Comment by MPSFounder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MPSFounder | Hacker News Reader

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Author is not consistent. He mentions in 25 cases, the firm hiring McKinsey did not know the answer beforehand. Yet, Leap is based on firms already knowing the answer. The reason McKinsey is hired is to avoid internal conflicts over which manager takes the reigns. I doubt McKinsey is providing solutions to these industries (as in, introducing a product that was not pitched internally by someone already. In fact, in most cases, a manager will pitch the solution and McKinsey's job is purely finding the right managers to leave this internal "startup" to). Should that be the case, I would love to be proven wrong. However, every consultant I had met is no engineer or tech leader. They are merely consultants, restructuring the answers in ways that avoid conflicts within established giants. Most of them are Ivy League graduates that never worked in the technical field (got hired at Bain or McKinsey fresh out of school). Often we would make up stacks to demonstrate how ignorant they can be of technology. Managers and business people love McKinsey. As an engineer, I have not met any tech founder or technical engineer that esteemed the field (just listen to Steve Jobs' opinion on consulting). I attribute the mess that Google is under Sundar to McKinsey (not even mentioning the Opioid crisis where their hands are stained too). The redeeming factor is the author describes them as the enemy and is at least honest about his reasons for joining (stability and established resume name)

As having been through consulting a little bit, I can confirm that most of the times you pay a very expensive price for inexperienced and incompetent consulting work most of the time.

It is not malevolence but more a deficiency by design. First as you said, most consultants are not real "leaders" or "tech leaders" and when you start to get experience, you leave consulting or you raise the hierarchical ladder to become a more senior manager, that spend more time finding contracts, negotiating, dealing with the customer proposals and renewal than doing the actual job.

In the end, you have juniors that are doing the tasks pretending to be sector experts or like the guy in the article, you are propulsed "CEO" of the big entity of a big corp just after 4 or 5 years of basic consultant experience, not even having worked in real non-conducting job.

In the end, when you buy a mission to such a firm, most of the cost goes to structural costs and daily rate of a chain of useless parasitic executives like directors, executive partners, vice president, that will spend 10 minutes per month reviewing slides on the project. The consulting doing the job will be paid at most the double of what a good freelance can expect.

And regarding the spirit, the fun thing is that even when you do bad or evilish things, there is kind of a mental block brain process that makes you truly believe that you are doing an useful and much needed work. Despite it not the case.

In my own case, often I had this bad feeling deep in. A background that a customer that we were negotiating a mission for millions, could have just hired a decent developer for just a few thousands euros and have quite profited from a most good and successful system.

But like, in Matrix, when you are inside the system, it is hard to consider things outside the box.

In the same way that again in the example of the blog post, I'm quite sure that the big company would been able to find hundreds of existing employees that would have fitted the bill well and better for a lot cheaper.

"As an engineer," you've probably yet to realize "technical cofounder" is p97 a polite way to say "second-class citizen." You get more equity than a "founding engineer," I hope. So there's that.

Here's a tip to every reader. If your founders or co-founders are not technical (and never have been) and are pitching stacks using buzzwords, run. Equity is worthless if the startup goes under

Here's another. Exit and product are totally orthogonal.

I would rather work for someone honest than for a bullshit artist. But I wouldn't necessarily decline to work for the world's best bullshit artist. Just that you want to be very sure you know who at the table is the sucker.

Non-technical folks (business/marketing/artistic/bullshit types) can be founders of tech companies, but there needs to be significant tech prescence at the top. I think as a general rule, at least a third of the equity needs to be devoted to technical folks if the company wants to succeed.

Ideally you get someone whose good at both, or at least competent at one and really good in the other, such as Jobs or Gates.

The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leadership consists of Cook, Luca, Schiller, Eddy Cue, Williams, Ternus and Craig (they are the ones that effectively make the big decisions). Craig and Ternus are the only "engineers", and neither of them have been engineering first. This is not a founders story, but I am trying to highlight how non-technical folks will put in the decision making seat non-technical folks, which will harm your product in the long run. You can be the best engineer out there. If you report to someone who holds the reigns and is not technical, you are facing a tough road. Of course, there will be exceptions. However, this is rather the norm, and in startup culture, where the odds are already stacked against you, I'd advise against it.

Actually, this is wrong depending on the company and what the specific situation is.

Look at DEC, a classic engineering company failure. DEC failed because they were led by engineers who didn't understand the market. It apparently was a great place to work, because they were so NIH that they built everything from scratch.

Then look at Intel, a company that is in the process of failing because they listened to their customers too much. None of their customers wanted GPUs, or mobile chips, or power savings - until they did. By that time Intel was already behind the curve.

Then look at Microsoft under Ballmer - a company that probably illustrates the point you're trying to make. But then they won with Nadella, luckily.

Apple is a bit different and a bad example because unlike other companies they attempt to define the future. Most companies aren't in a position to try, much less succeed, at this.

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