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Anecdata: the two ex-McKinsey people I've worked with were both decent.

I have skepticism of management consulting in general, and concern about the opioid thing, but I don't want people lumped in with that undeservedly.

Nah at this point, if you are willing to sign on with a company like McKinsey it suggests you have absolutely no moral compass. What they do is very well understood.

I'm guessing that, today, the opioid thing might've really changed how people think of it, and maybe even the undergrads who get targeted for recruitment will have heard of it.

That's fairly recent, though.

The Wikipedia article on McKinsey is over half just discussing various controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver...

This is a company that has fueled (among other things) the Enron scandals, opioid epidemic, Saudi repression of dissidents.

Some of this is--as a big consulting company--it has its hands in a lot of things, so some of those things are bound to be unpleasant. But it's also clear that there doesn't appear to be much of an ethical filter for what work it takes on. I honestly would be more surprised at this point if McKinsey hasn't helped plan out a genocide.

How about being called out for targeting the brutal murder of Jamāl Aḥmad Khāshqujī?

They play ball with all sorts of shitty regimes (including the united states) McKinsey has way more crimes than the opioid epidemic.

> ex-McKinsey

so the ones that left?

McKinsey's MO is to have consultants work for a few years and then become "Alumni" who work for real companies and/or become secretaries of transportation where they can hire McKinsey to screw more things up. This is the reason the consultants are almost entirely in their mid-20s.

"are almost entirely in their mid-20s"

Probably a lot easier to keep their salaries relatively low as well?

The entry-level McKinsey consultants that I know began at $250,000/year; they didn't have other places they could get those size offers. Maybe $180-200 at most, if they could wrangle a high-value position at a startup. I'm sure the salaries have only increased since then.

My own anecdata: the (also two) ex-McKinsey people I've known seemed reasonably decent people at heart, but both possessed a toxic combination of:

(1) being absolutely intoxicated by their own old-money-fueled prestige academic/career path, which gave them a

(2) vastly overrated sense of their own knowledge, ability, wisdom, capability, importance, and general superiority to anyone not in possession of these stellar academic/prestige institutional credentials which was

(3) completely unfounded in every way.

I'm no longer impressed by Ivy League or any of these prestige institutional credentials.

I worked hard and got into one of these prestigious universities for my Masters, but grew up lower-middle class, on the countryside, in a not very healthy environment.

Having seen it first-hand, I can only agree. There's so much privilege at these institutions, it's almost sickening sometimes. I don't want to throw everyone in one pot, there's certainly genuine, decent people there. But there is so much self-importance and arrogance floating around, and just this casual and unquestioned attitude of superiority.

What I do want to say is that pretty much everyone I met there had a base-level above average smartness and/or work ethic. But I also mostly hung out with STEM people. Didn't get to know many managerial or related types.

Sorta like tech companies these days.

Where are they claiming AP math by 5th grade? I seem them saying algebra by 5th grade, which is a far cry from, say, AP Precalculus let alone AP Calculus AB or AP Statistics.

My daughter was considering a McKinsey gig. A friend from Booth said "You can maintain your integrity at McKinsey, but McKinsey won't help."

I hear their pay is pretty well. Integrity and ethics are fair weather phenomenon even at the most respected of world's companies. I am not saying integrity is not important, but it's not what makes the economy and humans tick.

Speak for yourself.

I work there. One thing I appreciate is full leeway to decline any work assignment for ethical reasons. I was asked to do something in Saudi Arabia. I said no. Perfectly fine.

I sure wish the rest of the firm made the same choice. But it’s a decentralized company with partners doing their own thing in their own corners. If you want to work on green energy, are you accountable for the folks doing Chinese mining? Or German agriculture? Or American pharma? I’d say it’s ambiguous at best. It’s not like working for a tech product where, say, the QA team for Facebook is still actively enabling Facebook.

> but are these numbers better than a human driver

so how many unethical projects can you decline before they fire you? Also hypothetically, what would they do if every one refused (eg:projects like the opiod one)?

An example of this is MarketDial vs. APT (Applied Predictive Technologies). Apparently APT brought in McKinsey for something and one of the McKinsey consultants quit to start MarketDial, which is a direct competitor to APT. That said, from what I have seen all of the court cases against MarketDial have been dismissed, so who knows what the truth is.