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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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'
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is laughable hubris to think there's a class of people who can come into an industry, learn it in a few months better than the people who have done it for decades, and fix/improve things.
Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.
There's a reason nothing ever permanently changes after mgmt consultants prescribe it.
They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain. Think simple things that we usually rant about in software dev:
No VCS. Badly modeled domain. Code complexity. Denormalized tables galore. Cludged together OTS and custom components. Esoteric language choices. Code rot. Bad branching choices. Monolithic and brittle codebase. No CICD. No testing. No specs. Rotten confluence pages that weren't kept up to date.
And then, the worst: Domain priests that use complicated domain knowledge and rules and self-inflicted complexity to keep the software hostage by telling us we can't fix the above problems. Essentially job security.
Aye, but it is unlikely that a consultant will actually be able to articulate these issues better than someone who has _successfully_ worked in the industry and solved these problems (in contrast to your reverbalization of deadwood as domain priests). Unless, of course, the consultant has worked _successfully_ in the industry for a good length of time. But the class of consultants discussed have not. All squares go this way, all pegs go that way, never shall the twain meet.
>They don't need to learn your domain. Your domain is not special and for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. Thats my take from what I've seen. The issues that companies face are all generic and bad no matter the domain
why don't the consultants just cut out the middleman and take over these billion dollar industries if it's so easy? Why bother consulting for tech companies if they can just put them out of business with a direct competitor? Domain expertise apparently doesn't matter, should be easy for these expert managers
The number of companies that have gone bankrupt or been disrupted due to short term optimizations recommended by these management consultant companies is massive
Nah, their secret sauce is that they are sales behemoths first and foremost. They are adept at convincing any CEO/SVP to ignore any internal advice from the CEO/SVP's technical teams and sign large, binding contracts instead with them. Also used to work at a big 4.
This is the opposite of what I encountered doing consulting, where often the best outcomes were achieved by asking the internal teams what they thought, and then telling the “leaders” who were petrified of accepting such advice without external validation of it.
Consulting companies will gladly bill you for telling you what you already know. This gets them a foot in the door to start the outsourcing process. For the "leaders" the implicit allure is the personal risk mitigation factor for when things go wrong.
Another thing about consultants is if you call up in the middle of the night and need a team in Singapore the next day and stay for two weeks to work on a crisis they’ll do it. FTE’s will laugh or quit.
There are quite a lot of businesses that need to hire consultants to implement the opinions of what to do from their employees. Management to employee communication has broken down to such an extent that the only way to bridge that gap is consultancy. Working out what to do and how to make progress is something consultancy is genuinely good at. The annoying part which only drives a deeper wedge is managements response to this is to have the consultancy implement what they found which just ensures future engagement will be a nightmare.
There is also the opposite. Management often decides what they want first and looks for justifications after the fact, and since their own people who have to deal with the consequences of that decision will not support it, and the data doesn't support it, then they hire consultants until they get one who doesn't care about what's real and gives them the justification to support it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Auditing companies absolutely get cyber security experts. Graduates coming out of University obviously don't have the experience of that of veterans but are in a team of experts with experience in that area.
The checklists and workpapers are a way to ensure that there is a level of standardisation in the work that is being performed. If you have assessed a clients firewall or operating system as a veteran you are encouraged to replicate how you did that in a work paper or checklist to cover bases.
Big 4 auditing firms are some of the best in class when it comes to knowledge sharing. Yes sometimes a junior or a senior might miss something without the context, but that is why humans developed lips to talk through it.
I can't count the amount of times I have challenged what a junior has said, or the conclusion a junior has come to based on what a client has said based on my experience.
I was once a graduate myself and found many glaring gaps through the use of simple checklists. If that's all it takes, then the industry needs to write some of their own.
the checklist without intelligence is almost useless or generates too much noise. That's however those companies are able to profit. Generate a checklist, hire a undergrad to fill the checklists, organize it with a nice report, full of data, which mostly are noise, and ask a bunch of money, which is exactly the topic. Consultancies know less than they claim, because they are sending junior people with checklists to audit your company.
Probably not. IT has its own procedures for enforcing process compliance [1] that are much less susceptible to deviation and much more efficient.
It's ok if you fail to capture something and need to use less effective methods like checklists. But going to them by default or, like the GP's said, only using them are bad.
(But anyway, the GP was complaining because he was expecting highly valuable customized advice, and instead he got low-value process adherence checks. How you do your adherence checks is a completely different subject.)
Or I think this shows your lack of understanding of auditing.
In large global financial audits, there are many complex accounting systems that run on Unix systems. These systems as part of the financial audit are audited to ensure there is an appropriate level of IT general controls that support the underlying financial statements. I.e. what's stopping the admin from making direct data changes to the underlying database that supports the financial statements.
Furthermore, those traditional accounting firms (Big 4) no longer and haven't for a decade + only provided accounting. These firms have enormous skills in internal audit, governance risk and controls, data science, cyber security, Information Technology etc.
One of my duties is auditing other companies firewalls and you would not believe the kind of sieves I come across that could have been solved with a simple checklist.
Bonus points: Critical stuff like meraki licensing or certificates that could be solved with a simple calendar.
This stuff is 90% organizational skills and 10% technical skills. My job as a consultant is mostly on the same level as helping people wash their hands. The typical HN person is used to being on skilled technical teams at companies that build technology as their business, but let me tell you that all your business software consumers are constantly in a dire state from top to bottom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simple - do the same things companies do. Optimize for profit. I honestly could give a rats ass what a companies profits are in 5 years since I won't be there.
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years" - "not here because you 100% won't increase pay commensurate with market rate"
Its relatively simple to see how people could operate that way, because companies don't actually care about employees. They're a line item for profit generation.
You look at how companies are operating, how they are treating employees, how they are chasing short-term financial performance over long-term sustainability and simply mirror their behavior on an individual level.
Personally, I am only invested in a company to the degree of making my immediate coworkers happy and making it easier for them to do work. I don't care about the long term (5-10 year timeline) success of the strategic goals for 2 reasons:
1. The company is not invested in me in the long term.
2. I don't have strategic visibility to make improvements anyway, because I am not an executive, so it makes no sense to worry about something I can't control.
Yeah, but this will bite you as well when other people do it and you have to fix it. Or I guess you’ll always go look for low hanging fruit and run away from any responsibility/accountability forever. But even that bites back at some point or another when you run out of luck
> Whether or not I do it, I get bit by others doing it.
You could choose to stop the cycle instead of biting the next person down the line just because you were bitten by someone unrelated.
> Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.
Maybe not directly, but it does play a part. When no one cares about doing things right, even the ones who did care get fatigued and stop. The way to fix the situation is to be better yourself, thus giving others the chance to be at their best.
Ive done it a few times. Simplified everything and moved on to other projects only to see the the project be evolved by other into an unorganized pile of crap. I also got laughed at for not using sime pattern or framework du jour
I mean this is sort of how things already work, so much so that the trope of "the old devs didn't know shit" and memes about needing to replace everything or crapping on legacy code when starting a new job is talked about daily among devs.
I'm not really worried about what other people do because when I have to fix it, I'll be being paid to, and so would the next guy after me.
If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.
That’s fair but seems to me like a chicken and egg problem. Nowadays unless you go build something from scratch it’s all a pile of garbage because no one really cared. The few who did got pushed out or gave up so we as a collective shat where we ate.
> If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.
Sounds like the solution is to look for a good company—they do exist—not sabotage the current one.
There are many reasons to leave a company. Tech companies are frequently fundamentally unstable operations. In my opinion experience employee churn is more a matter of the environment than the individual and their plans.
I dont think many employee's have this mindset. This mindset would contribute to the issue and would be one that I would have not considered...so I thank you for your transparency.
I agree mostly with your comment and I've seen all of that too. The one thing I'd say though re
> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us
There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.
You make a good point. It can be generalized to say that a prescribed strategy will be successful proportional to how much of the overall org (internal, partners, etc) is invested in it. If the consultant is a one-man shop throwing out proclamations he will get very little traction. If he is a 10 man team digging into the actual systems he will get more. If he is a 100 man managed services embed he will get the most
This seems an apt description of management consulting trying to find its future.
It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.
The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.
Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.
This is really good, and matches up with my primary complaint from the execs I've seen hired out of consulting. They tend to be short timers. They often present wildly optimistic 3-5 year growth plans to the board knowing full well they won't be there in 3-5 years. The board almost never ties their compensation to these plans in any way, so the real thing they spend their time doing is hitting whatever short term metric their compensation is tied to, and these metrics are almost never well aligned with the long term interests of the company. I've been in a company that spent years digging out of the mess one of these guys left behind.
I'm a former tech consultant who manages/ed lots of people since then. A few thoughts:
1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.
2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.
3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.
This all reads vaguely like justification people often use for one off anecdotes trying to support a whole system. Obviously sometimes things work out, otherwise the system would completely collapse, it's just a matter of ratio and amount of grifters in the field making our (the "average" HN high level coder) lives miserable through sheer incompetence
I feel like there's pool of hucksters who work connections well, swoop in to management to fix big entrenched problems, and spend
* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company
* 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!)
* 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package
My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.
Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.
> My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff.
almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.
point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.
Sounds about right. I know someone who's company hired VP that was ex-McKinsey, and then they hired a bunch of ex-McKinsey staff.
* offshore more dev internally
* about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource
* they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring
* with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company
It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.
So basically the stereotype of business degrees trying to wave hands and leave the details for others to figure out after 80% of the budget has been eaten up by $5-700/hr management consultants that can do neither.
I started my career in advisory consulting for a Big 4 firm, which should support the premise of the article - a lot of times you have kids fresh out of college telling you what to do. While I quickly left for a smaller consulting shop that helped grow my technical skills more, I eventually moved out of consulting altogether for the reason you outlined in your comment.
I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.
Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.
> They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months
This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.
On the other side of this, as a dev, I find not having to live with the long term consequences of tech/product/process decisions a breath of fresh air. No longer need to obsess over every future “what if”…
Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.
The company I’m working for now relies heavily on consulting and it’s awful. Almost complete lack of documentation for critical infrastructure. Minor decisions made that come with major costs like using EFS instead of EBS which skyrockets costs. When there is documentation for something, it’s so useless yet in-depth, like the manager needed to check off a “documentation” bullet point but didn’t read a single line of it.
Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.
Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.
If it makes you feel better about your negative anecdotes I've had the same general experience. I've seen a lot of Business School -> Consulting -> Executive track guys come through various companies in my career and they've without exception been disasters.
There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.
The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
168 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadA 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.
I love hiring new grads.
Disclosure: former consultant
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.
Maybe at a body shop like Accenture though.
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.
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.
The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
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.
The current Big 4 accounting firms do have management consulting divisions (not separate entities to my knowledge)
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.
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.
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.
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-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-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.
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!
You HAVE to believe they bring in value because... well, you gotta believe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though.
Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey
Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.
There's a reason nothing ever permanently changes after mgmt consultants prescribe it.
No VCS. Badly modeled domain. Code complexity. Denormalized tables galore. Cludged together OTS and custom components. Esoteric language choices. Code rot. Bad branching choices. Monolithic and brittle codebase. No CICD. No testing. No specs. Rotten confluence pages that weren't kept up to date.
And then, the worst: Domain priests that use complicated domain knowledge and rules and self-inflicted complexity to keep the software hostage by telling us we can't fix the above problems. Essentially job security.
why don't the consultants just cut out the middleman and take over these billion dollar industries if it's so easy? Why bother consulting for tech companies if they can just put them out of business with a direct competitor? Domain expertise apparently doesn't matter, should be easy for these expert managers
The number of companies that have gone bankrupt or been disrupted due to short term optimizations recommended by these management consultant companies is massive
No, programmers/engineers/etc. are equally susceptible: https://xkcd.com/1831/
Related:
• https://xkcd.com/793/
• https://xkcd.com/1570/
Its such a common theme in modern businesses.
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.
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.
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.
No I don't know what a VMM is but it's probably not relevant.
Auditing companies absolutely get cyber security experts. Graduates coming out of University obviously don't have the experience of that of veterans but are in a team of experts with experience in that area.
The checklists and workpapers are a way to ensure that there is a level of standardisation in the work that is being performed. If you have assessed a clients firewall or operating system as a veteran you are encouraged to replicate how you did that in a work paper or checklist to cover bases.
Big 4 auditing firms are some of the best in class when it comes to knowledge sharing. Yes sometimes a junior or a senior might miss something without the context, but that is why humans developed lips to talk through it.
I can't count the amount of times I have challenged what a junior has said, or the conclusion a junior has come to based on what a client has said based on my experience.
I was once a graduate myself and found many glaring gaps through the use of simple checklists. If that's all it takes, then the industry needs to write some of their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checklist
Probably not. IT has its own procedures for enforcing process compliance [1] that are much less susceptible to deviation and much more efficient.
It's ok if you fail to capture something and need to use less effective methods like checklists. But going to them by default or, like the GP's said, only using them are bad.
(But anyway, the GP was complaining because he was expecting highly valuable customized advice, and instead he got low-value process adherence checks. How you do your adherence checks is a completely different subject.)
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software
In large global financial audits, there are many complex accounting systems that run on Unix systems. These systems as part of the financial audit are audited to ensure there is an appropriate level of IT general controls that support the underlying financial statements. I.e. what's stopping the admin from making direct data changes to the underlying database that supports the financial statements.
Furthermore, those traditional accounting firms (Big 4) no longer and haven't for a decade + only provided accounting. These firms have enormous skills in internal audit, governance risk and controls, data science, cyber security, Information Technology etc.
Bonus points: Critical stuff like meraki licensing or certificates that could be solved with a simple calendar.
This stuff is 90% organizational skills and 10% technical skills. My job as a consultant is mostly on the same level as helping people wash their hands. The typical HN person is used to being on skilled technical teams at companies that build technology as their business, but let me tell you that all your business software consumers are constantly in a dire state from top to bottom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would a company cut quality to increase profit? Yes? Then so should you.
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years" - "not here because you 100% won't increase pay commensurate with market rate"
Its relatively simple to see how people could operate that way, because companies don't actually care about employees. They're a line item for profit generation.
You look at how companies are operating, how they are treating employees, how they are chasing short-term financial performance over long-term sustainability and simply mirror their behavior on an individual level.
Personally, I am only invested in a company to the degree of making my immediate coworkers happy and making it easier for them to do work. I don't care about the long term (5-10 year timeline) success of the strategic goals for 2 reasons:
1. The company is not invested in me in the long term.
2. I don't have strategic visibility to make improvements anyway, because I am not an executive, so it makes no sense to worry about something I can't control.
Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.
You could choose to stop the cycle instead of biting the next person down the line just because you were bitten by someone unrelated.
> Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.
Maybe not directly, but it does play a part. When no one cares about doing things right, even the ones who did care get fatigued and stop. The way to fix the situation is to be better yourself, thus giving others the chance to be at their best.
I'm not really worried about what other people do because when I have to fix it, I'll be being paid to, and so would the next guy after me.
If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.
Sounds like the solution is to look for a good company—they do exist—not sabotage the current one.
Sucks to be the guy cooperating in this scenario, but it's the only way to start clawing things back from the brink.
> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us
There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.
It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.
The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.
Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc
1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.
2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.
3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.
* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company * 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!) * 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package
My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.
Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.
almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.
point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.
Possibly negotiated in the contract in advance. Interesting idea
* offshore more dev internally * about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource * they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring * with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company
It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.
I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.
Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.
This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.
Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.
Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.
Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.
Deep breath
There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.
The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.
https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=15m20s
https://despair.com/products/consulting
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!
Didn't have the heart to tell him his firm is supposed to bring expertise from day one.
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.