Comment by siliconc0w

7 months ago

Hard to place the blame on a single person, though I do think a "management consultant wearing an engineer costume" captures Google's engineering leadership these days

Yeah. But what do you expect when the boss comes from McKinsey? Not only does the place teach a particular skillset, it also selects for very peculiar employees. It would be downright weird if an ex-McKinsey employee were anything like a decent engineer.

  • Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?

    • The best manager I ever had was an ex-McKinsey consultant. Extremely empathetic, super competent, good dude. I have not worked with him for years but still text him for advice, and he delivers. I suppose that there are people who left McKinsey because they thought they could make more money elsewhere, and people who left McKinsey because they realized they made a huge mistake working there.

    • Tom Peters’ work on management excellence is generally well-regarded and he started it at McKinsey.

      He’s also more recently spoken pretty aggressively about how he thinks McKinsey has lost their way as a business and become a negative force.

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    • Jeremy Howard comes to mind. The sheer good that fast.ai brought as free quality educational material feels enough for "good in general" :)

  • McKinsey has absolutely stellar engineers and engineering leadership in its internal software teams, it's a gift and joy to work with them. Not sure about the consulting side though.