[jamiegreen]

Don’t underestimate the ass covering.

I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction

[corysama]

The more expensive the cover the better.

“I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?”

There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear.

[matheusmoreira]

> their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear

Sounds like an extremely nice job.

[acover]

Do you have a link? I can't find it.

[pydry]

Yeah, I think that's the majority of the grunt work done by junior consultants.

I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.

[ghaff]

There's a lot of boilerplate that actually takes quite a while to write from scratch. If the people involved have a pretty good idea in their heads of what fundamentals are fairly sensible and which are probably sort of irrelevant or even wrong, something like ChatGPT is actually pretty good at churning out at least a decent pre-draft that can save quite a bit of time. I've used it a fair bit for introductory background that I can certainly clean up faster than I could put together from scratch.