This in a thread about McKinsey settling for over half a billion dollars over its role in causing the opioid crisis, which is just one of the many, many arrows in McKinsey’s “aiding and abetting horrible shit” quiver. This was literally a conspiracy and a scheme. On just the basis of “harm caused” alone, McKinsey is far from a normal company.
> The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.
It’s easy to sit here and talk shit about management consultants while forgetting that management consultants aren’t coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn’t the common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like McKinsey do is “parrot back something a lower level grunt already knows”? Someone at the company gave them every idea they’ve ever had, or so the argument goes.
They can’t both be totally useless mouth pieces while also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.
Anyway, the average company does all the stuff you don’t really think about like making pots, windows, staplers, hearing aids etc. It’s the extreme outliers that people talk about not the dozen small factories making decorative concrete flagstones, etc.
Look at it in tech: Some FB engineers are INCREDIBLY smart and good - but the, as you say, "diffuse harm" they do is still *harm*
FFS when I was at Lockheed and we got audited for SOX the execs were stealing stocks from the newer employees and giving those stocks to the execs
and the auditors, I think it was PWC, gave use a green passing grade and employees got fucked.
Some of the execs went on to Solyndra and we all know about how they stole 700 million from the USG...
(look at the SEC claims for Solyndra, where weeks before shutting their employees out without notice, they were giving out huge bonuses to execs and certain employees - e.g. they gave a $40,000 bonus to the IT manager that locked out all the accounts of employees)
Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....
Jesus. Hackernews is one hell of a website
And just as a small rebuttal: the small companies are usually owned by larger companies. So while they may not be "the company" people think of, they're still part of "that company." The connection is certainly just as direct as a McKinsey-client connection.
If you're ordering by importance, I 100% agree with "social media" being at the top of the list, and this almost cannot be emphasized enough.
I say almost because this article is about McKinsey and the role it played in the opioid crises. As an article it's also light on details, so I'm let down that I come to HN-- which is often great at filling in details-- and begin to read low-effort exchanges about the implications of someone's hair cut.
What do people know about McKinsey's relationship with Purdue in this case of pushing opioids into treatments where they didn't belong? I'd like to know more about that. And when I can blithely complain about the shit UX of a billion dollar company on HN and get a direct response from management, I'd expect information from PR nerds about McKinsey's role in the opioid crises and the ongoing lawsuits against them to flow to HN, too.
It isn't productive if we keep hop-scotching over the meat of every article to talk about some other hazard to society that isn't mentioned in the article. If that's going to be the flow then the next article that pops up about Google's monopolistic practices will instantly veer off into whatabout Visa/Mastercard's monopolistic practices, as it did before.
Edit: clarification
To everyone in this thread who has this overwhelming righteousness indignation about mckinsey - have any of you ever asked your elected representative about their view of the government’s responsibility for the opiate crisis? Would you ever vote differently based on the answers they give? Did any of the state attorney generals who are going after private companies ever do anything to stop the (federal) government encouraging the increased use of pain medication?
This is a classic example of unintended consequences by the government - the companies were just responding to the incentives the government created.
The article points to McKinsey's task to "turbocharge" opioid sales, for a company that sold them for "improper use." So there are obviously a few outstanding questions attorneys general are currently asking about what people at McKinsey knew from "listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings" on that campaign.
If you're simply saying that your day to day isn't that, point taken.
When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff done", and the result of this is massive profits with a secondary effect of death and destruction, then the consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but let me guess nobody goes to jail).
The consultant may have been hired only for the first part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The minute you understand the possible consequences of the things that you contribute to, you become partly responsible for it.
As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial crimes, or worse.
Turns out this isn't accurate. See https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-obey-a...
But as my detective work in the Yale Archives has revealed, in the filmed version of the experiment 65% of participants disobeyed. Yet Milgram edited his film to show the opposite: that two-thirds will do as they’re told.
See https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-m... for some of that replication data.
Not as bad as 65% but still pretty bad!
1) McKinsey is basically fraudulent and pretends to do things of value
2) McKinsey is a very bad and unethical firm
3) McKinsey masterminds the business world to enable (1) and/or (2)
The main bit of the subthread is about (1), but this response is about (2). All I have to say is that, yes, consultants should be aware that there are consequences to their actions like any other. I don't think that's in question. I'm not sure the stanley milgram experiments are especially relevant but sure.
Remember this one?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
> In an academic paper published in conjunction with two university researchers, the company reported that, for one week in January 2012, it had altered the number of positive and negative posts in the news feeds of 689,003 randomly selected users to see what effect the changes had on the tone of the posts the recipients then wrote.
> The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.
FB was trying to refute that, and their study was more technically rigorous, but the outcome they were measuring doesn't actually refute the original claim at all IMO. People writing more happy posts on FB does not indicate they are actually happier, it could also be that they wish to broadcast more of their happy moments, or perhaps even just pretend to be happier, in response to the attitude of their feed.
Generally, most of us in software can choose where to work. If we don't make this choice according to morals (whatever they may be) then we are less moral than ppl who don't have a choice, and those who have a choice and do consider it.
Is that a bad thing? Depending on which morality you subscribe to I guess....
*Not everything, which is a tad extreme, but certainly 95%+. But sometimes shocking statements are needed to jolt people into the reality that their work has positive/negative repercussions in the real world. We hold an arms manufacturer responsible for designing weapons of mass destruction, there's no doubt in anyone's mind that there is culpability.
Engineers who build addictive products fall into the same boat. But, but, but paycheque! is not an excuse. Has never been before, isn't now, nor will it ever be in the future. As builders, we are defined by what we build.
I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.
Does not sexy mean they are not willing to spend the tons of money they have on internal employees?
Consultants are easy to fire. Depending on the company's policies, local laws, and the internal politics of the organization, a 'real' employee may be a lot harder to get rid of. Consultants are also time/task limited (in theory), while a 'real' employee is not (again, in theory).
I'm a (supply chain) consultant which is similar and have a full time contract and full worker protections with my employer. Projects are sold on a fixed price basis, so there isn't anybody to fire - clients are buying the work output or report, not the person or set hours. Some projects are time & materials, but if the project gets cancelled I'm still getting paid - I have a full time contract.
As an example of the value prop - I come with information that your company doesn't necessarily have. Let's say you need to expand your existing (15 year old) miniload ASRS and are locked in with the incumbent provider - I know up-to-date market rates for miniloads and racking, and will be better able to credibly negotiate it down to market rates (particularly as I have probably done a project with the vendor before). I will also be better able to tell you if there is a better solution to expanding the ASRS because, while this is a '1 in 10' year activity for the client, this is what I do every day. Maybe they would be better putting some shuttles in a separate ASRS fed by the miniload because the actual bottleneck is throughput/accessions instead of storage, and their stock profile is different to what it was 15 years ago? They are better than me at running their warehouses, but (hopefully!) I'm better at specifying automation.
So that's the value proposition of consulting - you can get access to very specific expertise that you don't need for long. Most companies don't need a full time expert on specifying warehouse automation!
Not great links but you get the gyst...
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partn...
Consultants sell their time, so of course their time is marked up.
Most of the huge profits don't go to people like you, but there are huge profits.
The opioid crisis has caused untold suffering and death. The amount of money they were fined is a joke that couldn't make a tiny dent in what fixing this.
It's small enough that it it's unlikely to stop them being involved in something similar in future.
But it is a crime the company is responsible for that caused many people to die and become addicted to opioids.
You think Kim Jong Un walks among the people he starves to death on a daily basis in North Korea? No. He's too high up. He's in his palace in the capital and he doesn't even see the real state of his country. He just hears about it in reports and goes to do his day to day job like any other person in a company disconnected from the consequences of their actions.
Does this mean Kim Jong Un is not guilty? No. Not. at. all.
Does this mean McKinsey's is not guilty?
Does this mean you're not guilty?
Your statement ends up reading sort of like "Is every Nazi guilty of the holocaust?" Technically maybe not, doesn't change the fact that of the matter that overall all Nazis are guilty.
You can't run away from this with some garbage statement of "Not a very useful perspective." This incident literally killed an amount of people that is equivalent to a genocide.
Imagine if you were a Nazi and you said that. If you were just a mere guard at one of these concentration camps could you say what you just said to me to a victim who lived through the atrocity? Think about what you should say to the parents of a man/woman who died from an opioid overdose. Literally, I think you're unaware of the magnitude of the crime that was committed here.
Watch these videos:
They accurately place the blame on themselves.
Do some searching there's tons of articles/video interviews on addicts who got addicted because of pain killers. Here's one: https://www.healthline.com/health/doctor-addicted-opioids
All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings. It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. I make a healthy wage, but its likely lower than I could get in tech. Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company.