[vismwasm]

"2. We provide a voice for the technical working teams."

This doesn't correspond to my experience. In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions - on the contrary a major incentive for going into (strategy) consulting appears to be to able to deal with C-suite executives directly and not having to care about understanding any of the day-to-day business.

It usually goes like this: The CEO, a former McKinsey partner, hires McKinsey to formulate a strategy for the company: Often on a trending topic like digitalization, AI, etc. The details are usually confidential so there's no involvement of lower-level employees (maybe providing some data but without any context as to why). After a few months of utter secrecy management presents some transformation strategy.

I have yet to meet a normal employee to respect what comes from McKinsey. The average strategy consultant will look down on lowly employees and prefer to have as little interaction with them as possible.

"I have a PhD in computer science from a T1 university"

Why is the "tier" of your university important here? Not trying to offend you, but that kind of elitism is part of the reason consultants have a bad reputation. And unfortunately it is reflected in their work.

[throwaway1281]

> In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions

This is certainly not my experience. Sure, we might not be talking to every entry-level employee (we'll interview some of them if need be), but we definitely talk to all levels of managers. The normal meeting cadence is 2-3x "touchpoints" with working teams and one "steerco" (C-suite) meeting every 2 weeks to update them on progress. We usually get a team room on client site, so pretty much everybody is aware that we are there, and we are more than happy to have a coffee with you anytime. (If you ask and they say no, that is kind of a red flag IMO.)

It sounds like the projects you have seen would be CEO-level secrets regardless of McKinsey's involvement. But I personally never had a project on e.g., digitalization or AI that doesn't pull in the relevant non-C-suite stakeholders of the client.

> Why is the "tier" of your university important here?

I made the point just to provide a counterexample to the notion that consultants don't have technical depth. Of course this is not always true - we all operate outside of our expertise area at some point; I had to learn the steel industry from scratch in 2 weeks for a client - but I just wanted to show that some of us do bring considerable technical expertise, not an MBA.

[sevagh]

>we definitely talk to all levels of managers.

Consider how much of HN are individual contributors, not managers. So, you don't talk to those minions.