Getting Drunk in First Class

Joel Spolsky reclaims his accounts with a management consultant from a high-end consultancy.

A management consultant [...] wrote me a nice email, that included the following sentence:

Our team is conducting a benchmarking effort to gather an outside-in view on development performance metrics and best practice approaches to issues of process and organization from companies involved in a variety of software development (and systems integration).

I didn’t understand a thing he wrote. The email contained a lot of words (“benchmarking,” “outside in,” “performance metrics,” “best practice,” “process and organization”) each of which set off a loud buzzing alarm-like sound in my head. The noise from the buzzing was so loud and so distracting that I found myself completely unable to parse the email.

Sounds like they used our Bullshit Generator.

The best part is that most management consultants, the stunningly good-looking, bright, earnest chipmunks with 4.0s in Russian Lit from Harvard who work for these companies, have absolutely no way of knowing this, so they can go through this whole exercise without even knowing that they’re doing it!

Yeah, so?

And it’s a lot of fun! First class flights to Houston and Oslo! Helping the world be more productive! Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.

Joel pretty much sums it up, and sums it up well. Consultants might not do shit; but god damn it, we make “not doing shit” look good!