Cultivating self-awareness while working in consulting, finance, and tech
After working in management consulting for a summer and deciding to go back after graduation, while being bombarded with media coverage on its evils, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the industry’s place in the world. This list is an attempt at compiling the many podcasts, books, and articles that helped me along the way. I am more jaded now but also more aware of the flaws in society that allow these industries to be disproportionately compensated for the value they add, skeptical of late-capitalism excesses (#expenseLifestyle) and have a better idea of what I think I want from my stint in this world.
During this time I have also had several conversations with friends with similar backgrounds (elite college, clueless about future, found themselves selling out). Much of this list is made up of recommendations from them or are things I wish I had recommended in the moment. While this list is mostly geared towards consulting, I think much of it will apply to finance, and some to tech.
This is a continuing journey and suggestions, comments are welcome!
Side note: I have linked Amazon pages where relevant but recently found this cool website that ships second-hand books for free in USA. Their collection is pretty great and I’d recommend checking it out before buying stuff off Amazon.
Podcasts
Somehow, a lot of the most insightful commentary I have heard has come from the podcast world (thank you Ezra Klein). This is perhaps because of how opaque, secretive and variable consulting can be — most mainstream coverage can be traced to the last one or two years and a handful of news outlets (thank you NYTimes). More are jumping onto the bandwagon and I am sure there are books in the works.
The Ezra Klein Show
Anand Giridharadas on the elite charade of changing the world
Anand Giridharadas explores common narratives about billionaire philanthropy and “social impact” work by elite institutions. In particular, he makes the case that consulting firms use their (negligible amounts of) social impact work to lure in recent grads, only to have them working on big pharma, energy etc., often on projects that directly undermine other social impact work.
Ezra Klein summarized (thread) this phenomenon in light of a recent Vox report covering McKinsey and BCG’s work for WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The podcast is a fantastic summary of the book itself (below). Giridharadas is usually very polemical but Klein is brilliant at posing questions. Vox. Stitcher.
Daniel Markovits in “When meritocracy wins, everybody loses”
Daniel Markovits takes a higher level, sociological view of many symptoms Giridharadas describes. Taking a radical stance against meritocracy, as conventionally imagined, he argues that meritocracy itself is inherently unjust.
It produces radical inequality, stifles social mobility, and makes everyone — including the apparent winners — miserable. These are not symptoms of systemic malfunction; they are the products of a system that is working exactly as it is supposed to. (Vox)
The dynamics he describes are definitely quite America-centric, but do offer generalizable ideas to think about conversations about “merit,” especially within the ranks of the global elite at large. Stitcher.
Similar topic, through the lens of consumption: How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the elite
Work as Identity, Burnout as Lifestyle
Klein interviews Anne Helen Petersen who wrote Buzzfeed’s famous “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,” and Derek Thompson, author of “Workism is Making Americans Miserable.” This podcast made me think about pervasive workism even in college and probably had the most discernible impact on my day-to-day (stepping back, learning to say no). Even during my internship, the signs of this were pervasive: people working weekends on tasks that didn’t really need to be done, struggling to answer when you ask them about hobbies, only engaging in tasks during their free time that would help in the working world (exercise, business books). Incredibly helpful listening. Stitcher.
Articles / Essays
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber’s seminal piece questions the value of jobs we have created under late-capitalism. This essay (which was later expanded into a book, below) questions why we didn’t realize Keynes’ predictions for the 15-hour work week and profoundly helped me think about how we construct prestige and value in our society. (It is slotted in the part of my brain that thinks about Universal Basic Income, but that is an essay for another time). It also has fantastic paragraphs that will stay with you for a long time, like this one:
For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘‘Prestigious’’ Jobs
This is an academic paper from a journal in sociology but, like Bullshit Jobs, gave me a lot to think about on how we define “prestige” on campus, and the forces that drive this construction. None of this was new information per se but it was helpful to see the phenomenon summarised and explored deeply.
Even Artichokes Have Doubts
Marina Keegan’s classic essay from 2011. She explored the world of finance and consulting recruiting at Yale in her trademark style. Extremely relatable content, only made better by this thread I saw recently.
“We are complicit in our employer's deeds” & “Bye, Amazon”
These are two blog pieces written by tech people — Tim Bray who quit as Vice President of Amazon Web Services and Drew deVault, an independent software consultant — and offer short, compelling insights from the insider’s perspective.
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
Anne Helen Petersen famous Buzzfeed piece, featured in the Ezra Klein show (above).
From MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech
An interesting, oldish, essay on a consultant’s experience in Dubai. A lot of the things they write about are definitely not generalizable but it’s interesting reading on the day-to-day life of an entry-level consultant nonetheless.
Books
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber
Amazon. Also available for free on The Anarchist Library, I won’t post a link because it will probably change but know how to Google things.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
A fiction recommendation that is surprisingly pertinent, especially for people recently / reluctantly inducted into the diaspora. Hamid was himself a Princeton grad and McKinsey consultant before becoming an author. I won’t try to summarize the book and hope that you just take my word for it. Amazon.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell
In some ways this book is just a glorified paean for mindfulness, but it makes for valuable reading nonetheless. Odell makes a compelling case for why pulling back from technology and reclaiming our attention is important not just for self-preservation and improvement of the self-help genre, but also a valuable political act in protest of hyper-capitalism and the accompanying culture of self-optimization. I skimmed the book because it often digresses into random pastiches of historical case studies. I can see the appeal of this format (and makes sense given Odell’s background as an artist), but it wasn’t really for me. A valuable read nonetheless. Amazon.
Surviving consulting / passions / morality / ethics
This section is not strictly relevant to your existential angsts but instead outlines some ways I have gone about thinking about morality and “giving back” in my own college and early working life.
Effective Altruism
This tweet summarizes philosopher Peter Singer’s favourite thought experiment. He argues that just as a passer-by is morally obligated to save the child, similarly the well-off are morally obligated to give to help the lives of people who continue to experience extreme poverty. The entire movement of Effective Altruism (EA) is founded on giving away money to maximize one’s “impact,” defined as the number of lives saved/positively impacted per dollar given away. GiveWell researches the most effective charities of the world to come up with these numbers. For instance, $480 to Deworm the World is enough to save a life — totaling to over 200 lives per $100,000 donated (cost-effectiveness model).
While I have some qualms with EA at large (I think it is way too utilitarian and cannot, on its own, constitute a tenable worldview), I have found it helpful to motivate myself to give more and reduce my frivolous consumption.
Peter Singer’s interview with Ezra Klein is a good primer to the world of EA (and will answer some immediate questions that may arise, such as, if giving to save lives is a moral obligation, am I being unethical if I spend on, say, a movie ticket?). Vox. Stitcher.
Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save (which he made free this Giving Tuesday) is also interesting reading / listening.
Entire communities of EA folks have cropped up around the world. 80,000 Hours is a website that shares career advice guided by EA principles. They have a helpful guide, especially useful if you are making a critical life choice right now.
GiveDirectly is my favourite charity and UBI is my favourite radical idea but I will stop now because this reading list is becoming very digressive :)
Mindfulness / Meditation
Last podcast, only because I remembered I titled this section “surviving consulting.”
How the brains of master meditators change
Vox.
