
The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell - dsplittgerber
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html
======
edster
Here is my best story about business consultants...

I was contracting at a big three automaker and they had retained just such a
firm, possibly even BCG, to "restructure" the IT department.

So they had a team of overpaid consultants come and perform an analysis. I
won't even get into the pointlessness of all that. However, the leader of the
pack, the alpha male of the consulting team, would physically walk his laptop
over to a printer near the admin's desk to print because the information was
too sensitive to print over the network.

In true hacker fashion a buddy and I had recently discovered that you could
telnet into the printers and with a carefully crafted command actually set the
text on the LCD readout on the printer itself. (The spot where is usually says
"Load Paper") So we actually wrote a program that would allow us to send any
text we wanted to any LCD of a printer.

So of course, this self important consultant became our first victim of the
prank. He hooked up his laptop and we starting sending text like "Loading
Virus" to the LCD. It actually became a little frustrating because he wasn't
noticing the LCD.

Finally, he looked at the LCD and we starting sending text like "Downloading
files from computer". This guy just went into an absolute panic and after the
first few seconds of frantic inactivity he got his act together and closed the
laptop. Of course, that didn't stop the printer from "Downloading files", so
he finally ripped the cable from his laptop to sever the connection.

He was in a panic for what I'm sure were some of the longest seconds of his
life, but by then we were doubled over laughing just a couple of desks away
and he caught on.

I will give him credit for taking the joke well and he never tried to push it
up the food chain or anything to involve any management.

~~~
Hoff
Well, if you're looking for fodder for future fun and games, remind your mark
that all sorts of interesting stuff can be recovered from the disks that are
often resident inside mid- and upper-end printers. And remind your mark that
printers actually can be infested with stuff; it's a good spot for malware to
operate on a LAN, too.

------
kolya3
Great description of burnout: "What I learned is that burning out isn’t just
about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do
work."

~~~
arvinjoar
This is so true. My father took on a nightclub all by himself. It was a stupid
move, he lost a lot of money doing that. What he was missing was a partner.
Not only to lessen his work load, but also to keep him motivated.

This is the reason you see musicians take 5 year breaks, or even quitting
music. They are lacking in motivation. Look at the band Queen, They are still
making music and touring, but half the band has quit. Freddie Mercury died and
John Deacon quit music altogether. What did John Deacon lose? His motivation.
Brian May and Roger Taylor both had a lot of say in the bands creative
process, and that process motivated them to continue, even after Freddie had
passed away. Now, Deacon, he wasn't as involved in that process, and he was
the one who quit.

~~~
known
"Not only to lessen his work load, but also to keep him motivated."

Advantages of doing <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PairProgramming>

~~~
dustingetz
yep, whole > sum

------
microcentury
"At my salary level, and with my expected advancement path, I could
comfortably retire in my thirties."

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

~~~
gvb
They think they will retire in their thirties, but they never have enough.

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

Enough."

[http://www.johnboglemedia.com/component/content/article/1-la...](http://www.johnboglemedia.com/component/content/article/1-latest/1-john-
bogle-enough.html)

~~~
wisty
Their fixed costs keep rising. When you are 22, you think that $100,000 a year
(rising with inflation) is heaps. But by 30, you buy your first yacht, and it
takes $50,000 a year just to keep it in the dock.

~~~
Retric
While that's true, the cause of this is a salary that compounds faster than
inflation. If you make 10% more each year it's almost impossible to retire
anywhere near the salary you had 5 years ago without saving a huge percentage
of your income.

EX: Ignoring inflation, if you get a 10% rase a year and get a 10%ROI on your
investments every year then you need to save 40% of your income to for 35
years to retire on what you made 5 years before you retired. (Assuming you can
live safely on 4.5% of your capital / year)

------
api
"I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful
businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of
being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual."

WOW that is dead on. I get the feeling half the world is like that.

~~~
tomjen3
The problem is that it is not that simple, because just doing what others do
works very well in most cases and you don't have the time to start questioning
_everything_ - why do you shower in the morning? Why eat three times a day?

I don't want to defend cargo-cults, but people copy because it works.

~~~
api
No, it's worse than that. I have seen this before. There is an entire portion
of the business world that merely goes through the motions of being successful
businesses rather than actually being businesses at all. It's really weird.

You could look at it as investment fraud with plausible deniability. Take
money, hire consultants, look busy. The only thing is, I don't think it's that
explicit or intentional. I think there's a breed of person out there in the
business world who does not grasp the distinction between actually doing
something and imitating the appearance of doing it.

~~~
duhprey
There's always been something wrong, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it,
with the idea of getting a degree solely in "business"... I think I get it
now.

Reminds me of a shirt I saw somewhere from a cartoon I've never seen: "What's
this? I'm going to go do some Science on it!" Seems very similar to: "I'm a
business man"

~~~
api
I could not agree more. Business is something you do with stuff, but you have
to have stuff to do business about. Business is not something that can be done
in a void.

A lot of the fakers and cargo cultists are trying to do business about
business to do business... they're not delivering any value because they don't
know how.

------
jonp
The author's first two articles on Dubai:

<http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N16/dubai.html>

<http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N17/dubai.html>

~~~
strongsauce
thanks for this, tried looking for them after the little footnote but their
website had no links to them that i could find.

~~~
repsilat
Interestingly, a google search for "This is the first in a four-part series on
the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai." and "This is the second in
a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai."
(with or without the quotes) turns up the other two articles well enough.

------
holdenc
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.

~~~
abalashov
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.

~~~
GFischer
They don't want anyone that has a clue and might therefore threaten them!
(sadly seen this in my work)

Edit: many of the other cynical explanations further down in the thread are
quite valid too (scapegoat theory et al)

~~~
edster
I've worked at so many of the largest companies as an employee, contractor and
even overpaid consultant and this is completely true. These companies are
completely mired in their own structure that there is nothing they can do to
get out.

Everyone is protecting their turf and their headcount that you almost have to
have "Bob and Bob" come into, even though they don't know anything themselves.

When I was working for a professional organization as a consultant, sometimes
I would go into gigs where I literally knew nothing about the product that I
was supposedly an expert on. I remember specifically one case where I spent a
frantic weekend learning about a tech that I was supposed to help this company
plan a rollout for because I was the expert. The worst part was these
employees had been preparing for this rollout for weeks, so they already had a
good grasp of the core and I was still trying to learn all of the acronyms.

~~~
api
Human group social behavior is a liability in our modern society. It works
pretty well when you're a tribe of 20 people hunting and gathering, but it
doesn't scale.

------
tokenadult
"I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder
such questions, 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. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the
children test."

I wonder how many children get sent to college by dads like that.

~~~
caffeine
I think it shows closed-mindedness on his part. They taught him analysis at
MIT, but they didn't teach him to think properly.

You're a guy with a degree from the top technical school in the world and
you've got one of the world's most prestigious consultancies on your resume:
you don't think you could go on to find a job in which you could afford your
kids' education AND not be a hypocrite?

I respect him for standing up after the fact and saying "I'm a wealthy
hypocrite." But I don't respect him for going to work there in the first
place. You'd have to have spent junior year of college buried in sand not to
know it's a game, mostly dirty.

~~~
jackowayed
Well he was taking a double course-load and working, so that may count as
being buried in sand.

But still, even if he didn't know beforehand, he figured it out very quickly
upon arrival and then stayed for a long time for the money, so I agree with
most of your point.

~~~
gjm11
Did he stay a long time? It doesn't look that way to me from the article, but
maybe I just missed something.

[http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-
day-...](http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-in-dubai-
work-is-still.html) seems to imply that he started there in June 2009.
[http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-
impe...](http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-
imperative.html) seems to imply he was still there in October.

... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are
together in one handy bundle at
[http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2010/03/dubai-
and-...](http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2010/03/dubai-and-back-
again-consultants-tale.html) .

So, he was apparently there for at least 4 months and at most 9 months. I
wouldn't call that "a long time" in this context.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
gjm11
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.)

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
gjm11
He already said, kinda, what the salary was: with bonuses and whatnot, he
expected to be getting $200k per year.

Given what he's possibly done to their reputation (I don't know; perhaps
everyone already thought they were corrupt and dishonest anyway) that he
wouldn't have been able to do if he'd signed the NDA, I don't see that an
explanation in terms of salary is required: getting everyone to sign the NDA
greatly reduces their exposure to this kind of bad publicity.

------
bkrausz
The tl;dr version:

Large consulting companies often tell their clients what they want to hear,
which more or less negates the point of consultants but can often pay better.
There are ethical concerns here.

I like the story, but the article itself has way too many metaphors that cloud
the point.

Or maybe I'm just too used to having all my stories condensed into 140
characters...

~~~
Silhouette
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 side (friends and friends of friends
who went into consultancy firms; few of them have stayed there much longer
than this guy).

What I don't get is why shareholders (for big companies) or government
auditors (for government organisations) don't openly criticise the policy of
wasting money hiring these completely unqualified people who either offer no
real benefit or actively cause harm to the projects they join. Obviously a
genuine expert could offer useful consultancy in their field of expertise, but
that doesn't seem to be the MO of these big multinational consultancy shops.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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 the fluff and is more profitable. These things happen.
But my reaction as a shareholder is to become a shareholder of the better
company and dump the stock of the inefficient one. I'm not trying to make the
inefficient company more efficient. Some activist shareholders do that, but
most don't.

There is one very important truth that too few people are considering:
Shareholders are not entrepreneurs. Most shareholders have no interest in
improving a particular company. Their interest is in choosing undervalued
companies and selling them when they are not undervalued any longer,
preferably at a higher price.

The distinction between investors and speculators is a lie. There is no
difference between the two. The important difference is the one between owners
and entrepreneurs.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
eru
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.

~~~
Retric
The only problem is they rarely buy the whole company, often they just get a
controlling share. At which point they can do a pump and dump which is great
if you sell at the right time but it tends to hurt long term investors.

~~~
yummyfajitas
How do you pump and dump a large company that you just purchased at a premium?

Incidentally, if such a pump and dump scheme was performed, the guilty party
is completely obvious. A minority shareholder lawsuit would be readily
forthcoming.

~~~
Retric
There are several approaches you can use on large company's including Enron
style accounting fraud but clearly it's much simpler with small ones. Other
options include <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html> where you try to
hype the market segment not any of it's products. But a far more legal
approach is to simply kill off the R&D program and look for a sucker/greater
fool to buy the rotting shell which looks great on paper.

------
abalashov
"I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good
method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society,
but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to
people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages
represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative
externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he
gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he
has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there
is nobility to it."

Oh, man, it'd be awesome if we had that. But then, much of the Web 2.0
"industry" about which this site revolves would not exist.

~~~
Gobiner
I found that quote particularly hilarious given the article in which it is
embedded. The article would make a good reference for the wikipedia article on
cognitive dissonance.

------
carbocation
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.

~~~
_delirium
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, which you buy and load sort of like
libraries: <http://www.palisade.com/RISK/>

Not necessarily a good idea, but somehow it caught on. One possible reason is
that it was one of the earlier widely available pieces of software for doing
declarative, dependency-based modeling that auto-propagates updates: if box A
and box B are linked by a "B = 2*A", then B auto-updates whenever A changes,
without you manually writing a propagate-updates loop. You can now do stuff
like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent (e.g., it's one of
the new features JavaFX variables have).

~~~
ramchip
_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.

~~~
gjm11
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.)

------
swombat
_I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it._

Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or
something?

~~~
kolya3
Maybe he meant that he got _into_ the bathtub and then screamed underwater?

~~~
lobo-tuerto
I also think this is the correct interpretation.

Maybe he needed to scream out loud to bring a bit of relief to his abused up
moral.

~~~
rdtsc
The problem is, his description of his morality crisis don't quite match with
his actions.

He did quit, but it was probably because everyone else saw the ship sinking
and was jumping off.

His $16k "sacrifice" at the end was not much if he claims he would have made
enough to retire by 30s and just live off interest. So, yes, he had a bit some
moral struggles, but it sounds like he managed to successfully "overcome" most
of them via rationalizations.

The blog post was written just to make himself feel better and to somehow turn
not taking a little bit of hush money into a great moral victory. Perhaps his
future employee will read how honest and devoted to the truth he is...

~~~
sree_nair
Have to add that the sacrifice is not the 16K, but it is the $200,000/Year
salary.16 K was just the signing bonus.

------
lsc
I don't think this is specific to business consulting, or to Dubai. I know
several people who were hired by high-powered technical consulting firms here
in the US; all of them were fairly bright, attractive young people with very
little experience of any sort.

------
sigstoat
i have the feeling, children or not, that we wouldn't have been hearing this
story if the $16,000 offer had been a bit larger.

~~~
sketerpot
As Calvin and Hobbes put it, the disturbing thing is not that everyone can be
bought, but that the price is often so low.

~~~
thefool
Exactly.

He even said that he decided that he would rather have a "hypothetical
children" have a rich morally bankrupt father that could pay for college than
one with integrity.

edit: oops this is pointed out above.

------
fauigerzigerk
"Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the
free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the
net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man"

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. Or is it that reality itself
is a "negative externality"?

No, I think the issue is one of faulty interpretation of that ideology. It's a
serious mistake that people make all the time. They mix up statistical
probabilities and individual causality. The average efficiency of markets
includes scams as well as geniuses. It includes people who contribute a lot
but market themselves badly and it includes the exact opposite.

~~~
shrikant
_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.

~~~
pmiller2
He's saying that since Einstein wasn't a rich man, by the author's logic, he
couldn't have contributed much to society.

~~~
eru
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).

~~~
Psyonic
contributes -> rich : (not rich) -> (not contributes)... what exactly are you
arguing?

~~~
eru
Einstein did not contribute to the market, and thus shouldn't be judged by
that. You could say he gave his insights away as gifts (or in exchange for
reputation?).

~~~
fauigerzigerk
The author of the article says "wages represent the value that a worker
provides to others". Do you really think Einstein's wage represented the value
he provided to others?

People work for all kinds of reasons. Money is just one of them as you
yourself allude to when you mention reputation. So wages representing the
value a worker provides is clearly nonsense.

They just represent _expected_ value for those able to pay, and it includes
all kinds of distortions like immigration controls.

------
eplanit
I guess Welcome the Real World, is the best response I can give. So sorry that
the real world is so non-idealistic and disappointing to you, and that your
wonderful skills and knowledge aren't being prized and utilized.

In other words, you're experiencing the reality shock _everybody_ experiences
when engaging with, and learning about, the corporate world.

It seems you'd be happier in Academia, a research institute, or perhaps
creating something on your own.

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

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

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

------
tome
_“Find me a rock” problems sound dead simple, but in actuality have
requirements that are poorly stated or unknown. You never know what you’re
looking for; you only know that you’ll know it when you see it._

Even better perhaps: "you only know that _someone else_ will know it when they
see it".

------
edo
What an amazingly insightful article. Props to the author for speaking up.
Yet, slightly dissapointed that he did not leave out of his own accord, but
waited to be laid off.

In his own reasoning "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."

Acting as if financial success equates to dishonesty. While in the very same
piece the author praises free market, and money in exchange for true value
does not compute. Does he believe, or not believe in the power of a free
market, or has he come to develop a disbelief in honest trading?

------
barrkel
Something that leaped out at me: "I believe that voluntary exchange is not
just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents
to society, but a robust moral system".

Voluntary exchange is not a moral system. A free market doesn't have morals.

~~~
dantheman
You are completely incorrect, the free market is a moral system because it
does not rely on coercion or force to compel others to interact. All
interactions in a free market system are voluntary and beneficial to all
participants in the transaction. No other economic system can make those
claims.

~~~
ahk
It can be beneficial to all "participants" but disastrous to society as a
whole, can it not? Look at the current rage against free market instruments
like CDOs and other complex unregulated derivatives.

Are you really claiming we dont need "coercion or force" from regulators like
the SEC or FTC?

~~~
kiba
_Are you really claiming we dont need "coercion or force" from regulators like
the SEC or FTC?_

It is naive to think any one human agents or regulatory agency is able to
prevent those "complex unregulated derivatives" or not be corrupted by
unethical firms/special interests/etc.

The free market system already have a "fail-safe" or "regulatory" function
through the bankruptcy of entrepreneurs and rewarding prudent entrepreneurs
with the leftover possessions of the bankrupt one. Failure is at the heart of
the free market enterprise system. It is a feature, not a bug.

It is those who wishes to prevent these failures at all and any costs that
keep our society stagnated or hurling down to its destruction as they keep
funding economic activities that is out of reality with human needs and
desire.

------
arethuza
I can recommend this book - it covers the same topics but is written by
someone who spent decades in consulting rather than a few months:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-
Consul...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consulting-
Machine/dp/1872188060/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271069591&sr=8-1)

------
waterlesscloud
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?

~~~
Silhouette
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 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.

~~~
gaius
_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.

~~~
Silhouette
I'm in the UK, and I have never had anything even close to this proposed to
me, by any employer, of any size, regardless of how happily I left.

It's only boilerplate text if you're the kind of person who also accepted the
"We own copyright to everything you ever do, at work or otherwise" clause in
the employment contract.

~~~
gaius
I've been laid off twice, and both times the severance agreement included
clauses that I basically agreed not to sue them for unfair dismissal. When
I've quit, of course there was nothing like that.

------
yosho
In college, I used to debate with myself on which career was better, ibanking
or management consulting.

In the end, I chose to pursue management consulting, which I've been doing for
the last 2 years.

Now, I debate with my friends on which career is worse, ibanking or consulting
because frankly, after sifting through so much corporate BS, I've come to
realize that all these jobs need to be prestigious in order to get ivy league
grads to pursue them. In reality, we're either glorified excel junkies, or
overpaid powerpoint formatters.

I'm crossing my fingers now hoping that this start-up I'm working on takes
off... I really do want to leave the corporate world for good. The realization
that the preparation we had in college is absolutely useless in the real
world, and that any semi-intelligent high-schooler could do our jobs is a
depressing thought.

------
regularfry
Isn't the "billion dollars destroyed" argument he makes just the broken window
fallacy in reverse?

~~~
devinj
If by, "broken window fallacy in reverse" you mean "pointing out that the
broken window fallacy is a fallacy", yes. He is troubled by the fact that he
is earning money by breaking windows.

------
jamesbressi
I'm so sorry for pointing this out, I loved the article, but was surprised
that no one else raised issue with:

"Like downloading MP3s, it was a victimless crime."

After all these years we know better than to say this carelessly. Is stealing
code from a hardworking programmer a victimless crime?

~~~
rictic
I thought this example was well chosen. Downloading mp3s is a familiar thing
that's very easy to do, but may not be ethically defensible in the final
analysis.

If you want to have a discussion about copyright though, you're poisoning the
well by calling infringement stealing.

------
known
I think this is the reason why MBAs find it difficult become entrepreneurs.

------
nextbigbuild
Should be required reading at every business school in America.

------
barmstrong
His description sounded about the same as my time doing consulting at
Deloitte. It didn't leave me with a good impression of consultants.

------
chaostheory
sounds like what I did at accenture

------
xster
confessions of an economic hitman

------
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).

~~~
jeremytliles
I think I missed the part where he had the leverage to make that kind of
demand. Perhaps even the brand-name consulting firms have figured out that
ridiculous severance packages don't make a whole lot of sense.

~~~
pw0ncakes
What I'm talking about isn't that ridiculous. Paying 6 months' salary is a
small cost compared to the cost of a termination lawsuit or a negative article
being written about the firm.

I'm guessing they gave him 2 months pay and _nothing_ for the move back, from
_Dubai_ (which is a dangerous place to lose your job, by the way). They also
seem to have given him nothing in terms of exit counseling.

To answer the question you raised: his article and the fact that it got
published is the leverage he had. I bet it's circulating around BCG right now.
It has the potential to be a morale and image problem, and not the Goldman
Sachs style of image problem (where people hate GS but consider them good at
what they do).

There are rational reasons for firms to pay decent severance packages. It's
not just something they do to be nice.

------
c00p3r
It's the same everywhere. For example, people who are reselling SAP in, say,
Russia, are doing exactly the same thing - tuning numbers and telling lies.
The better you're able to lie the better SAP consultant you are. There are no
project with was completed on schedule and within budget.

------
nearestneighbor
My prediction: "The version number finally equals Pi. No more changes to the
software are possible, because it's now perfect."

~~~
eru
Wrong thread.

~~~
nearestneighbor
One of the pitfalls of tabbed browsing.

