[spicebox]

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

[ghaff]

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.

[frognumber]

I would recommend a good psychic for this -- someone skilled at cold reading. You will receive even better validation and a similarly reliable "external sanity check."

If I were in Europe, I'd leave it at that. For the Americans, it's important to dot the i's and cross the t's, so: An art of the industry is telling people what they want to hear. That gets you hired again. Consultants are no good as an external sanity check.

They are great for taking the blame for decisions you had planned on making.

[classichasclass]

We had a McKinsey consultant team at a large governmental agency I was contracted to as an SME. Scope creep was a daily threat with them; they were always trying to get into another subline in the business and set up a new basecamp there as work faded elsewhere. The worker bees were earnest but had little or no domain-specific experience, and worked off obviously pre-fabricated steps that were carefully calibrated to emit "just enough" progress -- but not too quickly. I remember advising higher-ups we needed to get off that train, but the problem was the agency was far too shorthanded and relied on them for even basic operational tasks instead of higher-level conceptual ones, thus making them essential, and their management almost certainly knew it. I moved onto another opportunity and I have no doubt they're still there in some capacity.

[squirrel6]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Agree with this last paragraph 100% — I would also highlight that part of the value consultants provide is in helping senior management cut through politics to actually solve problems and encourage cross-functional cooperation.

[jeron]

>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?"

[simmonmt]

The value is that (ideally) they've asked around and figured out how half a dozen peer firms do what you're struggling with. So while they may not have solved your management problem personally, they can give you an idea of what's worked for your peers without all the icky industrial espionage and antitrust violations you'd need to find it out yourself.

[neilv]

I had a similar reaction, the first time I heard a graduating CS undergrad say that they were going into management consulting: "But you don't know anything yet..."

But I guess it's not that different from the new grads who are instantly called Software Engineers.

Some percentage will rise to quality work, through mentoring&training, effort, and experience... and quickly earn the title.

And some percentage will go through the motions... and still get paid lots of money.

[cm277]

Consultants are software engineers for human software, i.e. how a business runs itself. Just like software engineering, there are best practices, state-of-the-art, ways to pass on knowledge from seniors to juniors, etc. Just like software there are company 'assets' (the source code repository) with past cases, problems that were solved and how (or not solved and why not), etc. They are very similar businesses actually that just scale differently: consulting scales worse than software but at much lower risk as all 'development' is funded (typically mostly by the first customer than partially by N+1).

Source: 25 years as a consultant...

[spicebox]

In defense of consulting the “sales pitch” on consulting is that the people on top, the partners and managers, have the industry experience to guide the more junior employees who don’t have experience but have good analytical skills. How true that is is up to interpretation but that’s the steel man version

[faster]

A friend of mine who worked as a very high level consultant for years once said that consultants are often wrong, but never in doubt. Having just graduated doesn't really change that dynamic, as long as you have the confidence to pull it off.

[DrBenCarson]

The idea is they reduce problems to conceptuals. You don’t need experience, and in fact industry or specific experience is often a hindrance, to solving conceptual problems.

They do this many times a year (see: young people working crazy hours). Pattern recognition develops. They now lead 20-somethings doing this work.

The idea that age == competence is a bad one IMO.

[chiefalchemist]

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.

[jncfhnb]

Mostly this. Whenever you hear someone say “I’ve been telling them to do X for years”, you have to keep in mind that the value of the consultant is not to come up with the idea to do X, but to tell them to listen to you.

[patja]

Lots of Fortune 500 to 1000 companies lack the ability to recruit the best and brightest. And mostly they don't really need them. But when they do, consultants offer a ready made solution to get a project done.

[meetingthrower]

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.

[spicebox]

Like most good satire it’s based on reality

[whimsicalism]

> This is the humor page at the end of the economist.

Isn't this just a Bartleby article? Their column on management

[refurb]

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.

[conductr]

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).

[smokefoot]

The more expensive the services, the less likely you are to get a bid in this format.

[squirrel6]

In reality, we would usually take the value-based fee (how much we think it’s worth) and then allocate it down to scope bullets, which are also usually very vague.

[thenewarrakis]

>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.