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As someone with firsthand experience at a “top” consulting firm this article is pretty accurate, albeit with a definite negative slant. A couple parts that really ring true for me are:
> The work will mostly be done by clever but pimply 20-somethings, armed with two-by-two matrix frameworks … What they lack in wisdom will be made up for in long hours.
The structure of consulting firms is that a partner (who does actually have a lot of experience with the industry) will “sell” the work to the client and oversee the team that actually does the work. Partners will sell multiple cases at a time and most of time is spent doing sales so most of the work is done by the consulting team with some guidance from the partner. The consulting team will be comprised of a couple of consultants 1-3 years out of undergrad and couple of consultants 1-3 years out of their MBA and a manager who has maybe 5 years of consulting experience. Usually none of them will have any specific domain knowledge.
> Question everything
Since most of the work is done by (nearly) fresh grads they won’t have a lot of specific industry experience. At the same time it’s hard to find information on the obscure topics they’re researching so the actual information they find will be iffy. Sometimes it will even be made up (they’ll tell the client it’s based on “industry experience” or something but it was probably invented by 23 year old in excel). Regardless the information will be presented to the client as rock solid and scientific (with maybe a little disclaimer at the bottom)
In short: The people you’re talking to aren’t the people who are doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work have no industry experience And the numbers they’re basing their analysis on are probably whatever they found on google.
I know this comment sounds really critical but I do think there is some value in consultants and they are really good at structuring out a problem but the analysis they do is probably 75% accurate at best
The one time I dealt with KcKinsey, the partner was pretty sharp, one of the associates was as well, and the other, well, more arrogant than justified.
Overall, in retrospect, the experience was... not terrible.
We answered a lot of questions, did a lot of education. They produced a bunch of spreadsheets that kept the business planning people occupied (a good thing). And they basically validated to the senior management that the product managers and related advising on strategy were on the right track. Expensive, yeah. But it's not always the worst thing to get an external sanity check.
>In short: The people you’re talking to aren’t the people who are doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work have no industry experience And the numbers they’re basing their analysis on are probably whatever they found on google.
this has always been the most mindboggling thing about consultants. I have a few friends working as consultants and occasionally when they discuss cases, I always think to myself, "who on earth are you to advise them about so-and-so management when you literally just graduated college a year or two ago?"
I've seen this as well. And while not defending such practices, how much experience do the consultant worker-bees need when much of what they gather come from the staff of the hiring company?
That is, these consulting firms get called in more because office politics and organization dysfunction is high, too high. The fees aren't so much for expertise per se, but a stupidity tax on the hiring company that lacks the leadership and management to get out of its own way.
Put another way, these consulting firms don't hire themselves. The fact that they do get so much work is more of a reflection of how weak and rudderless some Big Incs actually are, than the strengh of the snake oil sells.
It is satire, not actually written by a consultant. This is the humor page at the end of the economist. But the fact that it is accurate actually does make it funny, if a bit trite.
I've been on both sides - as a management consultant at a top firm and within a corporation hiring a top consulting firm.
The grunt consultants are the ones making the slides, but they aren't deciding the direction of the project or the output. Every project I worked on as a consultant had a lot of input from the person who sold the work (their reputation is on the line!). But let's be honest, most consulting projects aren't mind blowing - basic stuff like "what is the competition doing", "what is the the flavor of the month for fund raising".
And in terms of "not having experience in the area", that's fine in a lot of cases. Often consultants are brought in to do work the company doesn't have the resources to do. Or, if it's a new area you need advice on, you partner with the consulting firm on how to do that. Maybe it's interviewing experts in the field, maybe it's creating case studies of how other companies did it.
I did work with one consulting firm that had domain knowledge (small boutique firm). The consultants had industry experience and a ton of contacts. We basically boiled down what answered we needed and they tracked down the answers.
While on both side I've never been a part of the a project where what consultants offered wasn't 100% clear to the client. HN acts like consultants are pulling the wool over clients eyes but that's never been my experience. They new exactly what they were paying for.
In my experience, this is all disclosed (partner/manager/associate). Pretty much any proposal I've seen from the top firms includes a cost estimate built by using hours x rate for each respective job title and often further broken down by stage of the project. Time and material bids are most common so you should be asking for this up-front, I actually view it as a bit of a red flag if they don't voluntarily disclose/bid it this way (eg. if I'm paying for time, I need to know how much time is being planned for and by which rate level).
>In short: The people you’re talking to aren’t the people who are doing the actual work, The people who are doing the work have no industry experience And the numbers they’re basing their analysis on are probably whatever they found on google.
I think this really sets the wrong expectations.
The partner or director that sold you the work may not be doing the day-to-day work, but that doesn't mean they aren't involved. Behind the scenes, the consulting team should be frequently checking in with the director/partner to make sure they are on the right track. Major deliverables are reviewed by the director/partner before they are seen by the client. You should also be meeting with the director/partner frequently to make sure they are aware of any feedback you have about the consulting team's work. If these things aren't happening, you should give that feedback to the partner and look elsewhere for future work.
The good consulting firms may not hire people with industry experience, but instead they select hires that are good at researching and gathering data from a lot of different sources and synthesizing it into pieces of information that are more easily digestible by others. This is what enables those consultants to get quick feedback from people who do have industry experience (the directors, partners, or others in the consulting company that they have access to) and course correct where needed.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of scummy consulting groups out there. IMO the key thing is to understand that while the partner who sells you the work may not be the one _doing_ the work, the people doing the work _will_ follow in the partners footsteps. If the partner is mostly absent, or you think the partner is pulling a fast one on you, their team probably is too (or vice versa), and you should ditch them at the first opportunity. If you have a good relationship with the partner and think you can trust them, they are going to try and maintain that trust by making sure the team doesn't do anything to betray that trust.
Yeah this is pretty spot on. I didn't work for one of the big consultancies, but it was pretty much the same playbook in the three different places I worked. As one of the underlings, I always tried to do good work for clients, but in the end I don't think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as much as they did. It's a weird world, where the value you provide is one of the following:
1. Using up someone's budget, because they don't get to keep it and want to look like they're doing something with it.
2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.
3. Being sent in to die on a doomed project, so you can take the blame for it.
Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The paycheck is nice, but there are other places to get one just like it.
>I don't think it was usually worth it for them to pay us as much as they did.
Do understand that, most businesses have zero way to actually hire competent employees outside of their areas of expertise. So if a bread factory wants a CRM spun up to manage their sales and orders, they don't know where to start in terms of finding that sort of talent, and a consultant is a far, far safer option for realizing their goals. The realization of a goal holds nontrivial value, which is what a consulting firm is billing them for.
Could they do it cheaper? Yes, absolutely, but, they'd also need to get lucky, and, understandably, luck isn't really something most successful businesses are willing to leverage.
> 2. Doing a bunch of pretend work so you can come to the conclusion the VP wanted in the first place.
I was once a contractor at a company that had been acquired twice. The Finance lead all off a sudden had a big team of people, and he lacked the imagination to use them effectively. His team were a waste of space. His solution was to hire a consultancy to 'benchmark' the size of the Finance team. Guess what they found...all of the acquired people had to go!
I felt he lacked the backbone to just make a decision himself.
>Eventually, you look back at your career and notice nothing you've ever worked on made a difference to anybody. The paycheck is nice, but there are other places to get one just like it.
Can't tell you how much motivation was lost after seeing my billed rate to a client vs. what the consultancy was paying me. They should bill higher than what they pay me for sure, but 6 times my rate? I was only doing the bare minimum after seeing that.
It's amazing how much money there is to be made in simply using up someone's budget in a way that's "good enough" so they can keep that money next year.
The same holds for marketing and advertising, which makes sense if you consider an agency to be a consultancy.
The pattern I've seen repeated everywhere: A genuinely knowledgeable expert sells their expertise via online content, books, and seminars. This attracts the clients. The expert will attend a few key client meetings. But then, unbeknownst to the client, they disappear and leave the work to juniors.
This is so ubiquitous that, earlier this year, I decided to change my career aspirations. I'd long wanted to be an agency leader, but the pattern above was repeated at every successful agency I came across, and it's not something I can stomach any longer.
So, I decided to put myself out there as the expert. I write a newsletter. I published a book. I'm pursuing speaking engagements. Just like the other consultants do.
However, I don't pass my clients onto anyone else. They're hiring me. They were sold on my expertise, so my expertise is what they're going to get.
When a project grows too big for one person to handle, or when there are aspects of the work that don't justify my high hourly rate, I transparently inform my clients of my intention of bringing on freelancers for those aspects. It's all done out in the open.
And while I do charge a markup on the work my subcontractors do on my behalf, it works out to far less than my hourly rate, and my clients are fully aware of the markup being charged and what value I'm providing in return (i.e.: supervision).
All of which is to say: I think consultants can provide incredible value. (I know, I know... a consultant who believes on consulting. Shocking!) But you do have to be careful, and oddly enough, the bigger and more reputable the consulting firm, the less I would trust them. The business rewards bad players.
You're still overseeing other subcontractors. My next step is likely in a similar direction but I want to start out with a couple of former colleagues in more of a partnership role.
IMO being responsible for other people is tiring and unrewarding, I just want a structure to tackle interesting projects without a middleman.
Small consultants, like me, are a world apart from what is otherwise an accurate depiction of big consulting. My firm and many of my friendly competitors, work on specific questions or projects - do it cheaply, quickly and within scope.
Sometimes you need the resources size brings to the project, but absent mergers, migrations and enterprise software launches - small consulting is probably the better choice.
Also, the same can be said of big law and big accounting - albeit on the legal side senior partners often bring more value.
Small consultants can be worth their weight in gold, it's unfortunate the stereotypical experience with big firms colors the perception of the entire engagement model. Particularly for niches where you have no experience or existing best practices. Simply having someone in the room who has seen a half dozen solutions to XYZ and knows the common pitfalls is worth the cost, let alone the actual labor/execution.
This is absolutely true. I am essentially a graduate in a company of 5 people. I bring solid knowledge in data analysis and statistics but no expertise in air quality (our specialty). But with the guidance from those who are actual experts and my own skills we are providing real value and insight to clients. There’s no BS, we turn down clients or tell them they dont need more constantly.
I worked at an MBB for a few years. With CS background, mostly on digitalization topics.
Never before did I spend so much energy into truly trying to solve the problems our clients had. More than once, our recommendation was to go along with an idea that was already present within their organisation (presented sharply and as factual as possible).
But it also happened that we recommended going a completely different way to whatever their CEO, the VPs, middle managers or employees wanted, because we discovered they were so entrenched in their way of thinking. I am grateful to have had the privilege to do this work.
Every consulting experience ever:
They all work at “top” firms and have “elite” educations. All of them. Seeing it in this thread.
After we sign the contract, “the problem is far, far greater than we were led to believe, and the solution is more consulting.”
The HR solution is always the opposite of what we’re doing. Title drift? Reduce titles! College grads have same titles as seasoned veterans? More titles!
The operational solution is always the same bundle of crap they sell to everyone else, but they’ll tell you it’s custom. Good luck getting any fixes in a reasonable time frame or expense.
I am sure the authors contribution will be missed. ;)
1. Consultants form long-term support relationships out of necessity, as training existing staff without them leaving for higher paying positions is sometimes impossible. There is a wide set of circumstances that make this true.
2. Savvy people that "middleman" their services have already failed their integrity check. You can be sure a "Turtles All The Way Down" project plan will lead to cascade failure, or be resold into a dozen other firms within a year.
3. Risking any project above 12% of annual revenue means your company will likely be driven into the ground eventually (applies to both ends of the deal). Most probably still think that a company with a $7.4B market cap won't still try to short you the last installment after deployment... lol... most corporations put professional bandits to shame. IP theft, piracy, and blackmail... you may find international business is not for fools and or idealists.
4. posting 87.4% LLM machine learning garbage articles will potentially earn you a plagiarism copyright strike or worse
"Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." (George Carlin)
So after years of being an engineer there is a part of me that is entranced by the idea of being a quick talking, sharp suited business consultant. Anyone whose been one of those "management consultants" have any advice for moving from tech to get picked up by one of the big firms?
EDIT: As for the why, I've been working as an engineer at large organizations so long I figure it might be nice to be on the other side of the consulting table and be considered an "expert" instead of the obnoxious "human resource" constantly whining about obnoxious reality. It get's tiring, and it seems nice to be one of the slick suited bad guys.
It is only glamorous to other people. There is an enormity to being the Jon Hamm that takes a toll. You are playing an archetype in a three act play.
Being picked up by a big firm is easy, they are always hiring. Once you're in, you can pivot into the sales process, especially if you can hunt your own kills.
From what I know, they mostly hire people at select elite campuses who are graduating from either their bachelor's, MBA, or PhD program. They hold recruiting events and you show up.
I believe it's quite difficult to get in any other way, but I'd be curious if anyone knows people who were working at another job and simply applied and got interviewed and a job.
Look into “solution engineer”, sometimes called “sales engineer” or “pre-sales engineer”. They are often paired with a sales expert as their technical partner. There are often 1 solution engineer to 2-4 sales experts.
Solution engineers are often engineer / developers who are good at communicating, explaining, asking questions. Activities often involve “technical proof-of-concepts” (commonly called POCs), running trials and “bake offs” (for example comparing between competitors). SEs often work closely with product engineering - communicating customer requirements, figuring out how to integrate with a clients’s particular setup, hosting workshops & webinars, going to a clients HQ and whiteboarding solutions. Often 25% travel (1-2 days on site with local customers, and travel once a month by flight to spend time with a customer for workshop.) You are expected to keep your tech skills sharp. Some progressions of this role are called “Field CTO”. This person is often a domain + technology expert (eg eCommerce + cloud microservices).
One financial benefit of a SE role is that - being on the sales org of the company, you are on the revenue generating side - not a cost center. Quality of life in the company can be nice because of that. Your compensation will often have a variable “bonus” to it - tied to the performance of the sales team (eg 25%+ of your total compensation).
If you know a piece of software, tool, or general domain, and you’re personally a big fan of them and use their software, that might be a good company to talk to about SE positions. Sometimes they might have a “developer advocate” role - which is someone who is also very plugged into the company’s customer / developers community.
If you’re interested in getting an SE job, one easy “cheat code” would be recording yourself doing “how to” on that company’s software, post to a youtube, and sharing it where customers are - might even be a subreddit you’re already in.
I saw a video where someone scanned thru months of a niche subreddit, found most common problems, and then made videos on how to solve those. Another idea is to use a tool like AnswerThePublic.com to find top questions related to a topic you know well (its based on search trends) - pick questions that are easy for you to answer, be prepared to see how crappy and annoying most videos are to solve that… then make your own video. Don’t want to get much into video on this thread, but Google Slides + OBS / simple 5 min how-to screenshare with decent audio would be better than 95% of the videos out there.
I’ve done this for awhile and happy to answer questions/ help out - worked at large cloud SaaS companies, and my clients are large well-known “Fortune 500” companies.
My career has bounced around from developer / architect / project manager / professional services (consultant) / customer success (technical account manager) / engineering product manager/ entrepreneur/ solution engineer and “fractional CTO” for startups.
Find someone in your network who already works there and get them to refer you for an open position.
Having been in the trenches of various startups and bigcorps, and having interfaced with multiple consultants along the way over the decades, there's an insidious pattern I've observed, especially over the last 10 years. Consultants, no matter how polished their decks or refined their methodologies, often seem to be selling a form of abstracted advice. They've taken a page out of the growth hacker / patrick mckenzie playbook, but without the authenticity nor the qualifications to back up their advice: commoditizing broad-strokes strategies and repackaging them for a premium.
And there's the glaring detachment from day-to-day operations. Consultants offer overarching guidance while skipping the nuance
There's also this consistent overemphasis on bigcorp-style "best practices" checklists. In the world of startups, where innovation and disruption are celebrated, these canned best practices can be the antithesis of genuine growth. As someone smarter than me once said, startups flourish not by following the well-trodden path, but by blazing their own.
Perhaps most frustrating about consultants is the temporal nature of their involvement. The transient "parachute in, advice, parachute out" / garbage in - garbage out strategy leaves startups grappling with the real-world implementation of sometimes nebulous strategies, and many organizations in utter shambles if allowed to run amoc
To be clear, i'm not branding all consultants under this shadow, and this might be a bit harsh after some recent negative experiences. There are some genuinely talented individuals doing consulting work and some who genuinely add value. But the increasing commoditization of startup advice and the corporatization of the field, where every consultant seems to have a canned playbook, does make one wonder: at what point does advice become noise?
Also, for those who've found genuine value in consultants or who haven't noticed these trends I described, would love to hear your counterpoints. Maybe I am just stuck on the dark side of the moon
We worked with a McKinsey consultant not too long ago, seemed like a nice fella.
Didn't say much, mostly showed up and took notes during meetings (typical vague "digital transformation" project from the executives).
Probably cost a fortune, despite being the youngest in the room.
If you found out who is father was and where he was from I'm sure it'd make perfect sense.
This is Big 4 consulting at it's finest. I saw Accenture and McKinsey fleece a lot of big companies and government agencies with these tactics. Some were downright underhanded and deceitful.
There is also a world of actual expert consulting. I worked in this space for a long time and while we definitely sniffed for opportunities to increase our scope we mostly did it by building reputation and delivering exceptional work. It's really, really hard to tell the difference from a pitch though.
Neither Accenture nor McKinsey are Big 4. The Big 4 are PwC, EY, KPMG, and Deloitte. Despite what the name suggests they aren’t actually the top consulting firms (the name comes mostly from their accounting work.The three consulting firms, at least in terms of cost/prestige, are McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (MBB for short).
Consultants very, very rarely bring any genuine novel insight. In my experience, their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful: they navigate sclerotic bureaucracies, locate the people who know the answer, and then present the answer to decision-makers in a way that cuts through organizational politics and saves executive face.
Small orgs don’t need consultants. Not because they can’t afford them, but because small orgs don’t have the dysfunctional communication patterns of large orgs, which is the prime driver of demand for consultants.
The client already has the answer within their possession. The client should already be able to surface that answer and execute on it. But they just can’t. They are institutionally incapable of finding the already-existing answer within themselves.
The old adage says the consultant will borrow your watch to tell you the time. This quip masks the fact that clients don’t know how the big hand relates to the little hand, or where their watch is located.
Very spot on — consultants are able to navigate the bureaucratic structure within an organisation to deliver work that the orgnaisation cannot navigate itself.
I've worked a decade in technology consulting. 10 years ago the client had no idea what they needed — apps, e-commerce, digital self-service were all new concepts. Now, organisations are already equipped with smart people who know the answer — but sometimes you just need to catalyse change when you can't do yourself.
The existence of consultancies, or agencies in the creative/marketing side for that matter, isn't a failure of an organisation — not always at least. Sometimes its simply becasue the organisation has created a structure which works very well in one set of circumstances and very poorly in others.
(There is a reason why big tech, for all its expertise, has a roster of outside ad agencies who do development and deployments of their non-core services ... it's just faster to have agencies do web dev than setting up internal teams. You get a few agency devs set up on google3, and you've got yourself a billable pipeline...)
Only had to do it a few times, but exactly my experience. The main one was spending ~3 months and speaking to ~40 people in order to write 2 rest APIs in about 300 python LoC.
It was a minor integration between 4 different services owned by different groups, with no one knowing anything about any system/functionality outside a very small slice of the domain they controlled. At best they could point me to another person to ask, with every question taking a minimum of three levels of indirection to resolve.
They were fully aware of the situation too; utterly shocked we managed to close it out in those 3 months. They had more than enough software developers and knowledge to do it themselves — my only value add was piercing the veil, navigating through all their compartmentalized knowledge to get a straight answer
After being on the inside and outside. Can confirm.
For decades on the inside I was pissed that we paid consultants since we already knew what to do.
Now being a consultant. I see this is true. The main thing we bring is just aggregation and bodies. (and someone to blame). But hate being apart of it. Really the customers should staff up some and do their own internal consulting.
Large corporations should just die, they are not efficient, not innovative, they are just a large pooling of capital that takes on its own life and feeds on humans.
The entire system is MOLOCH.
As a former McKinsey consultant this is very true. Most of the time the work was just cutting through the bureaucracy, interviewing people, getting all the data, synthesising it and present it back.
To be fair though, once in a while there were some cases where a client genuinely did not have the required expertise in house or needed a solution quicker than their in-house teams could deliver.
Strongest defense of consulting I've read
I also think any “Mechanical Turk but we need over-achieving Ivy League educated 25 year olds to actually do it” tasks are also very well served by consultants.
Conducting surveys, combing through massive data, etc.
I agree with most of your points, and would like to point out that the “client” is not a single person or organism, but just a lot of people. Just as the internet already contains all the answers in it, you might need a search engine (or LLM) to find them. Crawling the web or the org is grunt work that you might have no time for.
> their prime contribution is simultaneously their most cynical and most useful: they navigate sclerotic bureaucracies, locate the people who know the answer, and then present the answer to decision-makers in a way that cuts through organizational politics and saves executive face.
Is this not a description of a successful middle manager inside the org as well?
I am a software "consultant". In reality, I just end up an FTE on a project for 2-4 years. Definitely self-complimenting, but that's what happens if you actually do your job until the company grows enough to finally replace your team with 10 teams.
Using consultants as a potential fall guy for some big and risky initiative is extremely common in my experience.
There's a lot of negativity in this article and the comments. I'm married to an almost-partner at a prestigious consulting firm and they truly do care about their clients and has genuinely solved a lot of problems for them--well into their 30s I will add! So clearly the advice here is to only hire good ones, say maybe my spouse? ;)
As a solo consultant this doesn't resonate so much. Isn't it like everything else that you can just look if they come in a suit or birkenstock? You cross polinate a bit from other succesfull places but mostly just work hard, play nice and have a more benefitial tax situation.