This humorous but sadly true article is very timely for this discussion.
You are correct. They do hire droves of college grads, most of them with little to no experience in the corporate world. But where do you think you should start out your career at 22 years old? Working your ass off (and thus learning) in a leading firm that’s instantly recognizable to most people or at an unknown company where you will sit there doing jack shit all day for years with no advancement?
Starting salary for a college grad was closer to $45,000 when I worked there in 2001. Not I-banker money or anything, but about what you would expect for recent college grads.
People stay at the Big-4 (or competitors like BDO, Accenture, CSC, etc) because after 4-5 years you can make manager and make over $100,000. A few years after that, you can be senior management making over $200,000. Hopefully after 10+ years you can eventually make partner or principal making $400,000+.
Or you just take the experience and go someplace else.
The “brainwashing” of these sort of firms (and I include Accenture and other firms that follow a similar model) is that they create a sort of “fraternity” environment with happy hours and other activities designed to make the associates feel like they are still living college style. What I found over the years was that your Work Life Ballance (or WBL) consists of not just long hours, but so many happy hours, dinners, social functions, weekend work and other bullshit that you don’t even have time to have a life outside of the firm. Everything is “team” this and “relationships” that.
What is the alternative? If you want to be an accountant, those are the best firms to work for.
I’m still not sure about this whole consulting thing. I’m still not convinced that they aren’t just high-priced temps who convince companies to hire them when they actually need something done because 90% of their employees are lazy pikers like that Dudley B. Dawson guy. I’ve always wondered why people start their career in “consulting” right out of college when they know jack shit instead of 15 years down the line when they have actual industry experience?
I would like to see him do an entire article about our stupid jargon. A business school classmate of mine who works at A.T. Kearny sent me this.
One of my team leaders (people who report to me) actually got made at me. She’s like “you never give me a straight answer! All you do is talk in that stupid consulting bullshit!” I’m like “clearly we need to revisit the parameters of our relationship paradigm.”
So true. We hire people from BCG, McKinsey, whoever when something needs to be done and accountability needs to be deferred. It is much handier to pay someone to produce an analysis with an unfavorable conclusion than to do it yourself and take the shit for it.
It is also somewhat obvious what the consultants think of the relationship they have with you. Once upon a time we hired Accenture because we had relationships with people there who had serious expertise in an area we were deficient in. The team they gave us was not exactly their A team, it was as you said, a bunch of post-college kids looking to get some job training at our expense. This arrangement did not last long.
Great stuff. The next time someone pisses me off around here, I am going to have to implement some user-centric convergence.
Did you mean to say the “where” part loud and the “like” part soft?
I work in an insurance company now. A big one. It really isn’t any different from my job as a management consultant. Just better hours and the people are dumber.
The best was working in consulting during the dot-com bubble. Especially one of those firms like Accenture, Sapient, Scient, Razorfish, Viant, MarchFirst or any of the other firms characterized by a) a nonsensical name, b) one of the dot-com vowels in the name ( @, e, i, .com, > and X ) c) a CEO with no experience other than founding other failed consulting firms and d) no longer existing. Basically it had all the work of a Big-4 but with the added benefit of being run like a religeous cult. I remember the first time my “Project Team Coach” (a 27 year old Indian girl widely regarded by clients, staff, peers and superiors as an imbecile) asked me to “Capture any critical issues on the whiteboard”. I’m like “what the shit did you say? Are you trying to tell me you want me to write down whatever they say on the dry-erase walls. Why not just say that?” Another time a couple of my teamates are like “Well I don’t think that is subsumed under the rubrick of…” and I’m like “dude. What the fuck?” “It’s means t…” “I KNOW what it means! I want to know why you are talking like that and for that matter why are you wearing a bowtie?!!”
Ahhh…good time. I remember the good old days when people had dilusions of grandeur. I’m not sure what’s more depressing. Reading MBA Jungle articles about “How many millions is enough?” or “How to find a job in the secret job market when every company is in a hiring freeze.”
Not really true of Engineers, IME. My hours have gone up as I’ve become more experienced and had more responsibility. The first few years it was hard to find 40 hrs of work to do in a week. Salaried from day one.