I Left My Dream Job at Mckinsey: Here's Why

It's my first week on a new engagement at McKinsey and I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation for a client kickoff. My new manager walks in and asks to take a look at what I'm working on. He looks at the first slide and then starts thumbing through the rest of the presentation and says, we don't use font sizes bigger than 10 here at McKinsey. Reduce the size of the fonts and figure out some way to fill in all the blank space and redo all the slides. Then he left the room. It was like 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. I thought it was a joke, but that dude was deadly serious. This guy was kind of like a caricature of what everybody hates about McKinsey. And thankfully, not everybody at the firm was like that. But that is a reflection of just how much consultants agonize all of their energy thinking through how to communicate something down to the cosmetics of font size, which can be really frustrating for people who actually just like to get stuff done. But that's actually not the biggest reason why I left the firm. McKinsey is perennially ranked the number one consulting firm in the world. One of the most well-run and prestigious companies to work at with a less than 1% acceptance rate, much lower than getting into Harvard. And in fact, it's one of the very top choices to work at for people who graduate from Harvard. But I actually think it's not for everyone, probably not for most people. And I'm going to share the soft underbelly of what it's like to work in McKinsey by talking about the top seven reasons I quit. The first that we have to dig into is the lifestyle. It sounds super glamorous, traveling the world, advising titans of industry on world-shaping strategy. But the fact is when you do travel, you're working like a dog, so you don't exactly get to enjoy the places you're traveling to. And you'd be surprised how much big corporations are spread all over the world into remote places. So yes, I did work at Luxembourg, San Francisco, and Chicago, but I also worked in Cincinnati, Eden Prairie, and Peoria, Illinois. These are places where the hotel and food options are pretty limited if you care about that sort of thing. I actually grew up in those sorts of places, so I actually kind of like going to Applebee's every day. But for much of the McKinsey people who are used to a lot more, it adds to the grind when you work these long hours in a remote place that's not that nice. And most importantly, the travel schedule really gets in the way of settling down roots in your actual home city, building friendships, starting a family, and just having a healthy routine. Being out of town, living out of a suitcase Monday through Thursday is a great way to ensure that you're an absentee parent. Now, you may be thinking working in other industries like tech can also be pretty intense and long hours. And while that is true, especially in early stage startups, I'd say that there is a lot more flexibility. If you're an engineer, it just matters that you get the work done. You don't need to travel across the country and put in a bunch of face time. You decide when to work. Now, this is changing quite a bit with remote work, and I'd say the lifestyle these days is probably a lot better than it was, say, you know, two, three, five years ago. But nonetheless, if you're a consultant, clients and their deadlines are still the ones dictating your schedule. The second reason I quit McKinsey is the nature of the client work itself. Yes, you're meeting with some high flying Fortune 500 CEOs and executives, but these are also decades old businesses with hundreds of thousands of people where you have to navigate tons of politics to get anything minuscule done. I'm just personally very demotivated by optimizing monolithic businesses like this to grow 2% per year versus 1%. McKinsey is actually what made me realize I love working with startups, where there is a real chance you can be part of a rocket ship growing 1,000% a year and is so much more exhilarating. The third reason I left McKinsey is I just didn't want to be a partner at the firm, and I just couldn't see myself selling consulting work in an authentic way, to be honest. Part of that is I was a business analyst in the middle of the sausage making every day, and I just had a hard time believing that we were worth the 500 grand per month or whatever we were being paid. Selling consulting business just wasn't a lifestyle or a skill set I admired personally. No offense to my friends at McKinsey. I personally find myself much more gravitating towards the iconoclasts, the builders and the creatives, the rule breakers, the kinds of people who tend to start early stage companies. The fourth reason is there's no real feedback loop. Yes, you make money off clients and you're graded by other consultants on the quality of your work, but there's no real way to know if the work you're doing is actually creating value because you don't own the actual execution of the strategy you come up with. And you're just simply not around anyways to see the impact because you're onto the next project. One of the reasons I really love venture capital and investing is there's a very clear and objective metric by which you're judged, and that's cash on cash returns. Venture is a little bit tougher in the sense that it may take 10 to 15 years to IPO, but I'm personally willing to play the long game. The feedback loop for startups is much faster. You could, for example, launch a new marketing campaign for your product and see the results same day. A related but actually more important point, it's just not as fulfilling when you only do strategy. I didn't fully realize this until I worked at Google and startups. The work you're doing is just so much more fulfilling when you actually see it through all the way to the end and see the real world impact that it's done. At McKinsey, the best you can do is maybe stay in touch with clients and hear about that secondhand. But for the vast majority of consultants, especially junior folks, you just have no idea if anyone did anything with your suggestions. This is the polar opposite of a startup where ideas are cheap and execution is everything, and you spend all of your time actually building and learning as fast as possible. And lastly, this is probably a controversial point that many will not agree with, but I wondered if the work was making me more transactional as a human being. Hear me out here. People are generally just ruder and less kind when they're in a rush. And with consulting, you're always pulling late nights to meet a client deadline, always running to catch a flight. And I think for me personally, it brought out the worst in me sometimes. And also the fact that you're constantly working with different project teams, doing work for different clients, and then leaving before the repercussions of your work are known. I also think that structurally, that might make a lot of people more transactional as well. And so in some sense, I actually didn't like the person I was becoming through consulting. And I think this is one of the underrated pieces of joining and leaving jobs is what is the nature of the work due to you as a person? I admittedly am an idealistic optimist, but I like it that way. So for me, being a venture capitalist and getting to dream alongside amazing founders, trying to do the impossible is perfect. Now you'll notice I didn't say I left McKinsey because of the stress. Frankly, I think there's a lot of jobs out there that are more stressful, namely working at an early stage startup or starting your own company, which I think is an order of magnitude more stressful. But I would say I don't like the kind of stress that you face at McKinsey because it's often the product of big company politics that are beyond your control, especially as a junior person. Imagine an executive at a company may be threatened by your presence just because McKinsey was hired by his or her boss when they weren't doing a good job. And that person may go out of their way to criticize you publicly in high stakes meetings in front of your team and clients and give illogical emotional feedback, which leads to tons of thrash on the work you're doing. That stuff happens all the time at McKinsey. And there are certain clients and engagements that get reputations for being a complete disaster. But at the end of the day, I think those stakes are still just so much lower than living paycheck to paycheck or say being a startup operator where your customers, investors and team owe their livelihoods directly to you. All that said, I'm actually really grateful for my time at McKinsey. There are some amazingly smart people and kind people there that were actually the biggest draw for me in the first place. And I certainly personally got a lot out of it. At the time I joined, I was much more of a math nerd who needed help with communication. And McKinsey, I think, is the best training ground for that in a business context. And it opened up the doors to so many other opportunities. I actually ended up following one of the partners I work with into the public education sector. And I eventually went to Harvard Business School in large part because of the McKinsey brand and the strong references. And that is actually where I discovered my love for startups and venture capital. So McKinsey was an integral part of my journey so far that I'm immensely thankful for. And I wouldn't change for the world. But I thought this was an important video to make precisely because McKinsey is such a strong brand that opens doors. I feel so many people join the firm when they may be better served elsewhere. You can't go too wrong working with such smart people at a place that opens doors. But it's a safe option for many incredibly ambitious young people who could dare to do something that's a better fit for their talents. And for the most daring, startups are an incredible opportunity for outsized impact. On that note, if you're looking to break into the startup world and venture capital, I made a couple of videos that walk through step-by-step how to land the dream job helping build the future. Thanks so much for watching. See you next time.