throwaway202212's comments

By first hand I mean you're the executive paying the bill and understand the motives behind hiring a consulting firm and the incentives such a firm is working under for the client. I'm doubtful most here have that experience (I certainly never did in 20 years of industry before joining a consulting firm). Having McKinsey or BCG walking around your office and telling you what to do is not first hand experience in my opinion.

I'm trying to offer a unique opinion of a software engineer who spent a short time working in this industry. If you're not buying it then no problem.

Personally, I would never invite McKinsey or any of these companies into my own company. But then again I don't run a 100k person company.

Apologies, "in my opinion and limited experience" it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

I'm not legally literate enough to understand the court opinion you attached. Regardless, of course there will be cases of bad players in any large company - that goes without saying. But its tiresome always hearing the same "McKinsey is the root of all evil and secretly influences governments and companies".

The opinion that most engineers have of MBB is often based on conjecture as they typically have only ever hard arms length exposure to such consulting firms. As a software engineer myself, working at both startups and FAANG before McKinsey, I was of the exact same opinion about McKinsey and these types of companies. The truth is much more mundane and boring though.

I worked in McKinsey Digital. Here's an example of the typical type of project we did:

- Client is a legacy bank

- Client wants to be a fancy new cool digital bank like Revolut

- Client brings in McKinsey to help get them there

- McKinsey (traditional side) does a strategy engagement first (4-8 weeks) to define priorities, budget, etc

- McKinsey Digital + traditional consultants come in to do the implementation. This includes architecture, actual tech building (more on this below), assisting with hiring and HR, coaching, financials, integration/de-integration with rest of business. Essentially everything involved with starting a "new" business.

If you want a single company to come in and literally do everything to build and run a new business I do think you would need an MBB-type company as they can bring in all these different skills (business, people, tech, process etc). I'm very reluctant to praise my former employer.

On the actual tech building side, McKinsey would typically bring only 1-3 technical people as it's cost prohibitive for the client (I was one of those people). McKinsey would help the client hire new people or bring in contractors (i.e. Nagarro and the likes).

Fully agree with this. That being said, a lot of companies are wising up to this and forcing consultancies to work "fees at risk" - where they are only paid based on some measurable success metric.

There are obviously lots of hacks and shenanigans around defining and negotiating these success metrics with various "levels" [1] of impact being defined and fees being released only when some stage is crossed.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/rts/our-insights/keepi...

It's fair to say my view would be biased. But probably not in the direction you would think.

I think we need to be more critical of what it means to see things "first hand". MBB are typically operating at the executive level and the motivations between executives decisions typically don't reach the "rank and file" of the organization (forgive the wording). In my response I mentioned that the cost of engaging McKinsey is so extremely high that there will need to be some type of rational justification for bringing them in (beyond just covering my ass).

That being said, I worked on a few projects where I wasn't sure whether the cost justifies the benefits but this was largely due to incompetence or overselling - never "pure graft".

Building a digital bank for farmers in Africa. Was all text-based (USSD) and for those without phones we used NFC key fobs. Several million DAUs within a year.

In my opinion, there will always be a need for large companies to bring in outside help to get very specific things done (largely due to their size and dysfunction). MBB are smart enough to generally move where help is wanted. Just in my time there I saw them hugely lean in to big data, design, cloud, AI etc. And when they invest they go big.

That being said I personally would never bring in MBB for a purely technical implementation project. Way too expensive and the value is not there right now.

I can only obviously speak to my own experience and I did not come across anything like this. There's no love lost between me and my former employer FWIW.

That's interesting. I'm curious to know how the internal sponsor of the project sold it internally. It generally takes a lot of motivation to convince your superior (and finance team) to pay the millions McKinsey would charge per week.

At the micro level, I would agree that in some cases there was a tendency of some to make things more complex than necessary. The implicit intent here was generally to demonstrate some type of credential to lay people.

That being said, at least in my personal experience, most of the actual recommendations were backed by as much data as possible. In the projects I worked on, I don't think a single slide went by without hours of debate and critique by the partners. It was a given that any recommendation should be supported by data.

That being said, there are also lots of cases where there is no right/wrong answer - especially given the timeframe (typically 4-8 weeks). Companies basically pay consultants to come in, analyse as much data as feasible and just make some type of informed decision. In most cases the company is either unwilling to make that decision themselves or does not have the ability to do so (i.e. organisation is too complex to tackle this problem within so just get an outsider to cut across the company and get it sorted as best as possible).

This really sounds like a conspiracy theory. That being said, McKinsey (and presumably BCG and Bain) very much embrace their employees leaving to join their clients. It creates a good "referral" network if you will. But more than that, I don't buy it.

Running agile in a small team is one thing, having a company do "agile at scale" is quite another (yes I realise the contradiction in terms). As someone who worked at McKinsey, on several large scale "agile" rollouts the bulk of the work was on re-organising the company (this is not an easy thing to do in companies with thousands of employees - hence bring in the consultants). The driver behind these projects was almost always cost cutting or increasing efficiency. The agile part was mostly window dressing.

Accenture aren't even in the Vault Consulting Top 50 rankings. I don't know how this list is calculated but people in consulting tend to refer to this (I used to work at MBB).

Former McKinsey employee here. They have a large office in Silicon Valley and serve most of the big tech companies (largely on boring non-tech topics).

I also worked at McKinsey. 5 years, with some of that time in the Johannesburg office. Agree with the above and don't have much to add. But AMA.