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McKinsey Is An Evil, Reprehensible Corporation and I Would Never Work There (Again)

An utterly vile company with a less than 40% rate of summer internship return offers.

I recently came across an article shared by my friend working at Bain that McKinsey & Company, the prominent management consulting firm with global reach, helped the Trump Administration execute its ethically questionable immigration policies. McKinsey proposed cost-cutting proposals which jeopardized the health and safety of immigrants in order and were decried as too extreme by ICE staffers themselves. This type of inhumane treatment is to be expected from a firm like McKinsey, a firm that’s known to do such things as revoke a summer associate’s return offer without proper notice or justification.

ICE isn’t the only time McKinsey’s been in hot water. McKinsey has been making reprehensible and irresponsible business decisions for decades, like their uninformed involvement in the Enron scandal, their reckless precipitation of the 2008 financial crisis, their eyebrow-raising partnerships with various authoritarian regimes, and their ethically questionable decision to punish an intern irreversibly for a minor, honest mistake. I could go on and on about McKinsey’s troubled history. I know all of this because I really went to town with googling search terms like “McKinsey scandals and controversy” and “McKinsey is a fucking evil company” and “reasons to be happy you’re not going into management consulting” while I was waiting at the gate for my flight back home, shortly after I realized I had been quietly removed from a group chat with the other summer associates.  

It doesn’t matter whether you’re only there for the summer or just for a two-year stint before b-school. McKinsey is evil, full stop, and if you work at McKinsey, you are evil and full of bad ideas that are wrong. This rings especially true if you work on a team like the team that worked with ICE, the team that worked with Eskom, the team that inspired Pete Buttegieg to run for office, or the team in the San Francisco office that arbitrarily decided playing “fuck, marry, kill” with the client firm’s top female executives at the end-of-summer happy hour could be a last-minute deal-breaker. 

Ultimately, the trouble with management consulting is that it necessarily reduces people to numbers. For example, instead of seeing a human being that deserved to be treated with dignity, McKinsey saw an immigrant that cost $40 to maintain per day. And instead of seeing a human being that deserved to be treated with dignity, McKinsey saw a Harvard student who cost a $17 million contract. In both of these situations, McKinsey’s quantitative calculations failed to grasp the complexity of the situation — namely, that people shouldn’t be punished for taking risks. Whether it’s risking one’s life to escape the violence and poverty that has ravaged Central America, or risking one’s neck to make the brave, truthful claim that Susan is definitely the hotter Wojcicki sister and I would honestly !@#$ the !@#$ out of her !@#$% while I !@# Anne as she !@#$%@$, we all deserve better from McKinsey.  

For these reasons and many more, I will never take a job at McKinsey ever again, unless they give me back my position. I cannot comprehend how people would want to be involved in this rather than seizing the opportunity to work at a place that aligns with their values and long-term goals. After graduation I will be working in Mountain View, just across the street from Susan Wojcicki’s sweet, sweet @$$, as a PM working on Microsoft’s Pentagon contract. 

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