Boston Consulting Group reviews

Stinking politics, Relentless hiring of low quality workforce are some basics, others are as follows: 1. Tendency to hire people at a lower level than they are eligible 2. Very Extremely substandard workforce, i.e. people don't have qualifications for the positions they hold. They use their networking skills to get hired in the company 3. Leadership doesn't have basic project management skills due to which people have to work for days and nights 4. For the first time in my life, I have seen people here lying to the face of their juniors, seniors and clients and then fight over it to prove their lies 5. People who are less qualified, less experienced, and of a lesser quality of brain cells could be your manager and it would take you days to make them understand a simple thing because they are complete idiots. 6. Salaries doesn't depend on your experience or qualifications, it depends on how well you can butter the leadership and how well you can network with your manager over smoke breaks 7. Very hierarchical approach, even when they say its a flat organization. The hierarchy is followed top to bottom, line by line 8. Growth is ZERO because the clauses of promotions cannot be met by any human, because the working hours, quality of projects, difficulty of project and client feedback are not the deciding parameters. Instead going out with managers for smoke/tea etc. are the correct parameters. 9. No matter what anyone does, if a project fails, the burden comes on the analyst because the leadership clearly states that the analyst was the one working on the project (hands on) even when its a project management failure. 10. Sometimes people are granted an express track and hired into the system telling them that they will be promoted before others. But that is a bigger sham, because these people don't have the power to promote. It depends on the people sitting at the mother company, so don't fall for this. I have wasted my precious years of life here. Please don't fall for this, BCG as a brand will not help you out when you feel pity for yourself about the work that you would do here. And all the reviews of people here about knowledge team that have <3 stars are actually true to the CORE. Instead the reviews that are 4/5 stars are written by management puppets who are trying to hide the truth about this horrible place. Be warned and proceed at your own risk because today you have an option tomorrow you will be a part of this.

I wish I'd realised sooner (I've given up ~6 years of my life) that the whole thing is nonsense. It is a classic case of the 'Emperors new clothes'. BCG works by convincing: Employees: to succeed at BCG is to be ‘smart and successful’ (and therefore to fail is to not be) Clients: your capabilities are substandard. You can’t possibly achieve what you want to with your own people and we (BCG) know things you don’t When you start asking yourself ‘why?’ - why am I working 90+ hours a week changing font on ppt slides and listening to rich white dudes battle it out over the right ‘turn of phrase’ at 8pm every night of the week you realise there is no point to this - unless you believe that to succeed at BCG is to succeed in life. Even if you’re good at it once you ask ‘why am I doing this’ - it’s pretty difficult to go back from… If you have a modicum of self-worth not tied to having a status badge at BCG (or what you do for a living), or if you’ve lived a 'normal' life where people have genuine problems and do work that genuinely has an impact on society (or your business) i.e. they actually DO something then it’s pretty hard to justify WHY you are doing the job at BCG. Objectively: Very long hours filled with tedious work: a) majority of work covers similar topics (strategy, cost-cutting, due diligence, COGs …) there aren’t that many problems in business b) The model works on replication: taking the latest ‘BCG thinking’ and ‘packaging this up’ for the client in question (formatting it into their slides and changing a few words) c) Pointless work (Everything is possible, not everything is practical). Great giving a client a ‘master-plan’ but 9/10 they can’t execute it because it doesn’t fit their business and we have no idea how to actually execute everything. Also, nobody cares about that cool slide you did… d)Pay vs. overall renumeration: hour for hour you won’t get paid that much and you will say goodbye to evenings and weekends. Having time off is the exception not the rule. Be prepared for very disappointed friends and family Poor leadership: a) Very little investment in people training (as a PL I got like one afternoon) and the issue perpetuates because you have nobody to learn from (so you can't learn on the job as they say) b) No requirement to prioritise team's wellbeing / what work adds value: you're not evaluated on it really. You can (and will) treat people like expendable resources because they will do anything not to get a bad review c) Partners are cults of personality. You can get away with a lot of things you should not be able to in 2021 Unease in the work you are doing: a) Poor quality for clients who are often paying 5-6 figure sums to get the same answer as their competitors b) Experienced hires are used to boost the image of the firm, but we don't really leverage their knowledge - so clients are paying for a limited viewpoint from people who have never done the work c) Some work is just unethical: Helping sovereign funds buy out public infrastructure? Cost cutting to increase share-holder profits at the expense of low-wage workers? Being paid as the ‘Levelled’ to help the government ‘Level-Up’