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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

#161

Post by gjm11 »

ramchip wrote: post #79
_delirium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually is the de-facto-standard modeling engine in a lot of areas, even some scientific areas, but mainly economics/finance. There are some pretty nuttily complex simulations written entirely in Excel, with the visualization part of the simulation done by popping up a chart--- you can even make it animated by popping up a new chart at a certain time interval. There's even a market in commercial spreadsheets, whi…

You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent Saying "Lisp had it X years ago" sounds perhaps a little weenish, but... that sounds a lot like the Cells library, and the even older Garnet KR. Granted, they're quite a lot less accessible than spreadsheet programs. FRP seems to be modern take on it. It's being very actively researched in the Haskell community.

Visicalc: 1979. Excel: 1985. Garnet: early 1990s. Cells: 2000 or so.

On the other hand ... Sketchpad: 1963. (Constraint satisfaction, but not embedded in a general-purpose programming system.) Prolog: 1972. And Guy L Steele wrote a nice general-purpose constraint system in 1978. ("Constraints", MIT AI Memo 502.)

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

#162

Post by pw0ncakes »

I had a job like that. I was supposed to use my analysis and creativity to build models for client forecasting, but if they didn't confirm what the brand team wanted to hear, they'd be rejected. It sucked. I was fresh out of school and cared more about getting the right answer than appeasing clients.

I lasted 8 months in that job. No regrets about leaving.

Also, $16k is piss-poor for a severance package in a brand-name consulting firm like BCG. Given the economy and the likelihood of a necessary career change, OP should have asked for 6 months' base (including COBRA) and an "office firing" (you're terminated but can use office resources for the job search and retain the right to represent yourself as employed).

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

#163

Post by stevenbedrick »

gaius wrote: post #144
jacquesm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be able to afford something does not mean you can afford the upkeep of it. If you live frugal a little goes a very long way.

Exactly. A good consultant could probably retire at 55 having set up his family well, private education for the kids, a bit of a trust fund, a comfortable retirement and bit of an interitance and so on. But as I say, this is not what most people would consider "rich". There's a good bit in Wall Street where Gordon Gekko is trying to explain this to Bud Fox. $100k salary and flying business class everywhere is not the…

Or, as Chris Rock so eloquently puts it, "Shaq is rich; the white man that signs his checks is wealthy."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m37JkkGjAY

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

#164

Post by gaius »

Silhouette wrote: post #17
waterlesscloud wrote: post #14

Isn't the headline offer he's talking about, which he goes into at the end, really just a very standard clause in a layoff agreement?

No, it really isn't. Not at any of the small businesses I ever worked for, where the guys at the top probably decide these things themselves. Not at a very, very large business I worked for, where the guys at the top probably didn't know the name of anyone in my building and everything was done by HR and Legal automatons. And not at any medium sized businesses I have ever worked for, either. The only time an agreemen…

The only time an agreement like this is standard is when you know you're doing something you shouldn't be, and you know you're about to lose your legitimate influence over people who could out you, so you try to buy their silence because to you the cost is cheap.

What country are you in? In the UK this is pure boilerplate text.

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

#165

Post by eru »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #133
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholders care only about relative performance. Absolute performance is irrelevant. So as long as all big companies in a particular sector waste X on consultants, that's fine for the shareholder. It doesn't even affect the dividend as you might think, because if everyone does it the cost can be passed on to clients. Shareholders start to care once a lean competitor enters the scene. Someone who does away with all…

Shareholders used to try to improve a company - it was quite popular in the 70's and 80's. Ever watch the movie "Wall Street? What happened since then is that legislators and courts have become hostile to corporate raids, and have mostly made it toothless. We would have plenty of shareholder activism if it wasn't for that.

Yes. I also never understand the reason behind poison pills (part from shielding management). Why should shareholders limit their own rights to sell the company to somebody who wants to run it?

`Corporate raid' is a term as backwards as `piracy' for copyright infringement. Those `raiders' buy a company with their own money (or money they borrowed) from shareholders willing to accept their price. They should be allowed to do whatever they want with their newly acquired company.

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

#166

Post by CWuestefeld »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #97
Silhouette wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was another important point: a guy new to the consulting business and with no significant amount of relevant training or support wound up being marketed as an expert and became the senior person on each project he joined. I've seen this in action, both from the client side (management brought in absurdly highly paid consultants to back up what they wanted when their own people wouldn't support it) and the other…

Shareholders care only about relative performance. Absolute performance is irrelevant. So as long as all big companies in a particular sector waste X on consultants, that's fine for the shareholder. It doesn't even affect the dividend as you might think, because if everyone does it the cost can be passed on to clients. Shareholders start to care once a lean competitor enters the scene. Someone who does away with all…

So as long as all big companies in a particular sector waste X on consultants, that's fine for the shareholder.

That's incorrect. As a shareholder, I can sell my stock and reinvest the proceeds into a company in a whole different industry. Thus, companies must compete for shareholders.

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

#167

Post by CWuestefeld »

_delirium wrote: post #4
carbocation wrote: post #3

He invokes Excel as an analytical engine several times in this story. I am trying to figure out if he actually considers it to be a powerful statistical engine, or if he is merely using it synecdochically for the benefit of non-technical readers, in order to represent statistical software more generally.

It actually is the de-facto-standard modeling engine in a lot of areas, even some scientific areas, but mainly economics/finance. There are some pretty nuttily complex simulations written entirely in Excel, with the visualization part of the simulation done by popping up a chart--- you can even make it animated by popping up a new chart at a certain time interval. There's even a market in commercial spreadsheets, whi…

Twenty-plus years ago I wrote a complete blackjack game in a spreadsheet, all using 1-2-3 "slash" macro commands (not VBA or anything like that). It even did insurance and doubling-down. I was part of the team testing the product, and each of us on the test team built a different casino game -- one guy did craps, and found a bug in the random number generator.

Once you get your brain around the paradigm, it can be a powerful tool.

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

#168

Post by jacquesm »

gjm11 wrote: post #155
jacquesm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However long he worked there, he didn't bite the hand that was feeding him, but when the party was over he did turn around to bite the hand that fed him. Being moral about the NDA does not weigh up against working there in the first place, and I don't know what $16 K means to a high profile Dubai consultant, it may have been substantially less than the severance pay he was entitled to anyway.

I don't think anyone was claiming that being moral about the NDA does "weigh up" against working there in the first place. If he were trying to paint a glowing picture of his own morals, he wouldn't have written the article in the first place. (Since he appears to have been there for something like 6 months before getting fired, I'll hazard a guess that his severance pay wasn't all that spectacular.)

10 K+ per month is not unusual, and depending on his contract they may have to 'buy you out' (for instance, after three months they might have signed a years contract with you including the first three months).

So the severance could be anywhere from $5K up to a very substantial amount of money. The fact that they're willing to pay another $16K just for signing an NDA suggests it was a pretty high salary.

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

#169

Post by adamtmca »

abalashov wrote: post #50
holdenc wrote: post #46

This story is written with a wonderful naivete. Consultants like BCG exist only to lend credentials and competent temporary labor. The companies who hire these consultants are looking for affirmation and peace of mind -- most of them too mired in bureaucracy or incompetence to draw even the most basic conclusions by themselves.

Still, it's hard to believe that peace of mind is worth paying 5 kids graduated 6 weeks ago in Political Science from Stanford to come give Powerpoints on meaningless, vapid crapola billed to you each at $300/hr, even where such figures don't make much of a blip on the bottom line.

That's just how the managing partner described it when BCG came to do a recruiting talk. He called theirs one of the most improbable businesses in the world- companies pay a lot of money to have just-graduated kids work on their problems.

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

#170

Post by eru »

pmiller2 wrote: post #136
shrikant wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised that someone whose ideology makes him believe that Einstein's contribution to society was smaller than that of the bosses of Lehman or AIG would be disappointed by reality. Would you care to clarify? I genuinely don't see where you are getting this from.

He's saying that since Einstein wasn't a rich man, by the author's logic, he couldn't have contributed much to society.

No, he doesn't say so. The reverse of A -> B is not B -> A or even (not A) -> (not B), but (not B) -> (not A).
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