Individual Economics in the Age of COVID-19

Yes, simply by cutting Netflix and cell phones. I’m not going to click that link and get triggered by the part where like his father bought him his house outright or something.

This is pretty funny like the guy discovered that you can’t make any money shilling FIRE advice if it actually works for people, you gotta come up with the next bit of investing advice to sell people.

Can’t believe Tony Robbins has written 40 books you’d think 2-3 would be enough to help me.

Though he knows what it is like to be truly poor, Mr. Nguyen recalls feeling “poor in relative terms” when he graduated from Yale University in 2015 and made $85,000 to start in Bain’s San Francisco office. A fantasy salary for many Americans seemed paltry in an expensive West Coast city, surrounded by colleagues who raked in substantially more.

I graduated law school in 2009. Literally 1/2 of my class was unemployed at graduation. Really fighting the urge to boomersplain to recent grads.

Bain only paid 85K in 2015?

That’s probably just the salary for a brand new hire. The number including expected bonus would probably be a lot bigger.

But also the management consulting industry tends to have a style of hiring a lot of associates at relatively low pay out of school, and then the ones that can deliver under the pressure of 80+ hour weeks get their pay increased very quickly. A bunch of high performance college kids will actually flame out of the stupid culture of management consulting where they identify “good” workers as those that can survive a toxic and intense work environment.

Consulting is an epic scam.

A 22 year old knows jack shit about anything, yet companies pay hundreds of dollars an hour for them to come into businesses they’ve never seen and offer meaningful advice? GTFO.

The consultants exist to validate the senior managers that hire the consulting firms, the end.

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I don’t necessarily agree with this.

Most consulting (even at the McKinsey level) is just businesses hiring Excel monkeys. It’s rare the consulting firms are the ones making the high level business decisions, they’re just really good at what they do. Which is creating a viable, detailed model from scratch in 2-3 weeks because they have a team of 6 people all working 85 hour weeks to do it.

It’s often worth it from the hiring business side to just outsource that part of it rather than either working your own employees to the bone or having a special team on full time staff just for projects like this.

Consulting firms treat their employees like total shit and it’s a godawful lifestyle for those that choose it.

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I think we are talking about two different things.

Excel monkeys are different from what I’ve experienced, which is a “strategic review” or whatever, which has in my admittedly limited experience universally been conducted exclusively so that executives can say “this is what BCG / Bain / McKinsey” recommended when getting it rubber stamped by the board.

There’s certainly some fluff projects in there that exist basically just to shield the executives from the consequences of either bad strategic decisions, or layoffs/restructuring that the executives can blame on the consultants.

From what I gathered (obviously it wasn’t me doing the projects), most of the strategy consulting projects involve either building a model from scratch or revamping an existing model from inside the business which did involve considerable man-hours. Whether those man-hours were needed or just used to justify the insane costs of the consultants is certainly up for debate.

Yea, the 22yo fresh hires aren’t the ones actually developing the strategy. They’re mostly building slides and pulling material together. Maybe some are analyzing data or compiling interview notes or something. Most of the actual recommendations come from the more senior members of the team who don’t have time to do the busy work, usually because they’re supporting multiple projects simultaneously.

Let me put it this way: has the consulting firm’s recommendation ever, in the history of consulting, been “fire the senior managers who hired them?”

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The other question is obviously “if you were any good at actually figuring out how to make money wouldn’t you be in private equity?”

You are not wrong in your assessment of strategic reviews. Most of the consulting firms offer a set of services that include other, less bullshitty stuff, like pure outsourcing or professional services. They probably do add some real value there because they can apply economies of scale but performing outsourced services for a bunch of different companies that would otherwise have to do them in house from scratch. Sometimes the consulting is also part of a broader relationship for example you might have one of the big accounting firms provide accounting and audit services and tax advice and a little “strategic” advice on the side because they have all this knowledge about your firm and other firms. Benchmarking would be a common area where consulting companies add useful value by being a consolidator of information.

I use consultants in my job basically daily (or at least weekly) because we maintain a small in house staff of full time employees plus a big budget for external consultant/outsourcing/services firms. When stuff comes up, as it does, it can be really useful to put 2 staff at a consulting firm on for a couple of weeks instead of maintaining some extra staff in house just in case stuff comes up. It’s nice to be able to “turn of the tap” on the expenses with the consultant vs. the people management headache of trying to do it all with in house people.

you can’t make this shit up

Well the results speak for themselves. I have not looked it up, but I assume the majority of American millionaires are spiritual shamans. That’s why we don’t have enough doctors, they’re all chasing that sweet shaman $.

You missed part, and it’s super attainable to anyone who wants to try:

So in 2013, I quit my job and began a five-year spiritual journey that led me to South Africa,

Yeah, no, absolutely. Anyone who wants to can quit their job and taking a five-year vacation spiritual journey!

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This snake oil business doesn’t come cheap. She spent $100,000 and spent 5 years on:

All these lazy millenials should just take 5 years off work and spend $100,000 of their avocado toast money on starting up a business scamming rich idiots.

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Aside from the spending $100,000 part, this sounds an awful lot like what I do for a living.

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Try charging rich morons $200,000 per year for it.