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I've also interviewed many consultants over the years. It strongly depends on what you are interviewing them for. If you want people with deep industry expertise and a strong fit for a fairly narrow role, then yes of course the consulting kids are going to suck. If you want people who can learn quickly and look more broadly than a specific department to do things like strategic or financial planning then consultants can be a good fit.

These kinds of consultants have the same issue as LLMs: they say the maximally plausible thing without knowing (or necessarily caring) if what they are saying is actually true.

I don't think strategy advice is worth much unless it's coming from people who stuck around and lived with the consequences (i.e, tested their ideas against reality).

>and look more broadly than a specific department to do things like strategic or financial planning then consultants can be a good fit.

I disagree with this, but I definitely understand your argument. I just don't see how someone who oscillates back and forth from various clients, even if they're all in the same industry, can get enough deep background to be able to coherently make recommendations about business strategy.

I'm so proud of my decision making when I was younger to avoid this path though it was considered an elite path

I am grateful for McKinsey and BCG because when I dropped out of my postdoc in 2009 and was looking for a job, I went to probably 20 or 30 of their lunch events at Wharton where I absolutely stuffed myself and my pockets, despite having no intention whatsoever of joining them.

> and my pockets

Do they give money out at these lunches??

No I mean I literally stuffed my coat pockets with food! Sandwiches, fruit, cheese especially.

Oral defense season was always a good way to get ahead, financially. You do get sick of pizza, though.

Perfect job-seeker frame of mind. Completely relaxed and having a good time. At worst, you're making other candidates look less weird!

> It's funny, when I was in business school years ago (please forgive me) getting a job at McKinsey or BCG was more or less the crème de la crème of post-MBA gigs.

Still is though right? Just now you have enough experience to be wise enough to know what is important.

What exactly should replace them? I am not aware of any reasonably comparable competition.

Any degree besides MBA.

How do you get practical experience out of that?

McKinsey is sweatshop but with good pay. The work conditions are atrocious and they grind through naive young people like Verdun.

Some people have argued on HN that the consultants are cya and political support for things the management class allready know they want. That seem about right.

>> consultants are cya and political support for things the management class allready know they want. That seem about right.

That is the most valuable job in virtually every profitable industries including tech.

It varies tremendously. Imo the people who have sweatshop experiences bring it upon themselves mostly.

I've always been unclear on this. Various careers are famed for extremely long hours, but I don't know just what it is they do for all that time. Consultants, financeers, etc.

I know that I have only so much brain power to spend a day. I can work longer, but at best you're going to get more grind, not quality.

I keep wondering if these consultants could accomplish as much in fewer hours if they weren't so intent on being the one who puts in so many hours.

I know almost nothing about what they do so I'm just guessing. But I find it hard to square so much effort with results that don't seem to merit it.

I am a McKinsey consultant, and I tend to think the people putting in those insane hours are shooting themselves in the foot.

It is easier to work longer hours when a hotel takes care of everything for you, but if you’re bragging about how little sleep you get you’re just teetering on the edge of burnout and American Psycho neuroticism.

There is a lot of work done that is effectively meaningless and doesn’t take a lot of brain power. Sliding things around a PowerPoint for example.

Sliding things around on a PowerPoint is a lot of nitpicky communication design thinking. It’s still draining.

I think many/most people who talk about working extreme long hours are posturing. They want to seem hardcore for the sake of career advancement, investors, etc.

What they really mean by 100 hours per week or whatever is that they respond to emails or chat on slack at all hours.

And while that's "working" in a way, it doesn't mean doing deep focused work for anything close to that number of hours. It just means they're on call, or else that work is their social life and they spend their free time chatting/hanging out with coworkers.

You can see this on social media with people who claim to work 100 hours and yet they clearly spend hours per day on twitter/instagram, go to the gym every day, go to parties, go on dates, travel, etc. The numbers obviously don't add up. I'd bet a lot of these people actually work less than the typical 9 to 5 engineer. It's more about being part of a sub-culture than anything else.

People who have actually worked crazy hours doing focused work like engineering for periods of time know that it's not sustainable long term. Your body and mind start failing you in various ways. Creativity and problem solving take a nose dive. You can do it for awhile but it becomes counter-productive before long.

Mm ye. I don't have first hand experience but two class mates and a friend that worked there gave the same picture.

They described it as up or out where you really have to grind long hours and the career is in sales and management not as a consultant really.

Not really what I meant. It is up or out, but I don’t really believe the long hours are an effective way to achieve the up. It’s just something a lot of people impose on themselves.

The sales and management part only really comes in after you’ve passed the team manager level which is fairly advanced.

> I don’t really believe the long hours are an effective way to achieve the up.

That is an interesting comment. I think you are right. Probably more of a baseline competency but extraordinary 'soft skills'?

I meant team manager as included in 'sales'. Where I've worked as consultant (warm body, not a real consultant) team managers were essentially sales people.

> Probably more of a baseline competency but extraordinary 'soft skills'?

And luck, tbh. It’s not too different from a typical org except career velocity is fairly fast and does not depend on vacancies opening up above you.

"Painting bullseyes around bullet holes" is the unofficial consultant motto.

I needed a reminder of this turn of phrase. Thank you.

Flanges up well after "Ready. Fire. Aim!"