Competence and possibility of malicious compliance are interesting questions, but I think the more appropriate question is if DoJ will be sued for violating the law by redacting unrelated content?
I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.
We do everything in Notion. Book time off, HR policies, run books, playbooks, knowledge dumps, project management, sprint management. Search is a lot better so it really opens up the use cases.
Imo, if you're building a company with the goal of selling it you should use Notion. Get your team to use it, and capture everything about your business. When you go to sell it you have the whole business packaged up in a searchable, interactive knowledge base.
And if you not going to sell it from the day one, but rather deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools. I guess.
> deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools.
I don't see how one follows from the other, the vast majority of people use tools to deliver value without really caring whether they're self hosted or not
You missed ‘I guess’ in the quote, but anyway. The idea is that the parent commenter said about the intent to sell the company, and I’ve got the impression it’s a day-one intention. Like, we’re building a company to sell it. So if I’m planning to do the opposite, deliver some actual value and ideally never sell it, what should I do then? Is it self-hosting then? That’s why I’m saying ‘I guess.’ It’s an open question.
Your comment implies people who build companies with the intent to sell don't build companies that deliver value. That couldn't be further from the truth. There is nothing wrong with wanting to build something of value and don't want to work forever. Also, just because you don't see the value doesn't mean the value isn't there.
You're right, though, people who build businesses they have no intent of selling will also get similar value. They also reduce their hit by buss factor, make onboarding new employees easier, and so on.
I was simply offering one perspective. I don't think any commenter provides every single perspective, or when speaking on a product, all that products value.
But I don't know why you'd guess such a thing. People have companies that they deliver value with and do not have an intention to sell yet nevertheless they don't use self hosted tools (in fact, doing so might a net negative as their time is valuable). So I simply don't get where this non sequitur came from. And like the other commenter said, you have an implicit assumption that those who want to sell a company haven't delivered value, well, what is the acquiring company paying for then if not value?
I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.
I actively used Notion with a lot of my fellow students at the time. I've subsequently gravitated towards Joplin for 'richer' content and Obsidian for general text.
I love notion for school stuff. The databases are just absolutely neccesary for me, and collaboration is a must for me (and without a paid subscription as well). I'm going to check out Obsidian Bases too though now they're out.
yeah, when I downloaded the beta back in 2017/2018, I was using it as a replacement for Evernote. It was amazing. As the feature bloat made it slower and as the push towards companies made it less individual-focused, I started to use it more for group projects and now for teams.
Obsidian is just better for writing especially longer notes etc. Notion is great for sharing data intensive stuff, nicely formatted docs, and for collaborating.
That's somewhat true for team collaboration, but not if you consider individuals on teams. There are people at least 10,000 companies using Obsidian, and some large corporate sponsors. See obsidian.md/enterprise
I'm an "enterprise user" of Obsidian, but all I use it for is personal note taking at work. My company shows up on that page because I get them to pay for a commerical license. Outside of that it isn't an official internal tool. I don't use it to work on projects together with my teammates, for example.
I use Notion extensively as an individual, but I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge management and have accordingly tuned it pretty closely to my typical workflows. Without that initial time investment it can be overwhelming.
It is suitable for individuals, I used it for a couple years and was very happy with it. I only decided to move on because I wanted a local database that I could mine as my personal knowledge base.
Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go.
But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.
Notion needs to fear all of the people using (and loving) Obsidian at home that want to use it for work.
Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
Now Obsidian gets to fight the battle for corporate on their terms. And their tool is already developer friendly.
There are a million Obsidian champions, and there's probably a dozen of them in your org. I think Notion should be shaking in their boots right about now.
If Obsidian can get their organization management and syncing/backup strategy right, and if they make their product interface well with distributed git automations, Obsidian is going to take over so many new workflows. Not just knowledge bases, but mdbook -> webpage workflows, documentation, customer-facing pages, everything.
Notion makes product managers smile. Obsidian makes developers and product managers smile.
> Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
I don't think that's true; my (admittedly limited) understanding of Obsidian is that it strongly appeals to the type of person who reads HN; they're not going to appeal to someone who wants a WYSIWYG editor that they don't have to think about manually syncing with anything.
Obsidian makes developers smile, but it won't make sales people, customer service people, or executives smile unless they're already inclined to.
Apparently Amazon purchased a block of licenses recently. Since the product isn't usable without community extensions, the scale of data exfiltration resulting from this asinine idea will be staggering, and is likely underway.
For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud".
I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search.
But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage.
That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool.
Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.
Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.
The reason I don't buy into this is that it shouldn't be necessary: If I've marked a word as bold, I can see it without format codes. The rendering is the desired outcome. In modern documents there's no kind of magical markup that somehow cannot be visualized "canonically". Format codes are less efficient as a representation because they obscure the "real" representation.
By analogy, to me it's like people preferring to draw by writing SVG, when drawing lines and circles is much more natural in a visual medium. Its not like sheet music where notation describes a completely different medium.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Because if you can see them you can fix them when they inevitably get fucked up. (Literally commenting immediately after fixing some formatting that Confluence broke, like I do every day)
> "I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025."
Two neatly separated editing, or one editing plus one preview, mode(s) don't equate to "all over the place".
> "But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage."
I have never used Notion. But if said program does support good enough search as well as tagging functionality (an essential of any KM tool to be considered at least decent), then the "hard-to-find and deeply buried" is on the user for being incompetent at managing (meta) data... which is often enough an inherited problem, e. g. through bad company policies or practices.
And if the tool, in 2025, does not support such essential functionality, the user is obviously also (at least partly) at fault: for choosing it.
> "That's because Notion only has hierarchy."
Easy to avoid as there have been lots of freeform knowledge management tools out there... since the likes of Lotus Agenda. In my experience their freeform-style makes them unpopular with most people for it takes... some... effort (e. g. discipline) to make proper use of them. Such software obviously has to be adapted for any corporate use, which makes them rather unpopular in that space. See below.
> "Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool."
The garden's consistency and associated enforcement ("discipline") is the job of the gardener(s), not the tool.
You don't like Notion's hierarchy-only structure... but then complain about "poorly thought-out folder hierarchies" of the people that use it at your workplace. I mean... whatcha think is gonna happen when you introduce your crowd to powerful freeform KM tools... in a structure that is hierachical (your workplace) and conducts its affairs accordingly? XD
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025
Lightweight markups in most basic usage are essentially punctuation extensions to natural language. It enables the UX in that what feels and looks like punctuation doubles as the effective key command you'd want to know for changing formatting modes anyways. This is why you'll find people like writers who like it.
> Love letter to @obsdmd to which I very happily switched to for my personal notes. My primary interest in Obsidian is not even for note taking specifically, it is that Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be.
— https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And there's a lot of interest from tech-savvy folks wanting to use it at work. (Said as a cofounder of a co making business multiplayer tools)
Yeah why do you need a Markdown editor when you can just write normal text files. Personally I find the source to be more readable than the "rendered" view from Obsidian.
Obsidian is great for solo use, but then so is Apple Notes and a dozen similar options. Where Notion shines is team based sharing and collaboration. There's really nothing else like it with the same feature set.
Once iOS 26 drops Apple Notes will be much-much more useful with the combination of supported linking between notes and supporting Markdown.
Before it rapidly became untenable as a place to actually store my notes. I use it more as a "temporary note" that will be moved to the proper place later.
Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work? I know it wasn't enforced but I think the free license limited you to personal use.
I bought a commercial license three years ago, and I don't really mind paying it, but then my job for the last year expressly forbid the use of Obsidian [1], and as such I didn't feel compelled to keep paying, though I still used it for personal stuff.
I looked at their website and it looks like the commercial license is optional now?
I don't really mind paying for it, I think it's a pretty decent notes app and I probably get more than $50/year of value out of it.
[1] I'm not 100% sure why, I think it might have been because the people doing the approvals thought that the Sync was an intrinsic to the app and they were afraid of company secrets going out.
> Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work?
I don't know if they ever required that, but they certainly do not now. They encourage purchase of a commercial license, but it explicitly is not required.
From the FAQ on their pricing page:
Do I have to pay for commercial use?
No. You are not required to pay for a commercial license, however if you are using Obsidian for work in an organization we encourage you to purchase a commercial license to keep Obsidian independent and 100% user-supported.
You can absolutely sync your vault without a paid subscription. Simply save it within your OneDrive or Google Drive folder. Alternatively, you could use Syncthing if you prefer a self-hosted solution.
You can, but _you_ need to figure out how to do it.
If don't know how or can't be bothered, you can pay for Obsidian Sync - which Just Works.
I tried to roll my own syncing with syncthing and iCloud and Dropbox. In the end I spent so much time debugging and dealing with files clobbering each other mid-sync I figured out $4/month to support a project I use daily isn't too much.
Zero problems since and I use Obsidian regularly on 4 different devices.
Seconding this. I use Obsidian and Obsidian Sync for personal stuff, but my employer doesn't allow Sync, so I use Obsidian very happily as a standalone on my work computer. The work vault simply never gets exposed to the outside world (we don't allow USB memory devices either).
Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.
I've the dev behind Relay [0] (real-time collaboration for teams using Obsidian), and we work with a lot of teams who have switched over to using Obsidian for work. We just hit 10,000 users yesterday.
You don't need a lot of the plugins to be productive in Obsidian, but I think a superpower people are overlooking is that you can build your own plugins for company specific features/workflows quite cheaply.
Combine that with having everything local, and you can use tools like claude code to actually make use of the knowledge/context that you're creating.
I find it crazy that people are pushing data into locked-in systems like Notion only to be limited by their weak-sauce AI tools.
In contrast, we are all in on file-over-app -- keeping the files locally on your computer so you can actually use them. Many of our customers run their Relay Server on-prem for total document privacy.
I know a team at my work is using it, though I'm fuzzy on how. I think they have a shared OneDrive folder that they use as a vault. How they deal with locking and such I haven't a clue.
I dunno. I love Obsidian, but it has a huge learning curve and is not currently the type of tool that I see companies adopting when they need to have their employees adopt it’s use. Obsidian is way too overwhelming for the average user, whereas Notion is far more user-friendly and intuitive for people who just need to interact with the system to do their job.
Edit: Not to mention that (last I checked) Obsidian lacks a lot of granularity when it comes to permissions for editing pages. It would be very easy for a beginner user to disrupt the markdown files or the organizational system. Even doing things like applying labels or tags in the YAML is less intuitive and requires a lot of consistency guidelines for users to make it worthwhile. Notion facilitates this kind of thing a lot better.
By default Obsidian is a markdown editor with the ability to link to other notes with a pretty graph of your note links. What is overwhelming about that?
Obsidian can be extremely simple at it's core, but to structure everything and make it easy to use by an organization will likely require a whole lot of additional infrastructure and adherence to strict guidelines for organization. Notion seems far more intuitive in this way. Notion is also a bit limited when it comes to customization, but that limitation seems like more of an asset in this case because it produces consistency of style and usage patterns across the platform.
Also, I don't find the Obsidian graph to be practical for organizing or locating files. It's impressive to look at, but not that practical in my experience.
You need to get out of your bubble. Notion is so much more popular than Obsidian you cannot imagine. My dentist office uses Notion for example. Migrating out of Notion is also very difficult and for most people it isn't worth the hassle. Obsidian not being web based is also a con not a pro to the average person. The number of people leaving Notion for Obsidian is a rounding error.
Yep. Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. It could probably be made even smoother but I cannot imagine obsidian being competitive, having used it. Just too much hassle for things Notion handles smoothly.
I would like to have more of the content available offline automatically though, i.e all text and image content, and big files downloaded on request. Closer to local first than this.
I have taken a glance, the integration between documents and db tables is what makes notion relevant for me in this space though and i don’t see how airtable competes.
Yeah. I feel like the ratio is probably more than Windows vs Linux. Of course for many users the ship has been sailed and they've switched to Obsidian. But for many many many more users they never even heard of Obsidian.
Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things.
On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation.
I think they cater to different use cases and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.
Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.
For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Every day I have my Obsidian vault open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.
I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. But I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recently said: "If you think about applications, each application is kind of like a mini-prison of computing". (https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/75...) I think he's right. I don't want to be in Notion's prison even if it's big and nice.
I like Obsidian a lot (especially for the ease of plugin development), but my impression is that most people don't use such comparatively heavy applications for managing their personal lives. It's more likely that they use a Google Keep or sticky notes just placed in random places. That leaves mostly enterprise use cases for such knowledge management tools, and Notion is much more full-featured for enterprise than Obsidian is.
In our small (~12) product studio, we switched to Obsidian for team stuff as well and it’s working really well.
Collaboration on the same notes works just fine, even if there is no “live editing” (which we realised is not really useful for us anyway). The fact that notes are just text files on disk has been transformative though - folks use the Shortcuts app, scripts and what not to manage and lookup things.
Came here to say as much. No proprietary 'lock-in' with Obsidian, just plain .md, and honestly (if I recall correctly - it's been years now) I felt like I struggled using Notion's 'fancier' features. It seemed like copying/pasting out of it was often problematic.
Like others are saying, though, Notion is much more geared for collaboration. I couldn't care much less about that, so here I am with Obsidian, still, years later.
My only reasons for switching was performance and simplicity. (Okay, I guess now that I write out like that, it seems like a pretty substantial disillusionment.)
Notion was always very sluggish and bulky. If they added a simple way to very quickly load and write simple Markdown notes on desktop and mobile like Obsidian, I might not have switched. Meanwhile their mobile app was taking literally 10+ seconds to even open.
Are they comparable tools in a team context? The ease of linking documents to people and collaborating? Seems like solo, sure. But in a group.. Obsidian doesn't replace Notion at all.
obsidian’s great for solo use, but for team collaboration, anytype is closer to notion-built-in group sync, permissions, and offline support. you don’t need plugins or external services for multi-user editing; it just works across devices
Disagreement insofar as the direction of vim. Neovim choosing to go there on way on functionality they wanted to implement both ultimately enriched vim as some ideas found there way into vim proper and gave the community additional options.
Such splits aren't always handled well and value is lost when good ideas aren't merged back because of personal reasons and when contributors stop contributing because they are turned off by the drama. See libav vs ffmpeg.
> because they believe it splits the Vim community and takes people power away from Vim development
I don't understand this point, and I tried to parse it and still don't. (I understand that you are just relaying it).
If vim maintainers don't want neovim to exist, they should have accepted the merges earlier. If they disagree with the merges (which I think they did), then that power doesn't belong in Vim anyways.
edit: this reminds me of this conversation from years ago
>I don't understand this point, and I tried to parse it and still don't. (...) If vim maintainers don't want neovim to exist, they should have accepted the merges earlier. If they disagree with the merges (which I think they did), then that power doesn't belong in Vim anyways
It's a very simple point to understand: whether the merges are good or not, the presence of a fork still "splits the Vim community and takes people power away from Vim development".
And if they're bad (which is the way they see it), they do it for no good reason too.
That's regardless of people "having the right to fork". Yes they do. But also yes, if they exercize that right, they do split a community and divert interest from a project to 2 projects.
> That's regardless of people "having the right to fork". Yes they do. But also yes, if they exercize that right, they do split a community and divert interest from a project to 2 projects.
You're not dividing the same-sized pie.
The alternative to a fork is a single project with fewer contributors.
The alternative to two communities is a single community that's not as large as the two would've been, with a good chunk of those remaining having unfulfilled wishes or unheard complaints.
The alternative to Vim as it is today is very likely Vim without a a few of its new features and improvements that came with Vim 8 and 9.
We do. Neither vim-or-vim-fork editor users nor vim-or-vim-fork-potential-devs are going to see any significant jump in population from the presense of neovim. People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist.
And from people contributing to vim via themes, plugins, etc., some have taken their talents to neovim, which would have stayed with vim if neovim didn't exist.
>Forks are good
Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.
Neovim migrated to a more modern style of C and more tightly integrated Lua as its scripting language (instead of conscript). Those are two large potential stumbling blocks for contributors.
From loosely following development over the years, I see names like chrisbra and justinmk who contribute to both projects, but there seem to be many who contribute to neovim but never contributed to vim.
Neovim also seems to have influenced the development of vim: channels, jobs, terminal mode, and issues/PRs on github (instead of mailinglists) felt like shifts in response to neovim.
I think it's also to Bram, justinmk, and other maintainers credit that the two projects contribute back and forth: many vim fixes are merged to neovim and I see big changes get brought back to vim too.
You are stating these things as though they were established facts. But they seem to be opinions. Or do you have data to back them up?
> People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist.
It seems reasonable to assume that a lot of new people would not pick up either Vim or Neovim without LSP integration and Tree-sitter.
Vim has adopted a lot of the early features of Neovim and now Vim9 also has things like virtual text for rendering LSP diagnostics in the buffer[1] and there is a Vim9 LSP plugin too. But it does not at all seem likely that Vim would have these were it not for the push from Neovim.
Besides, it looks like Vim still does not have mature support for Tree-sitter.[2]
> Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.
There are many famous forks from the past 30 years that hardly anybody calls bad. Some examples: Net/Free/OpenBSD, GNU/XEmacs, Open/LibreSSL. These projects allowed people with different goals or values to carry on in their own directions, while also motivating each other to pick up development pace. They have often also shared code with each other.
This thought process contains the misconception that non-paying users are the primary currency that sustains a project as opposed to developers even though the former are nearly worthless and the latter vital.
It contains the misconception that without the fork and the ability to create what they want to create that the additional developers who themselves aren't getting paid would magically be reverted to additional free workers for a project they don't run even though they can't do what they want. In reality it is likely to lead to more total developers working on the ecosystem.
It contains the misconception that code created for the fork is worthless for the primary project despite the fact that compatibly licensed code can either directly be used or can be used as a conceptual v1 that can be improved with the benefit of the prior work.
> Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.
If this were well supported people would probably mention actual projects that had been hurt by forks instead of speaking of hypothetical matters for multiple decades. This is brought to you by the same line of thinking that we all ought to work on one foo where foo is a an application because then and only then would open source compete with the billions of dollars poured into photoshop and the entrenched benefit of OEMs supporting the windows ecosystem with its application ecosystem, broad hardware support, billions of dollars to pay developers, and ability to earn money on shovelware and convince grandma to instead download Linux ISOs.
Just because its commonly expressed doesn't mean there is merit to the argument.
>This thought process contains the misconception that non-paying users are the primary currency that sustains a project as opposed to developers even though the former are nearly worthless and the latter vital.
And yet, projects that fail to get adoption and foster a community rarely go that far, except if they're small hobby projects that can fit on one or two developers scope.
>It contains the misconception that without the fork and the ability to create what they want to create that the additional developers who themselves aren't getting paid would magically be reverted to additional free workers for a project they don't run even though they can't do what they want.
Projects are not just about core developers. They're also about adoption, documentation (webpages, posts, books, articles), plugins, even themes, and configuration bundles. All of those are split in a fork.
And it's not like without NeoVim most of those vi-style-liking people would have gone to a totally different alternative editor. Most of them would have stayed with Vim. Especially when the differences where small to begin with (but enough to fragment compatibility in many areas).
Devs and users (including new devs and users) that would have gravitated towards Vim, now have the addec choice to gravitate towards NeoVim. The amount of people, that, absense of NeoVim, would have gravitated towards something completely different is, I'd say, much smaller.
>If this were well supported people would probably mention actual projects that had been hurt by forks instead of speaking of hypothetical matters for multiple decades
People have mentioned actual projects that have been hurt by forks. XFree86 vs X.org, OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice, MariaDB vs MySQL, and others. The xBSD fragmentation didn't help either to them losing ground to Linux.
> Neither vim-or-vim-fork editor users nor vim-or-vim-fork-potential-devs are going to see any significant jump in population from the presense of neovim.
Last time I used vim there was still a thriving ecosystem of vanilla-compatible vimscript plugins. And this thread is full of neovim users who continue to use vim for some use cases, like on remote machines. How many vim users do you suppose use neovim for certain tasks? :)
> Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.
My experience has given me the exact opposite impression. Forking may not always mutually benefit both projects, but the end result at worst occupies the time of a few disgruntled maintainers who would have likely stopped contributing anyway, and at best delivers real value for users by being responsive to their needs and desires.
I guess you're right, the logic you describe is simple, but I submit that there's a more fundamental logic: If the folks who split away pull people out of the original community, it means there was demand for the things that prompted the split in the first place.
If Neovim had nothing to offer vs vanilla Vim, nobody would have followed them. This seems like efficient exploration of an idea space, to me, and something to be celebrated.
What splits it more, IMO, is that neovim went in a non-compatible direction with many of their design choices. They have good arguments for doing so, but it still means that writing community plugins that can work with either version of vim is inherently harder.
That feels a bit like criticizing all the c-style programming languages for splitting the C community... Which is an analogy I rather like, as it suggest Vim has become so foundational that its legacy goes beyond the direct users of it. I've certainly found that to be so, as in addition to using vim itself, I also use its key bindings wherever I can.
Unless employees in your company are reporting to you in India, your hopes of getting into an EB1 category is close to zero. You need to prove that you've managed EMPLOYEES of your company in multiple countries other than the US.
Correct. Unless you are super senior within an organization, you must be managing employees now and managing employees in the U.S. to have a chance at an EB1C green card.
I've been in one of the "Big 4" Consulting firms, and I can vouch for the article. As a "Senior" the Customer is charged 150-160$/hour and on top of that 25% for travel. The work that we did for these customers was lackluster. We used to come in as "experts", get all the technical work done from body shops in India and offshore. I was shocked to see that Customers just keep paying for these expensive services, and have no clue they are getting hoodwinked.
This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart.
Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat.
They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money.
"Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling."
"They are not brought in to solve problems"
I've known people that worked for consultancies and the biggest value add they think they have brought is when the problem is the rivalries, politics, and squabbaling has led to inaction and they've needed outside support to come in who don't care about these things.
Perhaps we should hope for companies to have leadership teams where they are able to cut through this intransigence, but unfortunately all too often with old companies stuck in their ways this isn't the case.
They might see their role as brilliant mediators facilitating action by settling feuds using 2x2 matrices, but I think that's naive at best, disingenuous at worst.
They care about the agenda of the person they've been hired by. Usually a C-level agenda-setter or someone influential in the org, and often a McK "alum".
And speaking of action, they have zero stake in the actual implementation of what they proselytize.
All this isn't to say that they don't provide value. Exchange of money is usually is a reasonable signal of providing value, and these firms and its employees do reliably well in that area. However, the narratives around what value strategy consultants provide I find to be truthy, but not actually true.
I can vouch for this. I've done software consulting in corporates a few times throughout my career. Probably the highest value things I've done have been those times the team's organisational structure was a bit broken, and nobody in the company had the visibility, audacity and cover to call it out.
One team had no clear leadership, and there was an important milestone coming up that the team didn't seem to be orienting around. I started kicking up a fuss in meetings by constantly asking "Is this important for our April launch?". I know I upset at least one person, but with some help from management we ended up collectively getting the launch back on track.
At another company my perspective was relayed through my consulting company to the client's upper management, and that ended up being used to fire someone. It doesn't feel good - he was a nice guy. But he was genuinely useless. He spent about 90% of his attention brown nosing to upper management. Once or twice he even actively sabotaged the team in small ways so he could be seen stepping in and fixing the problem. I think they wanted to get rid of him anyway but they didn't have legal cover.
There's absolutely value for companies in having outside consultants sit amongst a team. But its a subtle kind of value. I thought I was brought in to write code. Hah!
I should clarify “value” is subjective. Value in this context doesn’t necessarily mean good, of value to society, aligned with your values, etc. Just that one party is willing to part with cash in exchange for something of value to them (presumably of value to them – unless they’re on drugs).
They’re providing value, just not to the company at large. But the specific person that hired them, and pays them with company fund, you can bet your ass they’re getting value.
I don't think they were saying they are mediators or settle feuds. I'm sure a bunch of people at the companies are pissed at the conclusions they come to. It's moreso though that precisely because they aren't tied to any feudal relationships within the organization they're able to be more impartial with their research and cut through bureaucracy.
Certainly though if all they're doing is parroting back conclusions backed by "research" that the exec who hired them wants to hear then they aren't providing much value, other than perhaps providing air cover when some decision, any decision, is better than no decision and gridlock.
Based on what? I’m close with a few higher levels at different strategy consulting firms, and most of their work at these firms we’ve talked about has been serious: how to respond to a firm you’ve heard of receiving backlash over a botched vaccine, balancing a pivot in their product line with their existing customer base, etc
Problems that will screw you royally (speaking of the firm here) if you get them wrong, so you bring in outside perspective that can pattern match your problem to real world examples (and get in the room with others who’ve navigated a similar problem) to make sure you take the best trajectory.
At worst, consulting is exactly what you say. Large firms, being so large, cover the gamut in their services (and so surely get some exposure to these more flippant projects). The bread and butter of consulting though is solving real problems.
From here, this perspective you have about consulting looks a lot like the mindset some people have around VC: “they just come in to pump companies and dump them in the public market / make an exit before the music stops and everyone realizes it’s bullshit”. Of course there’s some of that in VC, but by and large it’s legitimate and serious work, focused on legitimate outcomes, and done all around by genuine people looking to do a good job - all while creating real value for everyone involved.
Another value of consulting is getting advice from someone who has seen the same decisions play out elsewhere, including at competitors, and apply their secret information on your behalf. It is effectively non-public strategy information laundering.
I find that the people most critical of strategy consulting are often the ones with least experience in it—and tend to paint caricature and with a broad brush at that. Thank you for this more realistic comment.
AS someone who has both read the book and interacted with "big 4" names a few times this is going to be one of those "underrated" comments you sometimes see here.
At my previous place of employ they made some really terrible decisions which ended up costing a LOT of money later.
Their response was classic "the design was vetted by McKinsey"..
No.. you sent them what you wanted to do, they told you what you wanted/needed to hear and now you are deflecting your decisions.
I worked for a health insurance provider that paid BCG $1mil to confirm that we should be using agile in our org. It took BCG a month to do their "study."
We were already using agile in our org, but nice to know some incesteral relationship between directors/VPs were able to make a nice pay day.
> nice to know some incesteral relationship between directors/VPs were able to make a nice pay day.
you should read the book.. The industry is rife with this type of behaviour.
There are always stories about how "senior manager" X is basically a shadow employee. While they work for company "Y" their real job is to send business to the consulting mother ship.
It's not always so formal or sinister. I've seen consultants build relationships with younger managers and "rising stars" by buying them lunch and drinks, and even doing some free work that makes them look good. Then the consultant is an easy connection when there's some dollars to hire consultants.
I can't find the comment now, but there was a similar conspiracy about ex-Amazon Managers being paid to force their new employers to adopt AWS on one of the programming subreddits.
There is usually no forcing: they are typically hired because of their AWS knowledge - the business has already decided to go AWS, the new hire is doing what he's expected to do.
This really sounds like a conspiracy theory. That being said, McKinsey (and presumably BCG and Bain) very much embrace their employees leaving to join their clients. It creates a good "referral" network if you will. But more than that, I don't buy it.
The throwaways are likely shills (or charitably - ignorant employees that don't wish to dive into any claims about their employer?). There are actual cases involving big four and kickbacks/bonuses and corporate sabotage.
One example in the last few years: BCG and NCR Corporation.
"It is undisputed that Mr. Benjamin, as an officer of NCR, owed NCR a fiduciary duty that includes a duty of loyalty. The Counterclaims allege sufficient facts to show that Mr. Benjamin breached that duty by entering into a secret agreement with BCG to promote and expedite his candidacy for CEO. The Counterclaims further allege sufficient facts to show that BCG worked with Mr. Benjamin to negotiate a one-sided contract, and remove and replace employees who opposed adoption of the contract, and that BCG advocated for Mr. Benjamin’s promotion to CEO in hopes that he would award BCG with a discretionary bonus." [1]
I can only obviously speak to my own experience and I did not come across anything like this. There's no love lost between me and my former employer FWIW.
Apologies, "in my opinion and limited experience" it sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I'm not legally literate enough to understand the court opinion you attached. Regardless, of course there will be cases of bad players in any large company - that goes without saying. But its tiresome always hearing the same "McKinsey is the root of all evil and secretly influences governments and companies".
The opinion that most engineers have of MBB is often based on conjecture as they typically have only ever hard arms length exposure to such consulting firms. As a software engineer myself, working at both startups and FAANG before McKinsey, I was of the exact same opinion about McKinsey and these types of companies. The truth is much more mundane and boring though.
That's the best strategy to prevent the masses from investigating further. You shouldn't label something like you did if you haven't done your research.
> legally literate enough to understand the court opinion you attached
I think you are literate enough to read and understand the key part I included in quotes for you, from the ruling which completely refutes your prior position, and attitude, with hard evidence. It's as clear as day!!!
> McKinsey is the root of all evil and secretly influences governments and companies
Well they've had a lot of bad looks, especially with their role with Purdue Pharma and OxyContin. Their former alumni was CEO of Enron which they consulted for 15 years. "But up until the very end, it was promoting Enron’s business model, especially its off-balance sheet accounting practice, and encouraging others to follow suit." They "recommended ICE save money on food served to the detainees or send the migrants to facilities in rural areas to cut back on expenditure" They agreed to pay $100M to South African government in a corruption scandal [1]
Last year, one of their private investment funds agreed to pay $18M to settle an SEC issue regarding insider information gleaned from the corporate consulting business. [2] They have a hedge fund which makes bets on the advice they sell.
Here's another one regarding McKinsey & their investment office (MIO) and Valeant Pharmaceuticals which buys out other drugmakers and jacks up prices. "Four top Valeant officials, including Mr. Pearson, were McKinsey veterans, and the firm was advising Valeant on drug prices and acquisitions." Later in the article, "a federal judge in Virginia last month reopened a coal-company bankruptcy case after learning that McKinsey had not disclosed, as required by law, that it was also among the company’s secured creditors, through MIO". Further down: "An investigation requested by the oversight board found that MIO had five direct and indirect investments in Puerto Rico’s debt while McKinsey advised the island". [3]
So you start to look at all these big corporate consulting firms and if you are being unbiased, you can see it's systemic. They wield a lot of power and influence. They get their alumni and friends placed in government and huge companies and then make deals and institute their strategies to make a ton of money.
> The truth is much more mundane and boring though.
Yes from your position it would be. You aren't the one placing CEOs, making kick back deals, getting involved with foreign governments and corruption, writing strategy for Encron, ICE or OxyContin, investing in company government debt on one side and advising on it the other. The system isn't designed for people like you to be included in that part of the business.
In my opinion, people fall into one of these buckets - pawn, shill, or informed. In an information age, isn't it remarkable that most STILL fall into the pawn category?
It's fair to say my view would be biased. But probably not in the direction you would think.
I think we need to be more critical of what it means to see things "first hand". MBB are typically operating at the executive level and the motivations between executives decisions typically don't reach the "rank and file" of the organization (forgive the wording). In my response I mentioned that the cost of engaging McKinsey is so extremely high that there will need to be some type of rational justification for bringing them in (beyond just covering my ass).
That being said, I worked on a few projects where I wasn't sure whether the cost justifies the benefits but this was largely due to incompetence or overselling - never "pure graft".
> I think we need to be more critical of what it means to see things "first hand".
I think everyone needs to be more critical of "Shill" accounts such as yours.
You are fast to assume that i did not see it "first hand", slow to realize that this does take place and when provided new information (the lawsuit post) unwilling/unable to incorporate new information into your position.
What value do you feel you are adding to the conversation? You seem to be wearing your McKinsey hat "they never do anything wrong, it is all justified just not at your level"..
By first hand I mean you're the executive paying the bill and understand the motives behind hiring a consulting firm and the incentives such a firm is working under for the client. I'm doubtful most here have that experience (I certainly never did in 20 years of industry before joining a consulting firm). Having McKinsey or BCG walking around your office and telling you what to do is not first hand experience in my opinion.
I'm trying to offer a unique opinion of a software engineer who spent a short time working in this industry. If you're not buying it then no problem.
Personally, I would never invite McKinsey or any of these companies into my own company. But then again I don't run a 100k person company.
Running agile in a small team is one thing, having a company do "agile at scale" is quite another (yes I realise the contradiction in terms). As someone who worked at McKinsey, on several large scale "agile" rollouts the bulk of the work was on re-organising the company (this is not an easy thing to do in companies with thousands of employees - hence bring in the consultants). The driver behind these projects was almost always cost cutting or increasing efficiency. The agile part was mostly window dressing.
No not at all; this org had existed for two years already, was already using agile for said two years, and successfully delivered a multitude of projects using agile.
The driver to me seems to clearly increase complexity for the sake of it in order to push for more billable hours.
This was pure graft.
Honest Q since you're a throwaway but is this how consultants typically act? Justify simple things to be more complex to lay people and charge them out the wazoo?
I think I'm slowly starting to understand why some of my friends are creating their own dev agencies. This racket is rife with stupid money.
That's interesting. I'm curious to know how the internal sponsor of the project sold it internally. It generally takes a lot of motivation to convince your superior (and finance team) to pay the millions McKinsey would charge per week.
At the micro level, I would agree that in some cases there was a tendency of some to make things more complex than necessary. The implicit intent here was generally to demonstrate some type of credential to lay people.
That being said, at least in my personal experience, most of the actual recommendations were backed by as much data as possible. In the projects I worked on, I don't think a single slide went by without hours of debate and critique by the partners. It was a given that any recommendation should be supported by data.
That being said, there are also lots of cases where there is no right/wrong answer - especially given the timeframe (typically 4-8 weeks). Companies basically pay consultants to come in, analyse as much data as feasible and just make some type of informed decision. In most cases the company is either unwilling to make that decision themselves or does not have the ability to do so (i.e. organisation is too complex to tackle this problem within so just get an outsider to cut across the company and get it sorted as best as possible).
> It generally takes a lot of motivation to convince your superior (and finance team) to pay the millions McKinsey would charge per week.
And an insurmountable barrier to then declare it was a waste of money.
ie once these initiatives start - they are inevitably declared successes because too much has been invested ( literally ).
So the consultants always leave with success declared, whether it works out in the long run I suspect the consultants will hardly ever know - just moving on from one declared success to another.
Fully agree with this. That being said, a lot of companies are wising up to this and forcing consultancies to work "fees at risk" - where they are only paid based on some measurable success metric.
There are obviously lots of hacks and shenanigans around defining and negotiating these success metrics with various "levels" [1] of impact being defined and fees being released only when some stage is crossed.
You are danger close to seem like you are defending agile. I am all in on blaming kickback consulting. But we can't blame agile's failure on consulting companies.
There was a genuine and optimistic belief in agile among programmers and management. They tried and failed refusing to admit the mistake and doubling down on all the BS.
It works perfectly fine to hire consults to do welding courses for the employees. If agile was a good idea "agile consultants" would do fine to.
Another rôle they play is a kind of out-in-the-open corporate espionage. You pay them to come in and tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry (i.e. effective new things your competitors have been doing since the last time they came to visit you—and they'll learn some new ones from you to tell your competitors, next time)
Oh, so they increase productivity across the industry, thus leading to wage rises for employees, increased margins for company profits and a higher GDP for the country.... right?
(Off to dig my tongue out of the deep hole in my cheek.)
Didn't necessarily say it was bad. It's a bit like the Japanese R&D-pooling system post-WWII, in some ways, and AFAIK that worked great. Just unofficial, and with a profit margin.
[EDIT] Well, and also it's not kept within the host country, but exports those ideas & methods globally.
I had an Econ prof who described his consulting business as:
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.
Where I saw that work it was effectively routing around the middle layer: the guy bucking for a promotion based on some project isn’t going to let any report mention that the users hate it, but they’ll certainly tell the consultants that.
It worked but was a very expensive way to about fixing social problems.
This highly-paid factory efficiency expert was enthusiastically explaining how he works. "You just listen to the workers. They know where the inefficiencies are"
I've worked with senior managers who have zero regard for the knowledge of the people doing the work. It might be those workers don't have some over-arching conceptual framework for how the company works, but they do have intimate and sometimes deep knowledge of what they do all day. And not taking advantage of that is a huge blind spot.
I have worked as a consultant, but not for the one of the big 4. We understood that we were often being used to develop an 'independent' perspective that would support a decision that had essentially already been made or disprove a rival decision.
We also were fully aware of the old joke that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and then tells you the time. We sometimes deployed this ourselves with customers, and extended it to say that unlike our rivals, we would actually point out how late you were and how to get back on track.
[Edit] We sometimes found ourselves supporting one of the big 4 companies (as domain experts). We were often amazed by the quality of the A team that they would deploy to win the work, compared with the B or C team that would then actually execute it (often bright but junior staff).
That's exactly my experience in Europe. We want to fire 50 people/close a factory/whatever without blowback...let's hire McK to tell us to do exactly that.
I've also had some experience working for a smallish company with very big clients and they sometimes insisted on having an IT-Consulting company like Capgemini as a middleman. That's the biggest nightmare because they were always a net-negative from my POV...integrating them was just extra work and they provided no value except for their brand name to make the client feel at ease.
I'd say companies like this are a scam, but they're only half a scam -- half the customers know exactly what they're getting.
The other half haven't figured it out and think they're getting top-tier stuff and end up with life destroying garbage like your employee performance system or a citywide trash crisis? [1]
Do you need to spend millions to justify an inevitable decision but blame the hired guns for it? Hire McKinsey.
Do you need to spend millions for severely overworked junior grade consultants and offshored "experts" to provide you with objectively terrible advice and create an opioid epidemic? Also hire McKinsey! [2]
I have worked in a third-grade infrastructure company in India. Everyone in top management (including founder) was corrupt. Their business practices were always about bribing, siphoning off investors money, inflating assets, money laundering and so on. When it was trying to go public, it hired one of 'big 4' to do the auditing and other due diligence. Once it went public, that agency was fired (2 years after going public). With in 6 years, that company became bankrupt.
Everyone knew that one of 'big 4' was hired to make the prospects of going public legit and credible. That consulting firm made things look right in exchange of big bucks.
This has been my experience when the company I work for engages with an external consultant. Managers look for validation from an external source so that:
- when things go well, they can take the credit, or
- when things go bad, they can blame the consulting company.
This. Big 4 consultants are also needed by law or by convention in a lot of places for auditing and such tasks. If it's for actual consultancy services, the decision has already been made. Having a Big 4 company "sign" and provide authority on a decision a manager has already made, just makes it an easier sell to his/her higher ups.
Furthermore, they're trying to convince someone else (usually a boss) of a theory/idea/strategy that they might have but don't have the resources/rapport/etc. to demonstrate it's effectiveness.
Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
$150/hr is really not that much money, depending on the importance of the project, and having devs from India is fine.
Almost the entirety of the question in any given situation is 'Did it work out?'
Because if it did, it was worth it.
Companies are not interested in making 'great products' like a startup would, for some secondary thing.
Mostly, it's like construction: they need something built. That works. Not some kind of innovative thing.
They don't have a year to find 'top talent' and go through interesting architectures, or dynamic processes. They wouldn't even know how to do that.
You might be very well downplaying your input: if you are competent, know what you are doing, show up, and can solve the problem, you're probably worth every penny and much more. Now maybe that is or is not the case! Or maybe 'it depends' or maybe, some projects kind of necessarily require 'proper engineering'.
Now, all of what I just said would apply to normal circumstances. In Africa, it's so complicated. McKinsey is also very different office by office. Corruption is harder than we understand, because when it's a random event we can say 'oh, corrupt!' - but when it's normal trade practice aka 5% kickback for the buyer, well, it takes on a different characteristic.
your comment just establishes a spectrum- on one extreme, you have what is essentially a helpful project manager, on the other extreme you have a worse than useless middle man. I think the point might be that Mckinsey is more towards the bad extreme than people think.
For starters - 'McKinsey' actually doesn't do implementations. So you're not going to hire them to build something. Second, it's hard to fathom their value because it's very secretive. There's nary any real objective data.
Oh looks like they've changed their model. I would trust them to give strategic advice about something, or maybe some insights from an industry expert they might happen to have. Actionable or not, who knows. But I wouldn't trust them to 'build' anything.
I worked in McKinsey Digital. Here's an example of the typical type of project we did:
- Client is a legacy bank
- Client wants to be a fancy new cool digital bank like Revolut
- Client brings in McKinsey to help get them there
- McKinsey (traditional side) does a strategy engagement first (4-8 weeks) to define priorities, budget, etc
- McKinsey Digital + traditional consultants come in to do the implementation. This includes architecture, actual tech building (more on this below), assisting with hiring and HR, coaching, financials, integration/de-integration with rest of business. Essentially everything involved with starting a "new" business.
If you want a single company to come in and literally do everything to build and run a new business I do think you would need an MBB-type company as they can bring in all these different skills (business, people, tech, process etc). I'm very reluctant to praise my former employer.
On the actual tech building side, McKinsey would typically bring only 1-3 technical people as it's cost prohibitive for the client (I was one of those people). McKinsey would help the client hire new people or bring in contractors (i.e. Nagarro and the likes).
> Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
That’s not being hoodwinked either. If you’re happy to pay $1B for something and get that thing, then that’s your fault for not shopping around for a better deal.
Bernie Madoff and SBF hoodwinked people. Somebody charging a premium for their services and getting willing customers isn’t.
I have worked with the big 4, and also been on the receiving end of their "work". I can vouch for this comment personally. I've never seen less effort put into something worth so much money. Reams and reams of documents, jargon, and other bullshit and some cheap, obviously outsourced, incredibly shitty, "wireframe" sold as an MVP of a product.
I would be impressed by them if I wasn't so disgusted.
I've also seen some of these expensive "strategic" documents. And they looked like they were written by a high schooler (not a top of the class student either).
Just how fast they can adopt their standardized, saying-nothing-of-value presentations to each client's internal jargon and "needs" is impressive so, I have to give them that.
Used to work as a sub-contractor for Deloitte, all the work was done by us, the Deloitte folk would spend 12 hrs a day at work - looking super busy, attending meetings, schmoozing with the client, go for lunches and dinners and building reports and spreadsheets.
They hired impressionable good looking young people who were good at selling, period.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. The acronym is MBB (McKinsey, Bain, and BCG) that I'm familiar with when referring to the top consulting companies. MBBD (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Deloitte) is a reddit joke that I've seen a bunch. The original commenter was using McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Accenture to refer to the "big 4" consulting firms. I've worked with Accenture before, but I've never heard anyone group Accenture with those other consulting firms.
The Big 3 distinction isn't based on firm size (McKinsey, Bain, and BCG only have 38k, 25k, and 15k employees respectively) but rather on prestige and type of work done.
Dell is not lumped in with MAGMA even though they’re everywhere and everyone knows who they are because they have completely different business models, employee pools and compensation. They’re barely in the same industry, if you squint. Similarly with Accenture and prestige consultancies. If you were going to have a Big 4 the fourth would be AT Kearney, not Accenture.
If you redefine common terms as you go, you should at least give the reader a heads up. Nobody uses “big 4” for MBB and Accenture. Those are not the same type of companies.
The whole thread is debating who’s sitting in the BIG4 and all I see is companies trying to belong on musical chairs. What’s strangest to me is we’re not in an early-Schumpeter cycle, seats should be well-established by now, it’s been half a century.
Accenture aren't even in the Vault Consulting Top 50 rankings. I don't know how this list is calculated but people in consulting tend to refer to this (I used to work at MBB).
lol. McK isn't a body shop. McK = ivy league grads, olympic medalists, top PhD's from flagship state schools. I mean Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey. You think she's going to be managing some Indians on setting up SAP?
Big4 I used to work are fairly clear about who they call senior (consultant / senior consultant / manager / senior manager/etc) and I can rarely fault them.
Now for consultancies (Accenture and the like), the term is a bit more loose indeed.
Not exactly. The thing to keep in mind here though is that billable rate isn't necessarily 40 hours/week and you likely have some sort of salary component that requires you to hit a base amount of billable hours.
So something like (just making up numbers here)
$120,000/year
$170/hr for each billable hour over 20 hours/month
Sales/delivery bonuses, etc.
Plus, the Big 4 are, by law (SOX), forbidden from doing consulting work. Also, there are for, because public companies need someone to audit the books and someone to help them to prepare those books. Companies have to change auditors and the ones helping to prepare the books ever so often, and you cannot just stick with the same two simply switching chairs. All of that, of course, to avoid another Enron like disaster. Hence a pool of four big accounting firms most public companies, regardless if the fall under SOX or not, cycle through.
I've heard that curing internal myopia is a top priority for McKinsey this decade. Focus is on broadening gender/age/economic background and also broadening professional experience backgrounds.
They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss.
Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
Oh, glad McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. You aren't developing shit when every single person you hire leaves after 2 years, don't astroturf this garbage here.
What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
Right, that's why the GP is sarcastically saying how awesome it that they're now going to expand that ruinous treatment to more people by hiring more minorities.
In my experience, Accenture is the big body shop. I've worked at companies that outsource tech strategy, new system requirements / scoping, delivery and development, and post deployment support and maintenance 100% to Accenture.
There are regional hubs they have (I've worked with Philippines and India and heard of Eastern Europe) for the support and maintenance.
There are some back office financial shared services (e.g., AP / AR / cutting POs) that they also support. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more.
Accenture can give you everything from the PowerPoint slides up to the people that will be seconded or placed in your organization as contingent workers / contractors.
That's Big 3 like McKinsey, and yes, notes sent to India, India turns them into powerpoints, team on the engagement has the powerpoints by the next morning (apparently execs don't even read something that's not in a powerpoint—they'll do this with stuff that's only ever going to be emailed, never presented)
