pembrook

No they're not.

McKinsey would like you to think otherwise of course. They paint a brand image of only doing high-end C-suite strategy work, but ultimately thats a vanishingly small part of the business. Their bread is buttered (just like Accenture) on labor heavy implementation gigs.

Fundamentally, the business of billing out human hours is the same, as are the the incentives. Doesn't matter if its a strategy consulting firm in NYC or an advertising agency in Nepal.

They will all inflate scope, inflate titles/rates, hire mostly cheap new grads, and slowroll-and-expand any engagement.

And they will all take ANY work you give them, regardless of in-house expertise (which they rarely have, given the goal is to pay employees as little as possible to capture margin).

The advertising agency in Nepal will claim to offer strategy consulting to your C-suite, just as McKinsey NYC will happily churn out a powerpoint deck about advertising in Nepal if you're willing to pay them.

Hence why professional services firms all trade at low multiples. It's an undifferentiated commodity business of re-selling human labor in project-based chunks.

It sounds like you're agreeing with my point; good people do good work, the brand name on the invoice billing you for their time is irrelevant.

That said, I would be highly skeptical of any 'very experienced systems engineer' who took a job at a glorified post-collegiate body shop like McKinsey. At least in the US, given all the opportunities available, it means something has gone horribly wrong (EU/ex-US might be different given it's a dead zone for tech).

This is a tell you haven't interfaced with consulting firms much before.

When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:

"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."

There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.

It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.

Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.

What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.

- no workflow-specific application will ever scale as fast as demand for generalized intelligence

- nobody knows how the market for workflow-specific applications will settle once AI fully penetrates the economy over the next 20 years and what will be left and what feature groupings make sense. Tons of money will be lost trying to figure this out

- applications that target specific workflows are already packed with competitors with a highly tailored distribution strategy for that market who you would need to beat, vs owning a fast growing new category (LLMs)

- it’s very likely the real money will not be made by disrupting software (sub-2% of the economy), it will be made by disrupting other much larger industries

- everybody said the same thing about Google and yet Google quickly topped out as far as how many products they could execute well, now they can’t even stay competitive on AI, the larger the surface area of a company, the more diluted its focus and the more surface area where it can be disrupted

Yes they do if you operate a massive national chain and would like to minimize deadly health incidents due to avoidable human error.

Europe doesn't need to continue using fax machines and bury its head in the sand.

There's also the option to adopt digital technology and just not be an idiot about it this time since the price of intelligence is now effectively 0.

Or, France can continue preventing any productivity increases from technology and watch its social systems continue to collapse.

If it were just a phase out vs. a more aggressive ban do you think this funny HN hypocrisy would suddenly not exist?

Comments would be the same.

HN Headline: Europe dumps US & Chinese tech in key area

HN Response: Fantastic! EU is amazing! Sovereignty over all else!

---

HN Headline: US dumps Chinese tech in key area

HN Response: Booo evil USA! Evil Big Tech! Regulatory capture!!

Yea the evil capitalists are the problem!

Video games are definitely an essential need for the modern leftist internet incel, so to allow capitalists to risk time and money producing games you can choose to voluntarily play, and then allow them to charge rents in exchange for you voluntarily playing their games....well that's the definition of criminality!

The government should seize the video game means of production and all video games should be government produced. Quality will definitely go up, not down, the more the government starts meddling in this highly essential market. There's zero downsides to weaponizing the guys with guns to write laws that disincentivize the creation of the thing you want created, rent control works amazing every time.

Switzerland is an okay counter-example I'd say, Singapore not as much since their 'guest workers' aren't real immigrants and get NONE of the social benefits/housing that Singaporeans get. Very very few people become proper immigrants (full residents) to Singapore.

The real problem with both Switzerland and Singapore examples though, they're small tax havens full of rich people.

Kind of like Monaco...which surprise...is actually 70% immigrants!

But when the counter examples are Singapore, Switzerland and Monaco...I think we both have to be honest and look at what we're actually measuring ("the global super rich are higher trust regardless of country of origin").

Finding exceptions doesn't disprove the correlation.

I accept your surrender.

If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.

Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.

Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.

Singapore is just further evidence of my statements being true.

They also brutally enforce social norms and anti-drug policy, and in 2025 they had a total of 35K people granted permanent residency (in a country of 6M people).

In Singapore you're confusing temporary foreign workers with true immigration. In fact Singapore is an extremely low immigration country.

None of these foreign workers qualify for Singapore's public housing or healthcare for example.

I'm pro immigration and left-leaning, but I don't disagree with the right wingers that ethnic homogeneity leads to higher social trust (many studies have demonstrated this). I prefer having immigration though.

Care to offer a rebuttal to any of my statements?

Would love to hear you destroy me with superior logic and/or educate me where I'm wrong.

Or we can just stick to attacking me personally because what I've said makes you emotionally upset.

I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.

This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."

Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.

This is not intended as rage bait, I am again just distilling marketing language to reality.

If you don't pay the money your government decides you owe them, they will arrest you and put you in prison if you do not comply in virtually all countries. This is fact, not emotional language.

And yes, I fully acknowledge that authoritarian centralization can achieve the most efficient outcomes in certain areas (like infrastructure, military, utilities, etc).

But let's not lie to ourselves and pretend the government is not a giant monopoly that forces you to buy its products at gunpoint whether they are good or not. Allowing too much % of the GDP be captured by this monopoly, always ends in declining living standards, runaway debts, exit controls and ultimately collapse...every single time it has been tried.

HN doesn't need more pro-government voices, as it is already a a left-leaning audience. It needs the opposite, which I'm happy to calmly provide even if constantly being downvoted.

The seller does, because if the government removed that specific tax, it changes nothing about the market value of the home (competing buyers would also not have to pay that tax, buyer capacity to pay doesn't change either way).

Absent the tax, the seller would simply recoup more of the value of their property.

I think the confusion here is that there exists an economic truth, and then a separate and conflicting language/branding around this economic truth to make it more palatable to people having their money taken from them at gunpoint by the state.

I'm bringing up economic reality, you're rebutting this with the government marketing language.

Yes, I know 'employer contributions' is a clever trick to make people believe they aren't paying as much to government as they are, but in economic reality they are paying for this.

Ah yes, a red herring, plus my favorite HN hypocrisy, all in one comment.

The 'information wants to be free' crowd complaining about protecting intellectual property now that it threatens their income stream...has to give the patent trolls and the RIAA a delicious bit of schadenfreude.

I invented this react button style with 8px border radius, ChatGPT stole it from me, I want rents!

An economy “reliant on Neoliberal trade” just describes the entire global economy. Your quality of life goes back centuries in any other scenario.

The fact you’ve used the trendy populist boogieman word “neoliberal” and complained about a generational startup not being profitable during the growth phase tells me you watch a lot of internet content from people who don’t understand the topics they cover (breaking points perhaps?)

I would recommend re-evaluating who you borrow your opinions from. Global trade is not a boogieman, and OpenAI will have zero trouble building a profitable consumer advertising business, regardless of whether their IPO flops in the short term.

I agree, but my point is I don’t think we should be cheering on a group of 600 million highly educated people struggling to achieve the bare minimum.

We should be shaming them into contributing something useful to the rest of world in the most important development of our current time (AI) instead of clapping for domestic regulatory moats.

So we’re supposed to cheer on companies that make worse products and only exist due to regulatory capture now?

Political polarization is turning the world insane.

I hire people remotely throughout Europe. When we budget for a hire we look at the all-in labor expense, not the persons salary. If the German government didn’t charge us before we even pay the employee, we would just pay it all to the employee.

So it’s a tax he pays whether you want to “brand” it that way or not. Who gets the money changes nothing about our budget for the role.

Sovereignty over what though?

The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course.

But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed.

It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage.

Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist.

Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.

Good to know, will exclusively move to Chinese models for non-coding tasks.

The idea that producing text with AI needs to be watermarked as if it's a crime by default is backwards nonsense.

To me this would actually be a counter signal.

If you're NOT primarily writing with AI (at least mildly being informed by all of human knowledge distilled), then I will assume your ideas are emotional opinion-based nonsense, like most comments on hackernews, including my own.

Sorry, you’re the one who is misguided here.

Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.

Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?

The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.

Due to cultural/social priming, the topic cluster of "AI" allows you to wave your arms and be melodramatic and invoke science fiction and religion and philosophy.

When some kid in Nigeria does it with a 10 year old script, we're used to that idea so no social permission to invoke philosophy.

Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.

It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”

No it didn’t, they left information publicly accessible and somebody accessed it.

It appears politicians and the media are using the priming of the Hugging Face story to manufacture alarmist narratives to serve their interests now.

Remember, politicians want you scared so they can capture more power, the media wants you scared so you keep giving your eyeballs for harvesting and buying subscriptions.

No OpenAI did not hack or “breach” Australian medicare. Nor did anybody else. This entire alarmist discussion thread is based on a false premise and clickbait title.

They posted information publicly accessible to even Google and somebody found it. That’s it.

Can you articulate those differences?

Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.

Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.

True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).

The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.

There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.

Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.

The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.