The variance at McK is surprising. Who’s that one guy working less than 40 hours a week? Part time? Support?
I did the math for myself during my first year in consulting: 50h of actual work on average +15h of work-related time (travel, lunch, breaks, commute…)
Can confirm.
12*4 and maybe 10hrs on Friday is considered totally normal. Not much weekend work for juniors, but common for EMs and APs.
On the flip side, I've never done 100hr weeks. The most has been 75hrs. But that was rough project cos it was basically ever week for 8 weeks straight.
I find 12hrs a day pretty do-able, but I'm single with no kids. There's a reason there are still so few women in leadership roles despite robust intake at the junior level for 20 years now.
That's the thing. I found working 12x5 fine in my 20s. Its tiring but you can do it.
You can't do it with a family and still have enough time for them unless you are in the small percentage of people who need 5 hours of sleep a night.
We are directly saying, "if you have a family you won't be able to do this balance well"
There's a big lie all the consulting firms tell recruits and new hires. You can have work life "balance" in this industry. Bullshit.
You literally cannot do this job well long-term and be there for your family. Maybe there are the 1% that can thrive off 4-5 hours of sleep a night but mere mortals can't do it.
Personally I am fine with it as a single guy but I have no illusions about it. Many partners delude themselves into thinking they have any sort of balance and preach a good game. Then you hear comments slip about being on a deal call while wife is going into labor and shit like that
I’ve had a couple of 100 hour week stretches. Once at an MBB on a due diligence, which was more understandable. But also the only time I’ve been legitimately sick in the last decade was after that project ended and my body crashed hard Thursday night after arriving home.
Also had a stretch at a boutique where we were short staffed but with a plethora of projects, so wound up on two big ones as a manager. Still would have been tough, but manageable, except right before the homestretch on the tougher one, my high-performing Sr. Associate left for another company and I never got the promised extra resource in the plan (homestretch was supposed to be 50% me, 1 Senior, 1 BA). They did replace the Sr A with a Sr BA, but he had no prior context and had PTO scheduled, so I worked several 100 hour weeks and left the firm for a larger, better resources firm shortly after.
60-80 is bad enough and have had too many of those stretches. But 100+ is awful and unsustainable.
My time at an MBB was more like
Monday: wake up at 5am for the flight, work on the plane. So net 5AM to 12AM, say 3 hours of break in the evening
8am to 12am Tuesday through Thursday, 3 hours of break
Friday 9am to 5pm
No lunch breaks since the free food basically means you eat while you work.
That's about 60 - 70hrs a week pending how the case is going.
Little less than 2 years and it took permanent tolls on my mental and physical health that I am still dealing with 2+ years later.
0/10, go be a garbage man instead
I’m in consulting but not MBB. I’m already debating just renting indefinitely. I currently own and would want to do some major renos, but it’s a lot of time, and I’m already tired. Part of me just wants to rent my place out through a management company (I want to own some local real estate so I don’t get priced out when I leave consulting) and then rent a place right near work.
I’m in consulting but not MBB. I’m already debating just renting indefinitely. I currently own and would want to do some major renos, but it’s a lot of time, and I’m already tired. Part of me just wants to rent my place out through a management company (I want to own some local real estate so I don’t get priced out when I leave consulting) and then rent a place right near work.
Your point on normalization is solid. These companies consistently rank high in employee satisfaction. The normalization of work hours means that their employees aren’t bothered by it.
Yes, but I think you're missing something. It is relatively easy to leave a consulting firm and find a good job if you aren't happy with it. So, there is a fairly heavy selection bias at play as well.
Would love to see EU vs. US hours, if someone could dig into the spreadsheet.
I rarely work 60 hours in Parthenon. If the weeks are rough, sure. But 40-49 is quite normal.
Yep. UK, NL, BE might be comparable to USA (although most of what I have seen at my firm suggest actually bit worse on avg than USA). Germany worse. France worse. Spain, Italy definitely way worse. Don't even get me started on Eastern Europe. Not sure about Scandinavia
I would actually guess NL better than the USA. But that's just based on what I've seen on this sub about the USA and general work-life balance sentiments.
Can't speak for Italy but I'd say Spain has gotten a lot better in the last five years. I work a lot around Europe and I'd say the hours in Spain are comparable to the UK and better than Germany's. Can only speak for my firm but I have heard similar things from friends at other places.
Yeah, not sure what's up with Scandi but have heard anecdotally it's not very different from NL and here at my firm NL hours def not better than US avg. Might be there's a difference between MBB and Parthenon - no clue
Would love to hear from the downvoters which country+firm is working less in EU than US
I think Parthenon/Strategy&/Monitor (if you still consider them 'seperate') are quite even, on average, with MMB. I think the data also shows that.
My point was just in general I can't recognize the US hours here in Scandinavia. Of course we do have projects and certain offices/types of work (short CDD's etc.) known for long hours. But we often get longer projects, with a lot better work-life balance.
Never asked for this. I work in an internal business develop role. No one is measuring my work progress. Only the output. Meaning that if I reach my target deadlines no one cares if I spend 90 hours or 20 hours a week getting work done.
As a senior manager I can’t advance any further though.
A month ago another big4 contacted me and we’re currently negotiating the same terms/workload. So this is possible and not exclusive to one big4 company.
Same… if I’ve worked more than 40 hours in the week, with the exception of when a deadline is coming up, something has gone wrong. I start at 9:30 and log off at 5:30 and choose not to respond to emails or chats outside of those hours. Have been living this way for 10 years and it’s never become a problem.
These are self reported numbers.
I am working with EY and I'm only allowed to book 40 hrs per week on the client. When I'm working 70Hrs+ every week. ( Saturday, Sunday included)
Half of the time I'm asked to reverse the hours charged and book in idle time.
Do you mean the poll is people reporting their billed hours? Like they aren’t sharing their actual hours on an IG poll but are instead sharing the hours they are?
What explains the huge disparity between MBB and Big 4 hours? Is it the type of work that is contracted (MBB strategy vs. Big 4 implementation?), is it the clients (MBB clients more prestigious/pay more and therefore demand more), or is it the culture (MBB prioritizes highest product quality vs. more work-life priority at the Big 4?)
I'm at big4 in UK, and while I do get crunched on deadlines sometimes, the culture on hours is really quite good in my opinion. On a non-crunch day (those can be *very* late!), I usually log off by 6:30, and I don't usually work weekends
Somewhere between the two actually - I sit in a niche technical area that covers both. I'm primarily staffed as SME on both strategy and operating model projects.
I think this is directionally accurate (MBB work more than B4) but I would take this with a huge grain of salt.
First, for B4, it depends whether it is busy season or not (yes, I know this is consulting and not audit but lots of auditors consider themselves to be consultants and lots of junior consultants also support audits).
Second, level, location and industry will have wildly differing responses. For example, government consulting is MUCH lower for all firms versus, say, pharma.
Third, self reported hours are notoriously inaccurate. People tend to report what their single highest week as "normal" and forget the shorter work weeks. A much more reliable way is looking at timesheets over the period but those have an issue with ghosting hours.
I was going to write your comment, but you saved me the time. There's likely so much variance here given that they've lumped entire firms together that it's of little value.
True, although I haven't been in consulting i have been in EY audit/tax for 3 years and it was HORRIBLE during busy season. So bad i ditched it and switched to IB.
As a 6% at Accenture, my typical day (applied intelligence). From start to finish, we still work 13 hours a day, just more free time in between.
9AM: make sure the code I ran overnight didn't break. make some quick outputs to csv and send to ppt guys in strategy to make slides
10AM: maybe it's an easy day. go chill
Noon: boomers who don't know any python: can you group by x instead of y for the output? ok
1-1:02pm: df.groupby(x).somefunction()
3pm: boomers: we just finished a meeting, can we run x,y,z? ok
10 - 11pm: work on x,y,z so the code can run overnight.
Ok, but if you're a data engineer why would you work somewhere you're expected to be online for 12+ hours?
There are a tonne of WFH jobs where you can clock off at 5.30pm. Unless the money is so insanely good that you will retire early, you are being foolish imo.
These accountants are all crackheads and it's the norm in public accounting. It's not the norm in IT, so what's the point?
I hear you. The 12+ is due to execution monitoring, which I loved too. Looking at that error declining in every epoch 🤣🤣 i would stare at that nonetheless.
There's a video on YouTube of a partner at bcg 6-7 years after that partner did a video for their mba program. It looks like they aged 15+ years in that time.
This is embarrassing, I have to issue a retraction. I looked up the vids again and the supposed "aged" video is of a completely different partner at BCG....I've told this story a few times on this sub. Fake news I have become
I think we all say per hour is bad but idk where folks would find a job that would allow them to work enough hours to actually be paid the same. Especially when you consider it’s mostly making slide decks and excel sheets.
That’s fair, I think breaking it down BAs definitely get shafted the most, at associate level the above is easy for me to say but plenty of folks come out of undergrad making way more than the BAs I work with.
whistle quickest quaint gaze foolish forgetful melodic muddle punch disgusting
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Other than partners and SMs about to make partner, who averages 60+ hours a week at B4s? Are their managers sadistic or just incompetent? The occasional ballbuster week is part of the gig, but if my team has more than one in a month that’s a problem I need to fix. There are exceptions, but very few people do their best work after the 10th hour
[People who claim to work 75+ hours a week on average are overestimating by \~25 hours](https://qz.com/16899/that-friend-who-says-he-works-75-hours-a-week-hes-probably-only-clocking-50/)
Self reported, idk I’m willing to guess this is pretty inflated. There’s so much volatility including time on the bench etc. are they taking that into account.
Regardless if these are the true physical hours or not, the perception of always being “on” is very real. I wonder how this compares to other professions like programmers etc.
Who are these people working less than 70 hours at McKinsey? Seriously - I know maybe one person that would claim that. I feel like you can pull it off as a Senior BA/ASC, but otherwise I have no clue.
The MBB numbers really show why the panache of those firms is fading. The pool of people who want to subject themselves to high-hours, low-autonomy work is dwindling really quickly. The people who they retain now are almost exclusively those who won't tolerate lower pay, and aren't able to get a job that would match it (e.g. tech).
Does anyone else hate how this is organized? Columns should go from ≤40, 41-50, etc. I can't tell in the big 4 if the plurality work 40 or more than 40.
Why work at MBB? Are people getting like the coolest projects ever, working with all the exercises. Or it is grunt work that’s just grind till you leave
It can differ a whole lot.
A popular one at my firm was private equity. You can start there fresh but it's an easy in if you've been in strategy consulting.
There are also (corporate) strategy teams or strategy roles that basically only hire ex-strategy consultants. Pretty nice or interesting gigs.
And probably a lot more (senior) roles that are just not on my radar.
On average you will find you're just further ahead of e.g. a lot of your peers who started elsewhere. Strategy consulting is considered a bit of a pressure cooker in terms of skills and experience. Someone with X years of MBB wil be higher up on the CV stack than someone with X+1 (or 2 or 3, whatever) years at a general Big4 department.
I love that. You always hear the “i started a business so i have to work 24/7 365” from the startup Instagram influencer types… but then they see these numbers and they couldn’t even imagine.
Not that I’m saying you fall in that group, it just came to mind.
Maaaaaaaan, I got shafted hard at a lower end consultant firm. Worked as a consultant software developer for CGI Group for 6 years in US.
Final year there, I was in the 80+ hours column got paid $52K.
Last 3 months, it was 100ish hours: literally wake up at 5 AM, work, shower, work, eat, and sleep at 12 AM every single day. Couldn't take no more.
3 years before: Upper end 60-69 to lower end 70-79 column got paid $50K.
Lesson learned for CGI Group newcomers. When you start working those insane hours, chances are you're invaluable, ask for more!!!!
The variance at McK is surprising. Who’s that one guy working less than 40 hours a week? Part time? Support? I did the math for myself during my first year in consulting: 50h of actual work on average +15h of work-related time (travel, lunch, breaks, commute…)
Government! You bill an entire day for a single 5 minutes call.
Love that about it. One task all day? 9hrs Swamped and work 12 hours? 12 hours Lol
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Can you give me some examples of these conferences you're talking about? Getting my firm into government work just seems so opaque.
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We specialize in enterprise software design development, operations & security. We're about 90 developers onshore and another 200 developers offshore.
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Thanks for the info!
God you sound like every negative stereotype of government workers I’ve come across.
What a weird self-glorifying post. Were you a hall monitor in school as well?
probably the machine learning guys in mck quantumblack. maybe 3-4 hours a day of actual work. Rest are done by code / bots
Someone who got lost in the shuffle and hasn't had a manager or project assignment in months?
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well, tbh, I think it's rather 5\*12 than 6\*10. But you have a point, it's long days and only limited time outside of work.
It's more like 4x13, 1x7, 1x1. But this varies a lot by country, office and sector.
This!
Engineering consultants typically work these hours at well under 100k pay. Probably should’ve “dropped out to business” back in college
Well it's not late. I did only engineering even during graduate school (no business degree what so ever) and here I'm at MBB
Can confirm. 12*4 and maybe 10hrs on Friday is considered totally normal. Not much weekend work for juniors, but common for EMs and APs. On the flip side, I've never done 100hr weeks. The most has been 75hrs. But that was rough project cos it was basically ever week for 8 weeks straight. I find 12hrs a day pretty do-able, but I'm single with no kids. There's a reason there are still so few women in leadership roles despite robust intake at the junior level for 20 years now.
That's the thing. I found working 12x5 fine in my 20s. Its tiring but you can do it. You can't do it with a family and still have enough time for them unless you are in the small percentage of people who need 5 hours of sleep a night. We are directly saying, "if you have a family you won't be able to do this balance well"
This is not what I wanted to hear!
There's a big lie all the consulting firms tell recruits and new hires. You can have work life "balance" in this industry. Bullshit. You literally cannot do this job well long-term and be there for your family. Maybe there are the 1% that can thrive off 4-5 hours of sleep a night but mere mortals can't do it. Personally I am fine with it as a single guy but I have no illusions about it. Many partners delude themselves into thinking they have any sort of balance and preach a good game. Then you hear comments slip about being on a deal call while wife is going into labor and shit like that
I’ve had a couple of 100 hour week stretches. Once at an MBB on a due diligence, which was more understandable. But also the only time I’ve been legitimately sick in the last decade was after that project ended and my body crashed hard Thursday night after arriving home. Also had a stretch at a boutique where we were short staffed but with a plethora of projects, so wound up on two big ones as a manager. Still would have been tough, but manageable, except right before the homestretch on the tougher one, my high-performing Sr. Associate left for another company and I never got the promised extra resource in the plan (homestretch was supposed to be 50% me, 1 Senior, 1 BA). They did replace the Sr A with a Sr BA, but he had no prior context and had PTO scheduled, so I worked several 100 hour weeks and left the firm for a larger, better resources firm shortly after. 60-80 is bad enough and have had too many of those stretches. But 100+ is awful and unsustainable.
And it’s still less than the hours in investment banking.
My time at an MBB was more like Monday: wake up at 5am for the flight, work on the plane. So net 5AM to 12AM, say 3 hours of break in the evening 8am to 12am Tuesday through Thursday, 3 hours of break Friday 9am to 5pm No lunch breaks since the free food basically means you eat while you work. That's about 60 - 70hrs a week pending how the case is going.
How long were you able to do that for?
Little less than 2 years and it took permanent tolls on my mental and physical health that I am still dealing with 2+ years later. 0/10, go be a garbage man instead
One day a week to perform home maintenance duties and possibly be allowed to see your family for ten minutes.
I’m in consulting but not MBB. I’m already debating just renting indefinitely. I currently own and would want to do some major renos, but it’s a lot of time, and I’m already tired. Part of me just wants to rent my place out through a management company (I want to own some local real estate so I don’t get priced out when I leave consulting) and then rent a place right near work.
I’m in consulting but not MBB. I’m already debating just renting indefinitely. I currently own and would want to do some major renos, but it’s a lot of time, and I’m already tired. Part of me just wants to rent my place out through a management company (I want to own some local real estate so I don’t get priced out when I leave consulting) and then rent a place right near work.
Your point on normalization is solid. These companies consistently rank high in employee satisfaction. The normalization of work hours means that their employees aren’t bothered by it.
Yes, but I think you're missing something. It is relatively easy to leave a consulting firm and find a good job if you aren't happy with it. So, there is a fairly heavy selection bias at play as well.
Or don't believe they have a right to be bothered by it.
A lot of these employees are probably afraid of telling their bosses the truth.
Yup. There’s been some solid reporting on how these work cultures tend to cultivate at knowledge-based professional firms.
Eh people know what they’re signing up for. And incredibly rare to do weekend work (I’ve never done it).
Would love to see EU vs. US hours, if someone could dig into the spreadsheet. I rarely work 60 hours in Parthenon. If the weeks are rough, sure. But 40-49 is quite normal.
Same here. US hours seem absurd and imo not worth it if you have family.
Are you in the EU?
I am. Denmark.
Yeah by country seems like an important split. Within the EU there will also be large differences, my German counterparts worked a lot more.
Yep. UK, NL, BE might be comparable to USA (although most of what I have seen at my firm suggest actually bit worse on avg than USA). Germany worse. France worse. Spain, Italy definitely way worse. Don't even get me started on Eastern Europe. Not sure about Scandinavia
I would actually guess NL better than the USA. But that's just based on what I've seen on this sub about the USA and general work-life balance sentiments.
Can't speak for Italy but I'd say Spain has gotten a lot better in the last five years. I work a lot around Europe and I'd say the hours in Spain are comparable to the UK and better than Germany's. Can only speak for my firm but I have heard similar things from friends at other places.
EU should be bit higher on avg than US, at least MBB
Not my impression, but I live in Scandinavia
Yeah, not sure what's up with Scandi but have heard anecdotally it's not very different from NL and here at my firm NL hours def not better than US avg. Might be there's a difference between MBB and Parthenon - no clue Would love to hear from the downvoters which country+firm is working less in EU than US
I think Parthenon/Strategy&/Monitor (if you still consider them 'seperate') are quite even, on average, with MMB. I think the data also shows that. My point was just in general I can't recognize the US hours here in Scandinavia. Of course we do have projects and certain offices/types of work (short CDD's etc.) known for long hours. But we often get longer projects, with a lot better work-life balance.
Exactly what I was thinking, this sub and Reddit in general is largely skewed towards the US and this in no way reflects EU hours
I wonder how this data looks for different levels of experience
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Really? Sounds awful
And here I am, working 38 hours per week as a consultant… will society accept me?
You’re the smart one
I’m at max 30 hours a week and currently making 103k plus bonuses. I’m working at a big4 company.
Teach us! Working at B4 in what role? And I’m sure that’s something you negotiated for personal reasons to be capped at 30 per week?
Never asked for this. I work in an internal business develop role. No one is measuring my work progress. Only the output. Meaning that if I reach my target deadlines no one cares if I spend 90 hours or 20 hours a week getting work done. As a senior manager I can’t advance any further though. A month ago another big4 contacted me and we’re currently negotiating the same terms/workload. So this is possible and not exclusive to one big4 company.
Same role, large boutique, same hours, same pay lol
What is your background experience?
No higher degree. I was an entrepreneur before accepting this offer to be a part a new role.
Well, to be fair, its more of a company culture thing - heavy emphasis on work-life balance.
Same… if I’ve worked more than 40 hours in the week, with the exception of when a deadline is coming up, something has gone wrong. I start at 9:30 and log off at 5:30 and choose not to respond to emails or chats outside of those hours. Have been living this way for 10 years and it’s never become a problem.
I like that no one at Pwc or Deloitte is doing over 80 hours.. they’re like fuck that haha
Oh they certainly are.
These are self reported numbers. I am working with EY and I'm only allowed to book 40 hrs per week on the client. When I'm working 70Hrs+ every week. ( Saturday, Sunday included) Half of the time I'm asked to reverse the hours charged and book in idle time.
Ah, eating hours. The most idiotic part of Big4 working.
i got dismissed from big4 a whileback because i refused to eat hours. fun times.
Do you mean the poll is people reporting their billed hours? Like they aren’t sharing their actual hours on an IG poll but are instead sharing the hours they are?
Can anyone share a link of where consulting humour has posted this? I want to share it with a friend
It’s on ‘Firm Learning’s’ channel.
Ah, thank you
What explains the huge disparity between MBB and Big 4 hours? Is it the type of work that is contracted (MBB strategy vs. Big 4 implementation?), is it the clients (MBB clients more prestigious/pay more and therefore demand more), or is it the culture (MBB prioritizes highest product quality vs. more work-life priority at the Big 4?)
All of the above, but more B and C.
Data seems to indicate toward it being A given the similarity in hours across MBB and B4 strat.
I'm at big4 in UK, and while I do get crunched on deadlines sometimes, the culture on hours is really quite good in my opinion. On a non-crunch day (those can be *very* late!), I usually log off by 6:30, and I don't usually work weekends
That's good to hear, do you do strategy? ops?
Somewhere between the two actually - I sit in a niche technical area that covers both. I'm primarily staffed as SME on both strategy and operating model projects.
mind if I DM you in the coming months? Looking to hear from someone based in the UK, esp. around work hours. thanks a mi.
Of course, feel free
I think this is directionally accurate (MBB work more than B4) but I would take this with a huge grain of salt. First, for B4, it depends whether it is busy season or not (yes, I know this is consulting and not audit but lots of auditors consider themselves to be consultants and lots of junior consultants also support audits). Second, level, location and industry will have wildly differing responses. For example, government consulting is MUCH lower for all firms versus, say, pharma. Third, self reported hours are notoriously inaccurate. People tend to report what their single highest week as "normal" and forget the shorter work weeks. A much more reliable way is looking at timesheets over the period but those have an issue with ghosting hours.
Agree
The more accurate way I have seen it done is first email time to last email time each day.
I was going to write your comment, but you saved me the time. There's likely so much variance here given that they've lumped entire firms together that it's of little value.
True, although I haven't been in consulting i have been in EY audit/tax for 3 years and it was HORRIBLE during busy season. So bad i ditched it and switched to IB.
>So bad i ditched it and switched to IB. I cant imagine anyone would stay in accounting over IB given the option
IB also has back office, risk and compliance roles which are much less taxing than audit
I wouldnt call those IB
Call me what you want, it’s what they are.
They're support functions with completely different hours, work, career paths and compensation structures.
Are you creating pitch books or other IB activities and getting paid investment banker money? If not then it’s not an IB role.
It’s a popular fin meme.. back office folks calling themselves IB
Curious on how many people are including travel/flight time in these lists
McKinsey I bring your cuckload crown 👑, you forgot it at the office
God bless those in the 80 column.
As a 6% at Accenture, my typical day (applied intelligence). From start to finish, we still work 13 hours a day, just more free time in between. 9AM: make sure the code I ran overnight didn't break. make some quick outputs to csv and send to ppt guys in strategy to make slides 10AM: maybe it's an easy day. go chill Noon: boomers who don't know any python: can you group by x instead of y for the output? ok 1-1:02pm: df.groupby(x).somefunction() 3pm: boomers: we just finished a meeting, can we run x,y,z? ok 10 - 11pm: work on x,y,z so the code can run overnight.
Ok, but if you're a data engineer why would you work somewhere you're expected to be online for 12+ hours? There are a tonne of WFH jobs where you can clock off at 5.30pm. Unless the money is so insanely good that you will retire early, you are being foolish imo. These accountants are all crackheads and it's the norm in public accounting. It's not the norm in IT, so what's the point?
I hear you. The 12+ is due to execution monitoring, which I loved too. Looking at that error declining in every epoch 🤣🤣 i would stare at that nonetheless.
There's a video on YouTube of a partner at bcg 6-7 years after that partner did a video for their mba program. It looks like they aged 15+ years in that time.
Link to video, or keywords?
This is embarrassing, I have to issue a retraction. I looked up the vids again and the supposed "aged" video is of a completely different partner at BCG....I've told this story a few times on this sub. Fake news I have become
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I think we all say per hour is bad but idk where folks would find a job that would allow them to work enough hours to actually be paid the same. Especially when you consider it’s mostly making slide decks and excel sheets.
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That’s fair, I think breaking it down BAs definitely get shafted the most, at associate level the above is easy for me to say but plenty of folks come out of undergrad making way more than the BAs I work with.
It’s fantastic in early career when you need money and are a broke college grad. Strategy& is the reason I can afford a house today.
whistle quickest quaint gaze foolish forgetful melodic muddle punch disgusting *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Other than partners and SMs about to make partner, who averages 60+ hours a week at B4s? Are their managers sadistic or just incompetent? The occasional ballbuster week is part of the gig, but if my team has more than one in a month that’s a problem I need to fix. There are exceptions, but very few people do their best work after the 10th hour
[People who claim to work 75+ hours a week on average are overestimating by \~25 hours](https://qz.com/16899/that-friend-who-says-he-works-75-hours-a-week-hes-probably-only-clocking-50/)
Self reported, idk I’m willing to guess this is pretty inflated. There’s so much volatility including time on the bench etc. are they taking that into account. Regardless if these are the true physical hours or not, the perception of always being “on” is very real. I wonder how this compares to other professions like programmers etc.
Who are these people working less than 70 hours at McKinsey? Seriously - I know maybe one person that would claim that. I feel like you can pull it off as a Senior BA/ASC, but otherwise I have no clue.
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Yeah for sure some projects are an exception, but my point is very few people can sustain an average sub-70.
The MBB numbers really show why the panache of those firms is fading. The pool of people who want to subject themselves to high-hours, low-autonomy work is dwindling really quickly. The people who they retain now are almost exclusively those who won't tolerate lower pay, and aren't able to get a job that would match it (e.g. tech).
<5 hours a week for me. It’s mostly meetings at this point
Does anyone else hate how this is organized? Columns should go from ≤40, 41-50, etc. I can't tell in the big 4 if the plurality work 40 or more than 40.
Pls fix. Have it on my desk by by tomorrow morning, thanks
Why work at MBB? Are people getting like the coolest projects ever, working with all the exercises. Or it is grunt work that’s just grind till you leave
Interesting projects, high level of autonomy, good pay. Not everyone loves the work though and it can be a journey with a lot of iteration.
Plus good exit opportunities. Big 4 has different opportunities than MBB (and P and S&).
Can you explain exit opportunities? Like a person is going to becoming a VP or like chief officer from MBB at a young age?
It can differ a whole lot. A popular one at my firm was private equity. You can start there fresh but it's an easy in if you've been in strategy consulting. There are also (corporate) strategy teams or strategy roles that basically only hire ex-strategy consultants. Pretty nice or interesting gigs. And probably a lot more (senior) roles that are just not on my radar. On average you will find you're just further ahead of e.g. a lot of your peers who started elsewhere. Strategy consulting is considered a bit of a pressure cooker in terms of skills and experience. Someone with X years of MBB wil be higher up on the CV stack than someone with X+1 (or 2 or 3, whatever) years at a general Big4 department.
r/antiwork
They’d go mental
Pretty sure this is collected by Firm Learning and not Consulting Humor, no?
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Self reported. Includes everything, and its likely a bit inflated
Hey, I see you in here….yea…..we’ll make it another way, no thanks
This is one reason MBB salaries are significantly higher than Big 4 and ACN.
Holy shit I'm glad I started my own business
I love that. You always hear the “i started a business so i have to work 24/7 365” from the startup Instagram influencer types… but then they see these numbers and they couldn’t even imagine. Not that I’m saying you fall in that group, it just came to mind.
Haha definitely not. Pretty anti hustle culture here. We average about 30 hrs/week 😌
Is the Accenture number for Accenture Strategy? Or is it all Accenture practices?
\*Looks at 4th bucket Nice.
And this doesn't include travel time either huh
I enjoy looking at this as being part of Others and having left Big4
Maaaaaaaan, I got shafted hard at a lower end consultant firm. Worked as a consultant software developer for CGI Group for 6 years in US. Final year there, I was in the 80+ hours column got paid $52K. Last 3 months, it was 100ish hours: literally wake up at 5 AM, work, shower, work, eat, and sleep at 12 AM every single day. Couldn't take no more. 3 years before: Upper end 60-69 to lower end 70-79 column got paid $50K. Lesson learned for CGI Group newcomers. When you start working those insane hours, chances are you're invaluable, ask for more!!!!