And if the latter is the case, then that sort of stamps the case closed from the get-go...
an absolutely wild statement to 99.9% of the world
They're not very bright, most of them. But they're very hard workers and high achievers. They stay for the resume candy or the health care.
the top students from the top ten universities in the US produce... mostly not very bright people?
this is getting even stranger to the rest of us plebians. sometimes i am left in awe of how different my world is from some of you here
The top universities are not setup to mold intellectually rigorous and curious people. It's setup to make hard working, and increasingly sycophant men.
My lab mate is a former drug addict with two years of art school. Easily more intellectually curious than anyone I met at McKinsey.
Ideologically aligned if nothing else.
Well we can all at least imagine being some 4.0 Ivy League dude who only interacts with 4.0 Ivy League dudes. He’s not going to think that everyone he interacts with range from merely brilliant to the most studious-enlightened hardworking top of the morning fellow (or whatever adjectives to use). He’s gonna think that some of them are idiots. It’s only human.
worship is an extremely strong word for a one-sentence casual comment.
but yeah, by default i will file anyone with a 4.0 from a top 10 school in the "brighter than me" category. is that worship?
You can perfectly well believe that thinking that the echelons of academic success is a frictionless gold sieve is just a milquetoast belief. Believing that your beliefs are milquetoast are most often integral to said beliefs.
The As, then, are better at the game. Once you've become a TA and have to grade the exams, you realize how A grades are quite within reach:
For the professors, being an easy grader has almost no downsides. The contrary is a minefield of trouble. "A" students will "ask for clarifications" for any minor mistake, knowing professors will often throw them a point or two.
The exams are, typically, slight variations of problems from assignments. Often, they are the same.
Exams have no curveballs; problems or situations that you have never seen unless you did extra readings. No problem which to solve you must have read more or fully understood the core material.
The TA is primed to give 40% of a problem's points for free - just restate the problem in math and draw a picture and right out the door you get 2 out of 5 points.
Note that, as far as I can tell, this is not generally true for "hot" topics like CS or bio. These programs have so many eager kids that the material is hard. But then these fields get hard working, bright, kids that don't actually care about the material - they go to McK. Within ten years they've forgotten everything and are just consulting parrots.
What did I see at the university? Very hard working people. Very interesting research. Very shallow knowledge outside a narrow domain expertise.
These are the folks McKinsey hires... but these shallow thinkers are sent on 6 week projects for companies in industry they hadn't even heard before.
Once, no one in the team knew what product CompanyX sold... CompanyX is a a top tier multinational consumer product brand that routinely sponsors sports events, including TV ads.
Everyone would recognize it. Cartoons have made jokes about these product since the dawn of animation.
CompanyX makes is the premier manufacturer of these.
Think as pervasive and obvious as sneakers made by Nike, but it wasn't footwear.
And yet only one person in a team of a dozen consultants had ever heard of the company they'd been hired for.
Partners get 300-400k and senior partners get closer to 600-800
Ultimately AI may be a big threat to the sort of “advisory” work McKinsey historically focused on.
It reminds me of Lewis' "National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments"
The health care is amazing, though. $30/mo for a family $900 deductible? Something like that. If you have a sick family member it's a no brainer.
Then I listened and we started to calculate:
- In the MCK Office from 0900 - 2300 on MO-FR
- In the MCK Office from 1000 - 1600/1700 on SA
- Often in the MCK Office from 1000-1400 on SU
Overall, yes: The amont was the double amount - but in the end working hours were also roughly the double.
I mean, it doesn't work for their consulting gigs either. There's a reason McKinsey has such a bad reputation.
It’s really about bypassing the existing power structure of the company. Competence of the work itself is a secondary objective. Most in-house initiatives can be slow rolled by management.
The fresh faced consultant with 2-3 steps to access the CEO neutralizes that. It seems grifty but is really exploiting bugs in corporate governance.
The current fad of firing the managers is a riff on this. Every jackass C-level is coming up with the novel idea of flattening.
Most of the times, the business decision has already been made long before McK is hired. It’s all about legitimizing that decision and making it happen.
You can also wield them as a weapon against internal competitors or opponents. Look up how they were used to kill off Cariad for example.
McKinsey was on a spree to become the best tech consulting company and brought a lot of great tech talent but the 2023 crisis made leadership turn 180 and simply ditch/ignore all the tech experts they brought to the firm.
All the expertise has left the firm and now they are more and more becoming another BS tech consulting firm, with strategy folks that don't even know that ML is AI advising clients on Enterprise AI transformation.
The tech initiative was a failure and Lilli's problem is just a symptom of it.
I wonder what was the experience at Bain and BCG
McKinsey has a weird structure where there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
Everybody there is reviewed on client impact, meaning it ends up being an everybody-for-themselves situation.
So as a developer you have little guidance (in fact, you're still being reviewed on client impact, even if you have 0 client exposure).
Then a (Senior) Partner comes in with this idea (that will get them a good review), and you jump on that. After all, it's all you can do to get a good review.
You work on it, and then the (Senior) Partner moves on. But it's not done. It's enough for the review, but continuing to work on it doesn't bring you anything, in fact, it will actually pull you down, as finishing the project doesn't give immediate client results.
So what does this mean? Most products of McKinsey are a grab-bag of raw ideas of leadership, implemented as a one-off, without a cohesive vision or even a long-term vision at all. It's all about the review cycle.
McKinsey is trying to do software like they do their other engagements. It doesn't work. You can't just do something for 6 months and then let it go. Software rots.
The fact that they laid off a good amount of (very good) software engineers in 2024 is a reflection on how they see software development.
And McKinsey's people, who go to other companies, take those ideas with them. Result: The UI of your project changes all the time, because everybody is looking at the short-term impact they have that gets them a good review, not what is best for the project in the long term.