[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.

[throwaway1281]

We - or, at least, people in the projects that I've been in - most certainly talk to anyone who can provide valuable input to the question at hand. That being said, it's impossible for us to know which individual contributors are relevant to a project - it's up to their manager to pull them in (we encourage them to do so). Just need a cc on an email and we'll handle the rest.