DISCLAMER : All points mentioned in this post are my personal opinions based on MY personal experiences. I’ll be protective of the projects I did at McKinsey for confidentiality. Any rebuttals are appreciated, although a response back isn’t guaranteed.

Let me break this into 3 parts (in proper McKinsey fashion, 3 is perfect, not too little to be un-important, not too many to be ignored). First, I’ll go over how I got in and why I chose to join. Second (most of the blog), I’ll talk about my experience, and third, talk about why I left.

Part 1 : Why I joined

I had no intention to join McKinsey & Company, until 2 days before the fated interview. I was fairly certain I wanted to be near tech, work on ML/AI related stuff and mostly continue in academia if given a choice. So much so, that I left the standard test McKinsey gave to all students in IITB placements midway- I didn’t see myself being a consultant. Mostly for 2 reasons-

1. I hated PPTs, more specifically making them.
2. I hated the corporate part of consulting- having an inch perfect resume, 3 peaks, being presentable and all the showboatery that comes with it.

For some reason they shortlisted me for the interviews, and I thought it might be good prep for future interviews (hadn’t applied to Bain/BCG/AT Kearney etc either, this was all I had). The interviews were sort of fun, very little on consulting/case studies and more so on my communication and ML related projects. I think my inner conpetetiveness took over, and I went through the 3 rounds whithout telling them I wasn’t sure about consulting. Got my selection decision a day later.

Next few months were a little tricky- I wanted to be in tech(and had accepts to univs for my masters), but an offer in hand from McKinsey made it tempting to atleast test corporate waters. It was the COVID 2nd wave that finally made the decision for me. I wasn’t going to compromise on a virtual college, and work-ex in McKinsey would help me in the future wrt job and growth prospects. Plus, most of my views on the consulting industry in general were through word of mouth from folks I knew, and I thought maybe it would be different if I actually experienced it first hand (I was wrong.).

Long story short, I deferred my admit and accepted my offer to join McKinsey & Company, in July 2021. For those who face a similar situation in the future and are confused between academia and consulting, these 2 points would be useful to keep in mind-

1. Range helps- There are things which consulting or a business related job would teach you that you may not be able to get in tech. Generalist often trump specialists- ask Google or David Epstein (https://www.amazon.in/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484).

2. If you’re not sure about your career path in the future, taking big risks early is better- much easier to face the consequences early than later when you’d have responsibilities to take care of.

Part 2: My experience

My McKinsey experience was quite different from most other new joinees, largely due to COVID. The famed MBB training session moved online, which made them less glamourous (usually they fly you to an exotic location and do the sessions and exercises in 5 star hotels). The trainings lasted about 3-4 weeks, and were group exercise intensive, although doing them on Zoom completely beat the point of them. They eventually became a chore we had to complete rather than something which we we excited by.

Talking about work in general, work in McKinsey is usually described with this one line- “You’re dropped in an ocean and expected to learn to swim”. I think this needs to be reframed- “You are dropped in an ocean, with 50kgs of weight, and expected to be an olympic swimmer while pretending to observers(clients) that you knew swimming before.” Atleast that is what I felt like.

Resposibility is huge for any fresh graduate, a single McK consultant can modify or make policy changes in large multinational structures, which is to an extent incredible and scary at the same time. You ofcourse have support structures- Experts, Partners etc who know the ins and outs of the industry, and with the hierarchy being flat, its fairly straightforward to approach them. I think the best thing about McKinsey is how responsive people are towards questions you ask them. Seldom did I not get a response from senior folks.

Another aspect of working at McK India which I found a bit wierd was networking. Quoting a senior- “To grow in McKinsey you need to do 2 things constantly- work hard and network”. McKinsey is an organization where you are expected to talk to everyone just so they are fimiliar to you and vice versa. Basically, you want to be known to more people so you are more likely to spend days being staffed to clients (rather than doing nothing aka ‘in the beach’). Although I support talking to folks in your workplace, forced communication tagged as ‘networking’ was something I was exceedingly bad at. I’m not someone who talks to others just for the sake of it, and to grow in the firm, I probably would have to.

If there is one thing McKinsey cares about, its the client- often at the expense of the firm members. Irrespective of what your priorities are, the clients’ needs come first. I’ve had many days where I did analysis which should ideally have no relevance (something which I did point out), but still had to do because the clients wanted it done. The client focus intensifies as you converse with more senior folks- for them retaining the client by keeping them satisfied is goal number 1, everything else is secondary. This meant I often had to push things, and spend nights working on making stuff presentable to clients- just so we could impress them with our speed and work. This aspect of consulting, i.e. the ‘optics’ is probably the most frustrating part for me- I’m not big on doing things to impress people, if the utility is minimal. Keep in mind- IT IS IMPORTANT TO DO THIS, IT’S JUST THAT I AM TERRIBLE AT DOING THIS.

Talking about work-life balance at McKinsey, I think many other blogs and posts have summarized it quiet well. It was mostly work during the weekdays. Till late at night, from early in the morning. I can count on my fingers the days where I closed my laptop at 9 pm, and some days work would stretch till 4/5 am in the morning. People are well intentioned - every single senior member will tell you to not work post 10 pm. But then the projects are defined in a way that makes it impossible to follow through. You might create rules to limit work past 9 pm, but if you then schedule weekly meetings with the client leadership team or plan to build 4 models in 4 weeks, the work life balance talk holds no value.

I could cope with the workload, largely because of being used to situations like these in university, but I did not see it as being something which was sustainable. I think the biggest learning for me was this- no one will draw the line for you, you will need to be upfront about it. The biggest skill I learnt at McKinsey was prioritization and the 80-20 rule, i.e. to do less work while maximizing outputs. I think the consulting industry is probably going to need to solve for this in the near future, because young associates have far more lucrative offers on the plate today than they did 10 years ago because of startups and the tech industry in general. Either they normalize work life balance, or find themselves facing a massive churn in employees. The “Great Resignation” has already seen MBBs publically call out for more candidates, but I think a cultural shift on work-life balance at MBBs is what will solve the root of the problem.

# Part 3: Why I left, and what next

I submitted my resignation on Jan 7th 2022. 6 months into my job. My last working day was in the first week of March. I sort of knew in December that I was going to quit, for largely 2 reasons-

1. I was heading back into academia for my masters in August’22, so a few months between McKinsey and my masters focused on research did not seem like a bad idea.
2. I needed a change - I realized consulting isn’t for everyone.

I’ll elaborate on point 2, point 1 is rather straightforward and only preponed my resignation plans.

Consulting isn’t for everyone. Consulting has its charms- wearing suits, staying in 5 star hotels, flying every week and working with CXOs of major organizations. If you’re someone who wants these, go ahead- its perfect for you. For me personally, what I really wanted was to be challenged on a technical level- i.e. solve technical challenges rather than business ones. Technical challenges require creativity involving maths and computer science(in my case), business challenges require creativity in working with people. Both are equally important, but its unlikely that you can learn to do both in the same place/organization. You are unlikely to build a new Neural Network architecture at McKinsey- because you don’t have the time or use of it in a business context- the scope of projects are clearly defined, and any technical creative pursuits would only delay the projects.

This does not mean that McKinsey work was not intellectually challenging. It just means that the problems were business related and not tech related. You get to choose which problems you want to solve which will keep you intellectually stimulated and make you grow in ways YOU want to grow in. I want to solve different problems than the ones McKinsey wants me to. This is why I needed to quit, and I did.

Although I quit, the learnings in my rather short (9 month) stay at McKinsey were immense. Probably the most important things I learnt was this- building the tech, and implememting the tech at scale are two different ball games, the latter being atleast an order of magnitude tougher. Elon agrees here, so must be true.

What next? I’m back at IITB as a research assistant, working on automating some analysis using ML, and finishing off some of my old projects. Ofcourse, after a much needed 2 week break. Lets see where thuis goes.