Have you seen this article in The Telegraph today?
The headline gives away the gist of the 1,300 words that followed it but for funsies let’s summarize the main points, namely the three instances of “bullshit.” Note they use quotes around the word — presumably someone they spoke to specifically used that word to describe Big 4 consulting — but don’t attribute it to one source of the several they spoke to.
Working as an auditor at one of Britain’s top accounting firms was once among the most prestigious jobs in the City [Ed. note: the City means London].
In return for scrutinising the accounts of major companies to spot any potential fraud or irregularities, accountants were rewarded with good pay, long-term stability and steady progression.
But today, jobs at the leading firms are viewed differently. Instead, in the words of one former “big four” consultant, the roles are now about “making money from bulls–t by pretending to be an expert in front of large corporate clients”.
Why lead with auditors and immediately pivot to consulting? Why drag audit into this? Next…
“It’s just educated people making PowerPoint slides of nonsense for companies,” one former big four consultant says. “People would be working 13 hours a day to just stay slightly ahead of their clients.”
He says meetings could be painful. “We famously did one project on new laws facing the car industry. The whole time we were going: ‘What are we doing?’ We just really didn’t have a clue.
“In the final showdown meeting with the client, we were just rambling off laws, and the clients kept saying, ‘Oh yeah we know that one.’ We’d basically spent hours trying to do this project and the client kept telling us, ‘Oh yeah, we knew about that’.
“But there was this one really obscure law I’d found from Arizona,” the former consultant says. “I’d found it after hours of searching and we mentioned that one, and the client said, ‘Oh we haven’t heard about that one yet’.”
For those still in the industry, it is an increasingly rare occurrence. They say it is becoming more difficult for consultants to outsmart their clients, threatening to call time on the “bulls–t jobs” boom.
Well they’re correct the boom appears to be over. The most recent boom came about thanks to money printers around the world going brrrr when the events of early 2020 brought everything to a screeching halt and when that dried up, the work seemed to dry up just as quickly. Firms have been struggling for the last few years to get the billing engine fired up again and last year’s revenue reports across Big 4 all showed paltry growth, with the exception of Middle East work for firms with robust practices there. To the surprise of everyone, it was KPMG that came closest to hitting nearly double-digit growth in one service line (Tax and Legal at 9.9%, so close!) while everyone else reported low-to-mid single digits in all service lines across the board.
For at least two years in a row we’ve heard about slow demand in consulting, making us wonder if EY’s failed Project Everest split was actually some kind of curse that came about because leadership forgot to knock on wood when they were rubbing their palms together in anticipation of buckets of cash they’d make by separating consulting from audit. By the way, EY just delayed consulting start dates for the third year in a row.
Alright, here’s the last bullshit from Telegraph:
Insiders at the accountancy firms may agree that their ranks are filled with nonsense roles. But, for now at least, the big four are likely to keep the “bulls–t jobs” boom going for as long as possible.
Um. There’s no doubt Big 4 are trying to keep the overpriced PowerPoint slides scheme going, the “boom” is long gone. For now. There are plenty of billable hours to be generated (no pun) by “AI transformation,” something firms are well aware of and already on top of.
But whatever. See the rest for yourself here:
How a ‘bulls–t jobs’ boom captured the Big Four accountants [Telegraph]
