Brilliant Video About Mckinsey

[adexkola]

I thought it was this video when seeing the thread title

Great video

Caveat: consultants in boutique firms and/or niche domains are actually very knowledgeable and valuable.

But management consultants? Snake oil salesmen

 

[GDaly95]

That's outrageous.

Are you saying she was trying to get you to log back in when you went home? Was it on OT?

As for the offshore team, what an asshole. Those poor bastards get treated bad enough as it is. I had an offshore team in India years ago who nominally worked 1 - 10 to coincide with our 9-5 hours but I'd always check with them when they started and were planning on leaving because often they'd stay late to get everything in the queue finished. This was a completely pointless activity because you'd get quiet and busy days with sales orders so they'd have feck all to do the next day, still have to work their full shift and not got a penny in over-time. I'd also tell them to go home if I found out they'd done more than their alloted hours that day.

Demanding really. Expecting it. Like it wasn't even a conversation. I was an auditor and from Jan - April I was basically working if I was awake. We didn't get paid OT, we got time off in lieu but it was capped at 120 hours but once we hit 120 of overtime (which happened very quickly) we were still expected to work all hours. We also couldn't take a day off for those months unless we had an incredibly compelling reason. It's easy to wonder why someone would put up with that, but it was just the culture. People peered over their computer screens to look judgmentally at anyone going home at a reasonable hour, it felt impossible to go against. The trade-off was that I was given generous study leave in the summer to do my chartered accountancy exams.

 

[sglowrider]

I've hated these twats (and their ilk) for years. Nothing to do with their morals though. It's the absolute snake oil they push to corporations about efficiency, outsourcing and new models of working that do nothing but make thousands of people unemployed and create an infinitely worse experience for anyone who works with or for those corporations. These bastards are the reason every time you ever need customer service from a big corporation you end up feeling as though pulling your teeth out with pliers would have been a better, less painful use of your time. Ditto if you're an 'internal customer' who wants some help from IT or Human Resources. But hey, they've given better value to the shareholder by laying off all the people who might actually have helped to fix your problem. And they do all of this assuring the corporation that this fulfils their mission statement about "putting the customer at the centre of everything we do". Go figure.

My ex-wife used to work for them. I used to go to their parties; I cant say no to free booze. But the conversations remind me of geeks running amok. They will be telling me things when I am actually in that field, ie technology. And they had just left grad school, like, 3 years before that.
Then the word would circulate that so & so's husband is anti-that (specific) tech when I only tried to enlighten them that its not the best thing since sliced bread like they think it is.
But the drinks are good.

 

[11101]

I'm still scarred by an interview I had for an investment firm when I had my first wobble about clinical medicine. They had figured it might be cheaper/easier to hire doctors and train them on investment then teaching people with a business background how to understand biotech/pharma innovations.

Massive room in swanky Mayfair office, with a single glass of water on it. Tosser in expensive suits looks me in the eye and says "If I pick up this glass of water, drink half of it, then hand it to you and you drink half of what's left, and we keep doing this until all the water has gone... how much will each of us have drank?" I got lost in world of mentally adding up ever decreasing fractions and ended up stuttering nonsense. Still pisses me off to this day that I couldn't instantly come up with the answer.

As I mentioned before what they're good at is sales and thats a sales question. I've asked similarly bullshit questions in the past. You want to see if they think through it and answer logically or freeze and babble nonsense at you because thats what theyll likely do in front of a client. He wasn't after the right answer.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

As I mentioned before what they're good at is sales and thats a sales question. I've asked similarly bullshit questions in the past. You want to see if they think through it and answer logically or freeze and babble nonsense at you because thats what theyll likely do in front of a client. He wasn't after the right answer.

That was an interview to be an investment analyst though!