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The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

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Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#81

Post by Rod »

gvb wrote: post #43
microcentury wrote: post #39

"At my salary level, and with my expected advancement path, I could comfortably retire in my thirties." I've heard this or statements like it in quite a few articles over the years, but I've never actually met a retired thirties business consultant. Do they exist and am I just missing them? The only ones I know are well into their thirties, working 70+ hours a week, and looking forward to making even larger boatloads…

They think they will retire in their thirties, but they never have enough. "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, "Yes, but I have something he will never have... Enough." http://ww…

Hedge fund managers are to management consultants what wolves are to sheep. Please don't compare the two. One is a master, the other nothing but a slave.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#82

Post by nir »

eplanit wrote: post #69

I guess Welcome the Real World, is the best response I can give. So sorry that the real world is so non-idealistic and disappointing to you, and that your wonderful skills and knowledge aren't being prized and utilized. In other words, you're experiencing the reality shock _everybody_ experiences when engaging with, and learning about, the corporate world. It seems you'd be happier in Academia, a research institute,…

It's not the Real World, it's just a certain part of it. Not a small part, but not all of it either. There are a lot of places that offer a chance to do far more satisfying work.

(BTW I'm not sure I'd recommend academe for someone with his mindset. The politics are perhaps even worse and the monetary gains much lower. A startup - even though far from the Disneyland some HN posts paint it as - could be a good place for someone like that)

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#83

Post by 3pt14159 »

eru wrote: post #37
chime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'Solver' ( http://www.solver.com/ ) tool in Excel is widely used for many business optimization problems. If you have x & y quantities of two raw materials and products A and B consume different proportions of each raw material, then you can use the solver to determine the most optimal production strategy that maximizes your profit (or minimizes your labor requirements etc.)

The joys of linear optimization. Do you know if it also supports integer optimization? (Doing that fast enough would be a feat in pure Excell.)

There are multiple versions of Solver. To get the free one to do this requires a hack (using some sort of Fourier Transform into a cell or something, I think there are multiple ways). There are paid versions of Solver that are far more powerful, with fully developed APIs. Also, Iron Python can be used with Excel, which makes the whole thing really intense because many Python Libs can be used. Excel truly is Microsoft's shiniest, best piece of software.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#84

Post by tkahn6 »

barrkel wrote: post #57
tokenadult wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the submitted article may have more sense of history than most Americans. It is a historical fact that Adam Smith first wrote a book The Theory of Moral Sentiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments in 1759, pondering the issue of why people behave morally when they could simply guard their own self-interest. As Smith pondered the issue more, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature…

You have completely missed the point. Contrasting economic systems is completely irrelevant . The choice here is not between different economic systems, but between different moral systems. You cannot make a free market your moral system because markets are amoral . That is, it is not that they are not immoral and so should be replaced with something else; rather, they have no moral content - morality comes from some…

Do not confuse capitalism with anarchism.

Capitalism believes in a government which protects private property and human life with physical force. You can pay someone to punch someone else, but that's inconsistent with capitalistic philosophy.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#85

Post by Rod »

eru wrote: post #37
chime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'Solver' ( http://www.solver.com/ ) tool in Excel is widely used for many business optimization problems. If you have x & y quantities of two raw materials and products A and B consume different proportions of each raw material, then you can use the solver to determine the most optimal production strategy that maximizes your profit (or minimizes your labor requirements etc.)

The joys of linear optimization. Do you know if it also supports integer optimization? (Doing that fast enough would be a feat in pure Excell.)

Give Solver Foundation a try: http://www.solverfoundation.com

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#86

Post by oconnore »

barrkel wrote: post #57
tokenadult wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the submitted article may have more sense of history than most Americans. It is a historical fact that Adam Smith first wrote a book The Theory of Moral Sentiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments in 1759, pondering the issue of why people behave morally when they could simply guard their own self-interest. As Smith pondered the issue more, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature…

You have completely missed the point. Contrasting economic systems is completely irrelevant . The choice here is not between different economic systems, but between different moral systems. You cannot make a free market your moral system because markets are amoral . That is, it is not that they are not immoral and so should be replaced with something else; rather, they have no moral content - morality comes from some…

Your use of "moral content" is entirely ambiguous, because that content will vary depending on which moral system you refer. And since a market is essentially an amalgamation of individuals (whom likely have or are capable of inducing moral content through their actions and desires), it is likely that a market has a great deal of moral content regardless of which system you pick.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#88

Post by eplanit »

nir wrote: post #82
eplanit wrote: post #69

I guess Welcome the Real World, is the best response I can give. So sorry that the real world is so non-idealistic and disappointing to you, and that your wonderful skills and knowledge aren't being prized and utilized. In other words, you're experiencing the reality shock _everybody_ experiences when engaging with, and learning about, the corporate world. It seems you'd be happier in Academia, a research institute,…

It's not the Real World, it's just a certain part of it. Not a small part, but not all of it either. There are a lot of places that offer a chance to do far more satisfying work. (BTW I'm not sure I'd recommend academe for someone with his mindset. The politics are perhaps even worse and the monetary gains much lower. A startup - even though far from the Disneyland some HN posts paint it as - could be a good place fo…

You're right. That youthful energy and talent are likely to be utilized best in a purely creative start-up. That was the idea with the creating something on his own suggestion.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#89

Post by _delirium »

tokenadult wrote: post #28
barrkel wrote: post #21

Something that leaped out at me: "I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system". Voluntary exchange is not a moral system. A free market doesn't have morals.

The author of the submitted article may have more sense of history than most Americans. It is a historical fact that Adam Smith first wrote a book The Theory of Moral Sentiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments in 1759, pondering the issue of why people behave morally when they could simply guard their own self-interest. As Smith pondered the issue more, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature…

Smith's overall conclusion on the relation between morality and free markets is a bit more mixed than that of someone like Hayek, though. He does say things like the excerpt you quote quite frequently, but he also has a number of comments lamenting the immoral behavior that profit motives cause, like an encouragement to fraud and collusion. He does worry that some attempts to solve the problem would be worse cures than the disease, but he doesn't think that no problem exists, or that self-interest always produces moral outcomes, or that government regulation to mitigate the immoral effects of self-interest is always wrong.

His policy proposals on that latter point are pretty pragmatic, and he endorses regulation when he thinks it has relatively large gains for relatively small downsides. For example, he proposes that the government ought to require employers to pay their employees in hard money, and not permit them to pay in promissory notes or in goods. His reasoning is that this prevents unscrupulous employers from tricking employees, either by paying them in goods whose value has been misrepresented, or by convincing them to work for promises of payment that the employer doesn't really intend to keep.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#90

Post by thwarted »

wyclif wrote: post #62
arvinjoar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. My father took on a nightclub all by himself. It was a stupid move, he lost a lot of money doing that. What he was missing was a partner. Not only to lessen his work load, but also to keep him motivated. This is the reason you see musicians take 5 year breaks, or even quitting music. They are lacking in motivation. Look at the band Queen, They are still making music and touring, but half the band has…

Actually, John Deacon wrote one of Queen's biggest hits, "You're My Best Friend."

Not sure what that has to do with anything, "You're my best friend" was released 21 years before Deacon retired.
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