elkement said:
I have been working as an IT security consultant - that type of job comprises both business consulting aspects and consulting / training with respect to e.g. cryptography. I have met other physics or maths PhDs in similar roles.
I know a few Ph.D.'s (not physics but CS/EE) in those roles and people that work for Accenture and companies like that tend to **hate** it, because there is a glass ceiling. and it's obvious to everyone that it's the people in sales and marketing that run the show, and there is a ton of resentment there. The technology/management conflict also happens in other places, but in places like IBM it's much less bad.
Also the reason that investment banking is attractive is that you have physics Ph.D.'s in senior roles. There *is* a glass ceiling but it's quite a bit higher in investment banking than it is in management consulting. That makes a difference not only because you can imagine yourself being the boss, but also if you have a boss that comes from a similar background, the decisions they make are more similar to the one's you'd make if you were in their shoes.
On the other hand, there is a sample bias here, because most of the people that I know that did business consulting hated it, and went into investment banking.
I just checked McKinsey's website out of curiosity. The international website does not explicitly mention physics, but obviously refers to PhDs that worked in academic research
One thing about McKinsney is that they are extremely brand name sensitive. The like graduates from big name universities so that they can tell their clients that they have consultants from big name universities. I know a ton of MIT physics undergraduates that went to work there, and I've lost track with most of them, but most of them thought the work was decent.
I think assessing different technologies and modelling the energy transmission in the smartgrid is a task very appealing to a physics PhD.
I think I'd hate it. One thing that I dislike about consultant's reports is that they often get themselves in a lot of trouble saying non-sense things, because "we don't know" is an not an acceptable answer even if it happens to be the truth. One other thing that I find annoying is that one thing that I've never seen a consulting company do is to go over old reports and see how good their model really was.
So true! It is very unusual that consulting is what the term implies - supporting the customer to complete the project on his own. A real consultant should work efficiently to make himself or herself redundant.
Business consulting is extremely political. Something else that I've seen is that often the client wants an answer "WE NEED TO SPEND MORE MONEY ON X" and the role of the consulting company is to provide an report that officially gives the answer that the client wants. If you reply "NOT X" then the report gets buried and you hire someone else.
Sometimes this is a *good* thing. Something I have seen is that you have a company in which everyone knows that unpopular thing X needs to be done, but no one wants to be screamed at for doing it. So you hire a consultant, pay them a ton of money, and they issue a report stating the obvious, and X gets done, and everyone screams at the consultant.
One other problem is that the math isn't really that sophisticated. If you look at what math actually gets used in those models, the most sophisticated thing that I've seen is regression. Often linear regression. Now it happens that some of the people in charge of those companies are mathematically illiterate and a linear regression might as well be string theory. Still, not what I want to do...
That work is useful, but it's not really want I want to do.
But especially the larger consulting companies basically sell "project resources" or hours. There is a a huge pressure on employees to meet challenging goals in terms of billable hours.
Google for the term "death march" and "project management."
Which is not an environment that I'd find "fun." A while ago I did interview for a job that was associated with a consulting company. I did talk to some of the technical people there, but it was disturbing because they had this "traumatic stare" and I figured that it wasn't going to be fun working there.
I had an interview with another consulting company, and after talking with them for five minutes I realized that I was completely unqualified and incompetent for the job they were looking to have me do, and I was extremely disturbed by the fact that the interviewer had no clue that I was totally unqualified for it.
But YMMV.