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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

#211

Post by Uchikoma »

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.

Consultancy is an easy business model.

In companies there are people who are paid to decide things. They also have budgets. Often they are called managers. There are consequences with decisions.

Managers learned a trick: Give the money of your budgets to consultants to make the decision your company pays you for.

If the decision was a good one: The manager was the one who hired the consultants!

If the decision was a bad one: Who could blame the manager, even the top consultants of BCG/Berger/McKinsey couldn't make the right decision, he hired the best!

Either way: The manager outsourced the work he was supposed to do but still gets paid and freed himself from the consequences. Heaven!

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

#212

Post by chbarts »

gjm11 wrote: post #109
rdtsc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually undermines his main point -- that he stuck to his "morals" and forgone the "large" hush money check at the end. If he was making enough to retire by his 30s then $16k wasn't that significant of an amount. That means the didn't really lose a lot so his "moral" stance is more symbolic, and not the tough financial decision that article might imply.

I don't think that was his main point. He had, after all, just said that he was willing to compromise his morals to the extent of continuing to work with BCG despite the dishonesty it involved -- because the amount of money potentially involved was so large. "I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticki…

> The reason for mentioning the $16k in the title isn't to say "look how much money I turned down" but to say "look how much money they offered me for this".

Right. It's to emphasize the fact that not only were they morally corrupt and doing horrible things, they were incompetent to the extent they though they could shut him up with a measly 16 grand.

If he gets a book deal out of this he'll be laughing pretty damn hard at a bribe attempt that, really, isn't even a house payment.

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

#213

Post by edge17 »

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.

I think his point is that Excel is a powerful weapon in the right hands. Most people don't do much with it, but it's powerful none the less. If dollars were points, many trillions in commerce and complex decisions have been made on the result of analysis done by spreadsheets.

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

#214

Post by gilest »

jodrellblank wrote: post #200
3pt14159 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally right, it had been a while since I had looked into this. I was confusing (blending together?) pyinex and IronPython. You are right, IronPython (and tons of other languages) all have access to the .Net libs, but pyinex is what I was thinking of. Apparently, though, it is not fully developed yet. http://code.google.com/p/pyinex/

I was thinking you were going to refer to .Net linking with Office, which seems to be something different from the COM automation, and more complicated than I've ever been interested in. That, however, looks pretty darn cool. On the odd occasion I've used Python/COM/Excel together, I've really wished for a Python shell inside Excel to do things like: for cell in Range('a1:a10'): cell.Value = cell.Value.split('-')[0]…

You can do almost exactly that in Resolver One (http://www.resolversystems.com/), which has got a Python console as well as allowing Python functions and Python syntax in the grid. It's a separate spreadsheet program, though, not an Excel plug-in.

Alternatively, there's PyXLL (http://www.pyxll.com/), which lets you write Excel user-defined functions in Python, but doesn't have a console.

(Full disclosure: I work for Resolver Systems.)

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

#215

Post by count »

gaius wrote: post #148
count wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which you should be within 15 years...

Hah, every newbie analyst thinks he or she is sure to make partner. Maybe 1% actually do.

How many newbie analysts actually stay and put in the work required? How many move on after 5 years? 3 years?
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