The people who work at McKinsey are, in the context of the American class system, members of the elite. They are not the oppressed proletariat. They're soft-handed, Ivy League educated elites fighting to climb the top rungs of the status ladder. That's always been difficult throughout human history, and if the biggest hardship of our elite is 2 AM Zoom calls, we should find a more deserving elite.
Don't get me wrong. I certainly don't want to be on any 2 AM Zoom calls. But I also don't aspire to be a member of the elite. And if I did, I would probably be willing to endure hardship in order to achieve that goal.
But there's another level to this. At one point, the left advocated for the working class, and a leftist rag like Mother Jones wouldn't be caught dead publishing entitled whining from members of the soft-handed elite class complaining about how difficult their lives are. But now, for some reason, the McKinsey class has managed to co-opt the left and cast themselves as the victims.
The notion that any working class individual should not care about any other working class individuals who draw a higher salary then themselves is whats keeping the working class from properly organizing and balancing power against actual elites, which is those who own companies like McKinsey, not those who are just salaried employees, let alone the entry level employees.
Its odd that’s people have such an easy time having sympathy towards the mistreated, but immediately lose that sympathy once they realize that the affected make more a month than they do.
People who work for McKinsey are not "working class". They are junior members of the upper class who are being fast-tracked into largely undeserved positions of status and power by virtue of their class affinity. They are the nearest thing America has to aristocrats.
Tell me, exactly what actual expertise does some 20-something kid fresh out of college have in terms of business management? If that kid actually started their own business and became a successful entrepreneur, I might believe they'd know what they were doing, but then they'd probably be rich enough that they wouldn't have time for McKinsey. (Money is not equivalent to social class.)
So instead of those kids, McKinsey ends up with the kids whose life strategy is to leverage their class status to navigate their way through existing institutions. Which makes them a fairly strong parallel to the old European aristocrats who managed to gain commissions as army and navy officers without any particular demonstrated expertise in military or naval affairs.
Though it's unfair of me to pin this entirely on the old European aristocracy. Our aristocracy also has their way of gaining undeserved naval commissions:
> A direct commission officer (DCO) is a United States uniformed officer who has received an appointed commission without the typical prerequisites for achieving a commission, such as attending a four-year service academy, a four-year or two-year college ROTC program, or one of the officer candidate school or officer training school programs, the latter OCS/OTS programs typically slightly over three months in length.
> After earning his Oxford degree, in 2007 Buttigieg became a consultant at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company....Buttigieg joined the U.S. Navy Reserve through the direct commission officer (DCO) program and was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence in September 2009.
> [Hunter] Biden received an age-related waiver and a waiver due to a past drug-related incident; he was sworn in as a direct commission officer.... The following month, Biden tested positive for cocaine during a urinalysis test and was subsequently discharged administratively.
Dividing people in classes and showing no empathy for those you dislike is supposed to be what's bad with the "elite" fantasy (everyone, with a bit of work, can get a slave job anywhere)
Yes, this "from my perspective, you are elite, so it is okay to abuse you for a while" will quickly backfire on people lower on the social ladder.
It is okay to wake up McKinsey employees at 2AM, because hey, they make more money than most of us.
It is okay to make software developers work 60 hours a week, because hey, they make more money than most of us (from the perspective of someone outside the Hacker News audience).
It is okay to... mistreat people in some sweatshop, because hey, they make slightly more money than... people working in some other sweatshop.
How about instead adopting the rule "40 hours a week, not a second more, full stop, no exception". Yeah, some rich kids would benefit from that, too. But you wouldn't have to worry that the lack of empathy will trickle down to you, so maybe it's a smarter strategy in long term. (Especially for the Hacker News readers, who are often not that far from the top.)
It's not about money. It's about aristocracy. Aristocrats aren't necessarily richer than the middle or working class in monetary terms. Class is more about status and power than about money.
If it were up to me, I would abolish the aristocracy and dissolve aristocratic institutions such as McKinsey that don't appear to contribute anything to society.
But if we're going to have an elite, let's at least hope they have the decency to shut the fuck up about how hard it is being a member of the hereditary upper class.
I empathize with her situation as I've been in similar situation at a Big 4 organization - An onshore manager (not my direct manager) from my team called me up at 2.30am (his afternoon time) during the first week of our engagement. I did not receive the call but fretted over whether he had an emergency at the Client site.
Turns out, that the next day, he mentioned he had simply called up at the unearthly hour to ask about details that I had already mailed him the previous evening. His lame excuse - 'Sorry dude, I don't read mails'
I'm not sure if I should feel proud or ashamed (or maybe both) that I was able to pull off 60-80 hour weeks and weekend work far too long for my corporate overlords without resorting to exotic stuff that the interviewee in this article used for staying up late/battling stress.
As long as people are enamored by such workplaces (including 24 year old past 'me'), not much will change - at least not soon.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the manager showed no remorse for a situation that was never an emergency. Guess I should simply be grateful that he didn't reprimand me for failing to be his 24 hour little helper/Verbal Email reader. :)
Sorry that you had to experience something like this.
While it never happened to me, but apparently one of my colleague's manager got a direct phone call from his manager because "he was not responding to slack messages fast enough."
I suspect places that house managers like yours and mine has no interest in dis-incentivizing these behavior and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Apart from lack of interest in dis-incentivizing this behavior, two possible reasons come to mind - why managers like these exist:
1. (Nature) Some of them were just tuned that way since childhood.
2. (Nurture) When these managers were junior employees, some/all of their past managers micro-managed them similarly, which built up resentment inside them and instead of rejecting these traits & becoming a better human, these junior employees decided to 'Pay it forward' in the worst way possible and ergo, continue the vicious cycle.
She should not worry. After 1.5-2 years of 60-hour workweeks at McKinsey she will be qualified to get a comfy 40-hour work-week management position at a software company and will make us devs work 60-hour work-weeks until she retires us at 35 because who needs that much experience to program a computer. And unless this is in FAANG, we will get paid as seniors the same she did as a junior.
Sounds terrible, but all the US medical resident physicians are playing the world’s tiniest violins for this article, because they keep worse hours, get paid less (like half to 60%), and if they mess up, someone dies or is maimed.
edit: downvoted for truth — witness the medical resident physician reply below confirming exactly what I observed. To clarify, I support raising the standards for all junior people and do not advocate abusive employment and training practices.
I was thinking exactly this. They get all kinds of perks at McKinsey, I just get dumped on by everyone. We don’t get retirement benefits, travel expenses, anything that is standard in corporate America and we have essentially no freedom to switch teams or move between specialties etc. like they do in the corporate world. Not to mention their salaries go up dramatically in 1-2 years of training. They would easily be making 5x what we make in a few years.
Not that they have it great, but I just have difficulty feeling too much empathy.
Ok, I’m going to go back to trying not to kill anyone today.
US medical resident training is exploitative. At least the duty hours and overt toxicity is massively improved compared to even 15 years ago. Do surgery residents still have to lie to ACGME about hours these days? Hope that is better.
I believe that is called "crab bucket mentality". Resident doctors deserve better than that. Their situation should be improved rather than dismissing everybody else's struggles.
Sorry it came across as dismissal, because it wasn’t. I don’t condone abusive employment or training conditions for anyone.
It was merely an honest observation that society writ large, and especially of note young physicians, will find it hard to sympathize with Ivy League grads making double their salary at a younger age with far less responsibility.
McKinsey just sounds like another tournament -- 64 people start, puke blood, and and try to be the final survivor who becomes a partner and becomes hugely wealthy. The rest rinse away to other places over time. No different than working at Goldman Sachs, etc.
If you decide to enter a tournament, fine, but adjust your expectations accordingly. This author sounds naive and self-pitying.
After being on pager duty at all hours plus working I sadly do not find her experience that different from the usual. That’s just the way it works these days .
I shudder to think if they go on strike and decide not to play golf for one day. This would surely bring worker revolution that we've been talking lately.
Every time unions come up on hacker news, I feel I step into a surreal dystopia. I live in a country where almost everyone is part of some union. It's not "if", it's mostly "which".
I was once part of an oncall rotation at work. We got 100% overtime, and a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how time consuming the actual issue was. Answer an email? Two hours overtime pay.
The idea that an individual stands a chance against a company, and that unions somehow don't change this dynamic for the better of the workers is so detached from reality, that I'm almost impressed at how effective propaganda campaigns must have been in the US.
The last epoch US workers had decent working conditions was in a time when unions were a lot more common. People fought and died for this. They didn't piss off and go golfing for a day.
From som cursory searching for stats: OECD 2016, 27 hours per week vs 34 in the US. They are from different years, so not sure how comparable they are.
Also, PPP probably also matters little unless you take into account the cost of living? And doesn't capture polarized inequality.
> PPP probably also matters little unless you take into account the cost of living
The point of PPP vs raw GDP is to take cost of living into account. Without knowing the country you're referring to, I can't really compare or discuss further.
Recently I learned of a quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (among other things, the science fiction writer and futurist): "...the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system..." [0] So, if Mr. Clarke is to be believed, does that mean that organizations like McKinsey - and for that matter capitalism in general - represent old fashioned ways of thinking? Then, why do orgs like McKinsey get paid so much??? /s
er, no. The idea is that we currently do not have a post-scarcity society, and will maintain the existing system to develop technology until we do, at which point, what's the point of a political-economic system?
Perhaps we will never achieve literal post-scarcity. Some people will always want to fly to another galaxy, and there might be not enough fuel to make all of them happy.
But if instead of yes-or-no we take it as a scale, I'd say we moved a lot on this scale during the last hundred years. So, how about reducing the work-week to 30 hours? Or perhaps keep it at 40 hours, but after each two years of work you get one year of vacation?
Welcome to consulting and working across time zones. Let’s not forget that in management consulting, dedication definitely pays off if you operate efficiently and consistently deliver results. It’s not a work/life balance job, but it’s one with interesting challenges that does give a lot of flexibility even though demands can be high sometimes.
Lol, spoken like a true corporate slave. Sad thing is anyone who works in McKinsey has more than enough talent to succeed without sacrificing their personal life. I guess the saying is true, McKinsey is filled will people who used to be interesting.
Don't get me wrong. I certainly don't want to be on any 2 AM Zoom calls. But I also don't aspire to be a member of the elite. And if I did, I would probably be willing to endure hardship in order to achieve that goal.
But there's another level to this. At one point, the left advocated for the working class, and a leftist rag like Mother Jones wouldn't be caught dead publishing entitled whining from members of the soft-handed elite class complaining about how difficult their lives are. But now, for some reason, the McKinsey class has managed to co-opt the left and cast themselves as the victims.