the hard questions, without being beholden to
| internal power and communication structures, can often be very
| helpful, as long as -- big "if" here -- you can trust the
| consultant isn't going to featherbed for the sake of the SoW.
|
| Having said all that, I've seen some terrible, terrible work
| from consultancies, including some big screwups from my old
| firm (which, to their credit, the cost of which we ate rather
| than our clients). More than once I've seen large clients
| outsource strategy, innovation, or the entirety of execution to
| a Big Three/Big Four firm, and waste tens of millions on work
| that delivered a couple dozen binders but not any tangible
| value. The common thread is usually that the company abdicates
| responsibility for overseeing and critiquing the work, rather
| than taking a firm hand. That never turns out well.
| Arubis wrote:
| Every problem is a people problem. Especially when you're
| told by your client that it's not a people problem.
| legitster wrote:
| I look back on my time as a consultant, and I think we
| largely did good work. I just personally found it frustrating
| how much time we spent spinning our wheels vs making
| progress. I spent 6 months _on a slide deck_ that no one
| ended up looking at.
|
| If I had one takeaway, it's that our clients were entirely
| too risk averse. Rather than just start executing on
| something and learn along the way, they would rather front-
| load every business decision with 500 hours of coordination
| and planning meetings. And as consultants, we were
| incentivized to enable this type of behavior.
|
| I think it's pretty telling that, while I believe consultants
| can provide value and do good work, I have to admit that I
| never would have hired myself on any of the projects that I
| worked on.
| eunos wrote:
| > you are only there because someone doesn't know how to look
| at their wrist
|
| Some more cynical view. You are only there because your boss
| doubt that you know how to look at your wrist.
| pempem wrote:
| You're only there because there's been no visible effect of
| whether you look at your wrist or not.
| gffrd wrote:
| You're only there because instead of quantifying work, boss
| worries about whether or not employees are looking at
| watches.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like abysmally bad management and also pretty common,
| to have to bring in an outsider to ask the workers "what
| obvious stupid things do you see going on here."
| legitster wrote:
| They are a bit hokey, but I think this is something shows
| like Kitchen Nightmares or Undercover Boss or The Profit get
| absolutely right - just a few honest conversations is often
| all you need to uncover a bunch of improvement opportunities
| _if you know how to ask questions_.
|
| This is why Toyota consistently crushes it with quality and
| manufacturing efficiency - their entire idea of continuous
| improvement depends on trusting low-level workers to have the
| expertise to suggest improvements.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Except Toyota's process isn't secret. Any company that
| cared to execute well could simply buy everyone a copy of
| one of several books on Toyota's system and start cargo-
| culting themselves into success. The only explanation I've
| found with predictive power is that most
| managers/executives don't really want to do things right,
| they just want to BE right. It's rare to encounter a
| "leader" (at any level!) willing to admit they could
| improve.
| legitster wrote:
| I think this is one of those reasons where leadership
| quality and company culture are still important. Toyota
| knows they can't be copied which is why they share it so
| openly.
|
| You can even read up on the failure of NUMMI where Toyota
| literally tried to teach GM executives their production
| methods and GM just couldn't do it.
| newsclues wrote:
| Sounds like a lack of leadership is driving this.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily seem true. Many professions rely on
| peer review and mentoring even at the highest levels so
| everyone can make fewer mistakes and continually improve. We
| don't assume a generalist doctor is incompetent because they
| refer a patient to an appropriate specialist. We don't assume
| a pilot is incompetent because they have a copilot with them
| and they run down a checklist before taking off. We don't
| assume a software developer is incompetent because their work
| goes through code reviews. Why should business leaders be
| expected to know everything and make the right judgement
| every time without the same kind of peer support?
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Consultants do seem kind of useless. But then why are CEOs
| constantly hiring them? There must be some political/internal
| dynamic reason for this if you can't find an external/efficiency
| reason.
|
| I'd be interested in seeing a list of consultants' greatest wins.
| I mean the projects proposed by consultants that enhanced company
| values by the most. There's plenty of stories of consultant-
| driven disasters ... but I wonder how many of those are just the
| rank and file grousing about over-paid outsiders.
|
| But if there's anything worse than consultancies, its
| bureaucracies. I have a lot of experience dealing with
| bureaucracies in health care and aviation. And my god,
| bureaucrats can be some of the worst of human capital. Nowhere
| else can you get such a marriage of apathy, laziness, and
| unchecked power as you see in bureaucracies. At least in the
| private sector one has to be an avaricious asshole and possess a
| type of animal cunning at the very least to climb to the very top
| of the power hierarchy. In bureaucracies you might find a guy
| with absolute power over regulatory decisions and he has the
| motivation and intellectual capacity of a well-fed water buffalo.
| How did he get there? He just stuck around longer than everyone
| else.
| mach1ne wrote:
| Some companies (mainly those which actually produce physical
| stuff) may lack the knowledge for fairly elementary process
| optimization. That's the stuff they teach the upcoming
| consultants at school. And that's the stuff that actually saves
| everybody's money.
| eecc wrote:
| If that's all, we can simply add a couple Operations Research
| classes to ant engineering curriculum and we'd be done.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| In my experience, consultants are a good, easy CYA policy, as
| well as being able to look good for promotions and whatnot if
| you get the big names.
| looping__lui wrote:
| Maybe if company politics outweigh objective facts!? Or you
| need someone to give you an independent perspective? For
| companies it can be like a bit of therapy...
| sharemywin wrote:
| That's how you sell the Board on a project. You know Jon from
| IT thinks this will save us a bunch of money.
|
| versus
|
| We engaged Deloitte and if we allocate $XXM on this project to
| using XYZ solution which is part of the "gartner magic
| quadrant" we can see a ROI of XX.
|
| the point of a consultant is to get you money from who ever
| holds the purse stirngs.
| pablobaz wrote:
| It's often more to provide backup and justification for a
| decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte
| told me to do it".
|
| While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two
| strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the
| value an independent view can bring, especially to a big
| company suffering from group think - secondly, a common
| consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to
| other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience
| and general approach. This can be invaluable.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell
| successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the
| exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can
| be invaluable.
|
| This is basically our business model, combined with a B2B
| product that supports it. We have developed a very good
| recipe for a few clients and are now applying it
| everywhere.
|
| Today, about 80% of our business is a consulting package.
| The 20% technology setup piece comes after we figure out
| how to conform the customer to our capabilities.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yep, do a successful project, write a case study, and
| resell it to everyone.
|
| "We here at [consulting inc] have previously implemented
| [solution] for [fortune 500] in [the same industry] and
| they experienced [big number]% increase in [metric] as a
| result."
| juve1996 wrote:
| I don't buy this argument at all. At the end of the day,
| consultant backed or not, you're responsible for the
| implementation. If it fails it's not on the consultants.
| They're long gone. And someone needs to carry the blame.
| napolux wrote:
| I guess that's part of their business: make who hire them believe
| that they are experts
| zwieback wrote:
| The problem isn't public vs. private or in-house vs. consultants,
| the problem is bad or missing metrics. In most situations where
| work gets distributed to other entities there's also a lack of
| understanding the problem space and an inability to measure
| progress. The article mentions that for the vaccine rollout -
| who's to say that it would have worked out better done in a
| different way?
| paulsutter wrote:
| They have extensive expertise at selling very large consulting
| engagements. If they needed other expertise they'd develop it,
| but they don't need it
| api wrote:
| They're experts at getting money out of large corporations.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| She could have listed the others too.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| The role of these companies is to be corporate sin eaters for the
| board.
|
| Through consultants they can blame all the
| bad/immoral/incompetent decisions on the consultant. This is why
| every corruption story in the West features a McKinsey or a
| Deloitte grad.
| smfjaw wrote:
| I worked previously at one of these places. It's quite
| interesting, they create solutions that are really only 'happy
| path' solutions that work in a perfect world and it's honestly
| kind of expected.
|
| You pay $100k a week for a bunch of ivy league/top uni graduates
| who are very intelligent but lack any real world experience who
| ultimately only deliver a slide deck and some recommendations so
| they don't have any real liability, a 21 year old grad can't
| navigate a lay off round properly and can only provide these
| 'happy path' recommendations, similar to how a lottery winner
| won't make good business owner, they have all the money but not
| the knowledge, the Mckinsey junior has all the knowledge but no
| experience. Execs hire them because they don't want to be the
| decision maker only the proxy decision maker and can say
| 'McKinsey advised this was the only solution to do
| layoffs/restructure/unpopular thing and they're the ones that
| know' when in reality all the exec needed was a short stop to
| back them up.
|
| Obviously this only relates to their management
| consulting/advisory arms
| kneebonian wrote:
| My understanding was they were brought in to validate the
| opinion of the hirer. As I once said before
|
| "This was one of those big eye opening moments for me.
| Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they
| don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the
| rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to
| come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of
| analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and
| lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them
| in meetings and then they depart. Consultants are brought in to
| secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as
| disposable pawns in interoffice combat.
|
| They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions,
| or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have
| no loyalty or love but money."
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I think I saw this the first time you wrote it. It's genius,
| and I think perfectly accurate.
|
| (Although, speaking as a consultant, we are not all like
| that. It is of course the big consulting companies being
| hired into the big-end-of-town companies. Some of us little
| guys really do care about our customers.)
| Galxeagle wrote:
| Copying my favorite quote from a different thread about data
| scientists: it's 'decision-based evidence-making'
| yamtaddle wrote:
| They're also an acceptable form of corporate espionage. Mid-
| and higher-level consultants (there's usually one with
| relevant experience at least _advising_ a team remotely, at
| least providing some background documents for them) will
| provide sets of "best practices" for you to adopt... that
| they learned from your competition. Anything you're doing
| well, they'll note, and those will be "best practices" when
| your competition engages them again.
| bernawil wrote:
| a 21 year old grad
|
| I hope this is hyperbole or using the term "consultant" when
| really meaning "pawn from a staff enhancement agency" (as is
| often done). Because the accusation seems to be that
| consultancies sell merely the appearance of expertise and
| nobody would buy into the appearance of a 21 year old.
| rippercushions wrote:
| The consultants doing the selling and schmoozing with the
| client's upper brass are rarely if ever the same as the
| grunts on the ground doing the work, who _are_ often fresh
| grads.
| _JamesA_ wrote:
| My experience working with teams from Anderson (now
| Accenture) and Deloitte was that they heavily favored youth
| and attractiveness over knowledge and experience.
| squokko wrote:
| When McKinsey/Bain/BCG goes to a client, the project is
| usually sold to the CEO or senior exec by a 40-50 year old
| Director or Senior Partner at the consulting firm. The
| project kicks off with a "case team leader" who is the only
| full time person on staff, they are usually like 30, running
| a group of 22-28 year olds, who are doing the work with the
| client executives who are usually 2-4 levels down from the
| CEO. The partners from the consulting firm are not full time
| on the project and their job is to keep the project on track,
| present the conclusions to the client at the end, but most
| importantly to keep the money flowing from the client.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Professor Mazzucato's argument is that the big three are
| weakening government's ability to innovate because that function
| is outsourced.
|
| Although she is confident this can be remedied by bringing more
| innovative projects in house the reality is the same as in large
| companies: entrenched cultures, fiefdoms, silos, budgets make
| change very hard due to entrenched interests.
|
| It takes outsiders to be the Pinata in the room at some point,
| they can say things FTE management can't. I'm a consultant, my
| beef with the big three is the 'nobody gets fired for hiring
| Mckinsey/Deloitte/x' syndrome.
|
| You will get a lot of cut and paste boilerplate slide deck read
| outs from the big players, smaller more specialized consultants
| tend to provide a lot more value for much lower costs.
|
| Ironically government departmental efforts at
| innovation/change/evolution are typically expensive, big players
| too...
| lormayna wrote:
| My previous executive come from one of those companies. She was
| the worst leader that I ever had, she left after less than 2
| years with a completed failure from organizational standpoint and
| many people disgruntled.
| dcl wrote:
| She probably got an awesome new role though.
| lq9AJ8yrfs wrote:
| It's substantially true, at least in part. Source: I worked at
| one of them for a few years.
|
| In my preferred niche I was surrounded by a mixed bag of peers
| senior and junior. In turn I wrote proposals, sold work, and was
| staffed on projects outside my niche I wasn't experienced or
| qualified in, but if you squinted hard enough you could say I had
| transferable skills toward.
|
| For the most part my projects were successful, in the sense of we
| didn't get fired overall and the customer paid for the work. The
| biggest ways to screw up were the easily caught stuff like
| missing deadlines, exceeding the expenses policy or padding
| hours, which was harder to catch but some folks were brazen
| and/or cunning about it.
|
| "Yes we're an expert in that" was a phrase that wasn't ever
| taught but I heard often. Saying yes to anything buys you time to
| find the solution either by skilling up or connecting to someone
| with actual knowledge across the very large and well-connected
| employee base, or fake it if you can't. Saying no ends the
| opportunity.
|
| Some of the work was mutually convenient, hey can you take care
| of this one weird project for me, cheaper and easier to go with a
| fudged service from an existing and recognizable supplier than to
| wade into an unfamiliar niche, go through the trouble of
| onboarding the supplier, and not know whether you're getting good
| service or not. Go with the big 4 and you'll likely get a solid C
| or if you're lucky a B grade service. Just the act of getting a
| new consultant onboarded as a supplier can take months or years
| at large companies. The big 4 are on the supplier lists
| everywhere already.
|
| Tbh a lot of this contract and relationships stuff is valuable,
| you're much less likely to get a complete service delivery or
| billing nightmare out of one of these large firms. You can call
| them up in the middle of the night and they'll sell you anything.
| It's a little like Alibaba or Amazon but for business services.
|
| Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand
| playbooks, in some of which they'd find and dine a "type b"
| personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady
| stream of contracts. Basically quid pro quo, but none of it made
| explicit or overtly conditional, more an open handed game theory
| type of thing.
|
| I took this mentality with me to a boutique shop. It works pretty
| well.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Probably the weirdest part was finding the land and expand
| playbooks, in some of which they 'd find and dine a "type b"
| personality and prop up their career in exchange for a steady
| stream of contracts._
|
| Like geopolitical spycraft? How far did the playbooks go?
| [deleted]
| lq9AJ8yrfs wrote:
| Probably a lot of the same emotional manipulation that goes
| into spycraft? IDK all I know about spycraft comes from
| novels.
|
| Hey we see your true potential, we know your exec team and we
| can help shape the company so you and the company succeed
| together. And we can coach you so that you know how and when
| and who to deliver your message to when the time is right.
|
| It worked both ways. Revolving door with clients was
| absolutely encouraged wherever it wasn't forbidden by law or
| regulation. Implicitly as an employee in good standing it
| felt like this was a standing offer should you decide to
| switch to an industry role, and I saw it often.
| [deleted]
| bluedino wrote:
| At F100_NAME we have piles of developers from Deloitte. They put
| a couple of them on this medium-sized Python project that a now-
| retired employee created. The first one re-wrote a lot of it and
| screwed it up, the next one started fixing it (not sure why they
| didn't just roll it back), the one after that didn't do anything
| for 4 months (then they left), and I recently spent two
| afternoons with the current one where they were trying to trick
| me into doing their job. I'm from another contractor/consulting
| firm.
|
| Haven't heard from them in a while so I'm not sure what the
| current status is.
| rvba wrote:
| In the past consultants were paid well since they were the
| experienced people. They worked on the interesting projects,
| they saw things, they really were good at something - so they
| would bring best practice from one company to another.
|
| Now the business model has changed. It is much easier to know
| what is the best practice. So what they do is hire juniors and
| sell them as mids or seniors.
|
| Good programmers dont really go to consulting firms anymore. It
| is not worth their time. Why work at BIG4 when you will get
| paid better in FAANG?
|
| If you say are a developer at crypto (ignoring that it is a
| scam) all the good projects are at crypto companies. Best that
| consultants can do is some slides or trick some company to
| implement blockchain instead of a database. Consulting
| companies lost their edge. They dont really play the game
| anymore. They can take some bad project and then outsource it
| to a cheap team. Or get a very bad project that is a total mess
| - ans then fail to repair that mess.
|
| If you want good software you go to a software house (that can
| still deliver crap).
|
| Apart from very specific skills, consultant programmers mostly
| do the shit projects - that nobody wants to touch. Or they are
| "staff augmentation" - headcount outside of salary budget.
|
| Also the consulting lifestyle just sucks: constant overtime,
| burnout, travel. Some people like it. Most dont.
|
| Most people in consulting search for an exit opportunity after
| few years. Programmers can exit faster, so the good programmers
| will leave consulting firms fast (it is different for business
| consultants - they have it much harder to leave, so they stay
| longer).
|
| But coming back: if you are in finance, or project management
| then sure - consulting can help your career at big personal
| cost. For skills like programming it is completely not worth
| it. If you are a junior programmer just try to go to a FAANG to
| earn 3x more. A "normal" company will pay you similar as big4.
| So why bother with all the travel and stress?
|
| If you are really experienced programmer, say 15 years - again
| you dont want to go to consulting. You can land a senior job,
| be paid well and not travel at all.
|
| So all those companies take people who are still smart but
| couldnt get better. Also consulting companies lie all the time:
| juniors are sold as seniors (especially programmers, but normal
| consultants too). And the development there is hard - due to
| travel and overtime they have it jard to learn on their own (no
| spare time). They also focus on closing a project, not on doing
| it well.
|
| What I try to write is that if you want to be a programmer
| nowadays it is better to do it in a software company from day
| one. Being a programmer at a consulting company is not worth
| the stress. Also doesnt pay better. It is a bit different if
| you are in finance or project managent, but even here it seems
| that the ability to boost your career by doing few years of
| consulting is becoming less worth it. The exit opportunities
| seem to happen less. Consulting is much less elite as it used
| to be. The consulting companies dont really have much edge
| anymore.
| college_physics wrote:
| Quite seriously, they capitalize at both the corporate world and
| the public sector being brain-dead, cost insensitive
| organisations (somebody else pays: the clients of the business
| entity, the taxpayer etc) and culturally unable to embrace
| concepts such as open source and collaborative platforms.
|
| Think about it, their main service is moving around and promoting
| "best practices" by copy pasting and incrementally improving (at
| high cost) what ultimately is solved via diffusion by the sector
| / domain as a whole. Essentially an expensive, backdoor way to
| engineer consensus.
| slackfan wrote:
| Consultants are paid to be the fall guys in the games of
| corporate politics.
| [deleted]
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