Someone here posted a tiktok a few months ago of some lady who worked at a consulting firm and she showed what her daily routine is like.
She basically just talked with her coworkers, went to lunch, came back and talked some more. It was basically adult daycare
And she gets paid six figures to teach executives what multi-colored sticky notes are.
I've never understood exactly what consulting is. Do they do independent research on behalf of a company? Do they read tea leaves?
Don't forget laundering unpopular decisions that would've been made anyways
Consultants serve as professional scapegoats. Executives hire them so that they can do what they want and have someone to blame when it goes wrong.
It’s just vibes. Consultants are hired to tell you what you want here. I’d they don’t, you hire another consultant.
It depends. The term "consulting" covers a WIDE variety of completely different jobs and companies. In a lot of cases, it means white-collar contracting, and it can be for any white-collar job that you'd normally hire someone for.
It varies so wildly. You've got capital-C Consultants like McKinsey, but you also have like "we outsourced our IT to another company with more specialized expertise", or "we bought into the grift economy around some ridiculously complex SaaS tool and hired a certified consultant to set it up for us"
Consultant is just a fancy word for someone who does something for a client. Lots of software developers are consultants.
And the business school is always the newest and nicest building with classrooms named after the company currently in the news for wiping out the last crested egret in south america or something.
I hate them so much. Weird freaks with their fucking fake degrees.
In canada they're usually named after guys who have slaves. Not for historic reasons, they're guys still walking around going to expensive dinners. Canadian natural resources firms just fucking love slavery
Canadian natural resources firms just fucking love slavery
When I'm Comrade Secretary-General of the Global Soviet, everyone alive who has held a management position in a Canadian natural resource company, and everyone who has ever done consulting work for one, will be put on public trial with all their dirty laundry aired for the world to see. And the dead ones will still have their dirty laundry aired, even if trial isn't an option. They are scum on a level easily equal to any American defence contractor.
And the dead ones will still have their dirty laundry aired, even if trial isn't an option.
CADAVER SYNOD 2.0 LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Weirdly enough, accounting profs in my experience aren't nearly as bad. Most of mine like to positively reference Marxist concepts without actually mentioning his name. They were way too consistent and coherent at it for it to have been coincidence, they definitely read Marxist work. I think it's because accountants have to work in the real work, and modern Western economists don't.
In my experience most well trained accountants who are not Mormons are usually at least Marxist in terms of their economic theory (because they see how much money really is sliding around in the system and how little of it goes towards labor, which is the thing actually generating the product). They generally aren't Marxist in terms of their political theory, but I've heard remarks of 'giving up every client when the revolution comes', or 'nbd communism will still need accountants'.
Nah, makes sense that people out to do math for a living are a little more... focoused
I like what Richard Wolff said about economics in higher education, that there’s the Econ school where they teach you all these nice stories about how the economy functions, and then there’s the business school where they teach you how the sausage actually gets made.
i studied finance this is very accurate at the 100-level. but the disciplines within business school have their own vibes. accounting was usually the most straightforward. management & marketing were an absolute joke. Econ was ideology in its purest form, think "axiom based on extremely simplified assumptions that we wont ever question". finance was a mixed bag, but maybe thats just my experience. the courses were a mix between real math (bond evaluation and derivatives, etc) and just econ-like ideology, but with the patrick batemans in class salivating over it. The best classes i had were business classes taught by non-business prof's where we had to actually read stuff, like veblen or marx (these were elective credits, though, most didn't take them)
fwiw, most accounting and finance people end up just doing back-office planning/budgeting/forecasting. its just "are we on/over/under budget?" stuff. we're all overpaid, sure, but we're not all investment banking psychos either
What entry level job did you go with when you graduated? I'm getting close to done and am getting anxious about career stuff.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and got really lucky and landed a rotational program. 3 years, 3 different jobs in finance and risk. I've done it all since. Credit risk, financial operations, corporate fp&a, Treasury operations. I found i like operations stuff best. It's the most tangible and you're closer to the business - the people actually doing the work. It's basically helping non-finance people like engineers and supply chain management their departmental budgets. You never really get near the soul-less finance stuff either, worst you'll do is lead cost-optimization initiatives where you push people to trim 5% of their budget here or the there, but it's never costing people their jobs.
Im also at a company with massive union presence so our culture is about as good as you can get from a big company. not sure if you're comfortable sharing your state but you can message me and if it's a state my company is in I can help get you a job
My gen ed econ class: "Let's watch this John Stossel video about how the government lost one million dollars last year."
My animal biology courses: "Check out this weird creature and its fucked up dick!"
My intro to business law class:
"Anyone who leaves the room for any reason is automatically failed! Now let me rant for a half an hour about how the Duke lacrosse scandal was a partisan conspiracy against white people!"The intro to chemistry class I took instead:
"Alright so today we're gonna talk about exothermic reactions, and I've got a video for this. [puts on a fucking camcorder video of him setting off bombs in the woods]"There are two kinds of chemistry teachers, and one of them is wanted by the FBI for teaching 8 year olds how to make Semtex.
Hell yeah, I regret assuming chemistry majors were all poindexters. Just like how everyone assumes you're pre-med if you tell them you're a biology major. I probably missed out on some fun friendships with budding tf2 demomen
My zoology professor was very pro eco-terrorism and had us read Kropotkin's Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution as part of the curriculum
Business degrees are just a way for the next generation of finance fleecers to get to know each other and become immersed in their weird cult lingo
The higher level degrees (MBAs etc) also function as a way to gatekeep very easy high-paying jobs to those who can afford the expenses (rich failchildren).
I was a business major
Here's some random thoughts about classes based on my experienceAccounting - Most professors stuck to the material and didn't voice any political opinions. The one who taught the intro class opened each lecture with a common way businesses tried to scam consumers and how to avoid it. A professor who taught some higher level classes bragged about getting golden parachutes and complained about the long term capital gains tax being too high. There was a light ethics component to some classes which mostly consisted of telling us future employers would ask us to cook the books and to please not do that.
MIS - Some useful info about tech infrastructure and some programming. Lots of useless jargon. One class had a whole unit about how to trick the real programmers into working unpaid overtime (such as "we're a family")
Marketing - Almost entirely jargon. I learned about native advertising in this class which helped radicalize me
Finance - See the Twitter screenshot
Management - Most meta class I ever took. The professor mostly put on YouTube videos vaguely related to management and then either left or took a nap
The professor mostly put on YouTube videos vaguely related to management and then either left or took a nap
That is the most Management thing I have ever heard
my left-lib management professor gave us all the answers to the final exam and threw a pizza party.
native advertising
What's that?
There was a light ethics component to some classes which mostly consisted of telling us future employers would ask us to cook the books and to please not do that.
Ethics classes are like "please don't do flagrantly criminal activities, even though all the biggest companies either reached that size by these means, or began engaging in these activities when they reached that size." Obviously they never talk about the ethics of exploiting labor.
Native advertising is when content written by an advertiser is presented alongside legitimate content with no differentiation. For example, a news site has an article about some product or company. This article was really written by an advertiser, but it is not marked as an ad. It's presented alongside actual news articles written by actual journalists as if it was legitimate journalism.
Apparently in the old days you couldn't even write songs that had a product name in the lyrics and have it air on the BBC radio when it was all state owned (or whatever it is). Even just referencing the product like that was seen as an endorsement or advertisement of it on public broadcasting. They had the right idea back then.
BBC is still relatively regulated in terms of on-air mention of brands, afaik, but frankly I think they should dub over them like old-fashion profanity censors. "I was driving in the c a r when . . ."
In the 1970's a Danish cooking show on public TV was cancelled for endorsing butter which was seen as advertising for the dairy industry.
I had a philosophy professor who said she taught business ethics and saw her goal as getting as many students to change majors as possible. That one was probably real.
One class had a whole unit about how to trick the real programmers into working unpaid overtime (such as "we're a family")
What was the class? What was the unit called?
I don't remember the name of the class or the unit, but it was the final class in the major. The phrase "trick people into working unpaid overtime" was never actually used, but is clearly what was being discussed. I only remember a few of the methods discussed such as we're a family, pizza parties, threatening performance reviews, and trying to gameify the production process somehow to get workers to compete for meaningless points.
I was reading a book about American chattel slavery called Slavery's Capitalism and that book made it clear how plantation overseers would use small prizes as an incentive to get slaves to compete with each other. Two able bodied slaves might compete with each other over a cup of sugar, or a hat (commodities which they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to have), for instance. The overseers would use this to get them to reveal their capacity for excessively hard work and, this part is key, then proceed to raise the harvesting quota on all the other slaves. Failure to meet quotas would result in one whip lash per pound by which they fell short. Here's the larger quote:
In other cases, enslavers used positive incentives to get people to pick faster, setting up races between individuals with prizes like a cup of sugar, a hat, or a small amount of money. But such speed-ups shouldn't be seen simply as attempts to import positive incentives into a system dominated by negative ones. They were also tricks, designed to get enslaved people to reveal capacities they were hiding. In Georgia, John Brown's enslaver Thomas Stevens would "pick out two or more of the strongest and sturdiest, and excite them to a race at hoeing or picking, for an old hat, or something of the sort. He would stand with his watch in his hand, observing their movements, whilst they hoed or picked across a certain space he had marked out. The man who won the prize set the standard for the rest. Whatever he did, within a given time, would be multiplied by a certain rule, for the day's work." But enslavers also whipped greater picking speed out of enslaved people in the field itself, forcing their targets to devote sustained attention and unrelenting effort to their speed and accuracy (less leaves, dirt, "trash," etc. in the picked fibers). This kind of invigilation reveals yet again the major differences between the labor system used on the cotton frontier and that used in the Lowcountry. It also reveals the essence of the enslavers' plan: to force enslaved people to show their left hands. Here, on the cotton frontier, enslavers "whipped up" enslaved people to force them to reveal capacities they were hiding, or that had not yet been created. "As I picked so well at first," remembered John Brown, "more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day," after starting at a minimum requirement of 100. "Old man Jonas watched us children and kept us divin' for that cotton all day long," remembered lrella Battle Walker, and "us wish him dead many a time."
Similarly, under post-slavery wage servitude, we are incentivized as workers to compete with each other over small concessions, small privileges, for which we are supposed to be proud of having, but our overexertion in attempting to beat each other, and win those privileges, is used to raise the expectations on everyone else. Productivity increases while wages fail to keep up with inflation. More and more surplus value is extracted by the Capitalist, and we are inundated with "hustle and grind" propaganda.
by @DodecaWeasel@hexbear.net in fact now that the timewall is gone I should go find the original comment
Reminds me of how newly-arrived enslaved people were broken-in for picking cotton by being rabidly whipped and chased by the overseer in a frenzy to pick cotton as fast as possible, and once the load was weighed, that became their standard quota
Without the benefit of studies, the specific analogy to wage labor in this case seems much less useful than the simple fact that if you are getting employees to work more than they would otherwise in hopes of a prize, but only the winner gets the prize, the others are not being compensated for their additional labor, but that matter is framed to them as their loss to the other employee rather than the employer using an antisocial framework to extract extra value from most of the employees at the price of compensating just one of them.
That's not the only relevant point, and the original analogy might have been substantiated in the text, but at base the perversity seems to mainly be offering people a carrot for more labor and then giving only one of them a carrot, it's false-consciousness-building 101.
I also went to business school, like 20 years ago, the only thing that stuck was relational databases from MIS classes. Finance, accounting, management, marketing, it was all useless to me
It's not saying much but I'm glad they still at least admit "profit equals revenue minus costs" because I often see class collaborationist bozos try to argue that "workers receive their fair share of the profit" by redefining "profit" as "the revenue split between workers and owners for their respective contributions." Through this sleight of hand they try to make it out that the owners contribute value to to the commodities by "taking on risk" and "creating jobs" and "building a workplace" and that this somehow justifies the passive accumulation of wealth by the ruling class on the basis of their private ownership of the means of production. The revenue is split (very unevenly) between worker and owners, not the profit. the profit is what is gained by paying workers less than their work is worth. workers wages are considered a "cost" subtracted from the revenue. the profit is what is left over after the "cost" of the workers wages, upkeep of means of production, etc.
you actually need someone to understand that profit equals revenue minus cost in order to have a capitalist system
right, they'll always understand it at the back of their minds, but they'll often try to conceal that reality under some kind of false pretense of workers and owners "sharing profits" rather than workers wages being part of the "costs" that they fundamentally see as decreasing their profits. The goal of the capitalist is to minimize the difference between revenue and profit by paying workers as little as possible, but they are loathe to admit this publicly since that gives away the game.
mostly they don't bother though as if the workers don't like it what are they going to do overthrow private property that situation is what they have police for
Last session I had my microecon prof try to argue against the minimum wage...
There is a reasonable argument to be made against the minimum wage in an economy with high unionisation rates in low-paid jobs. Under such circumstances a minimum wage can sabotage collective bargaining efforts and end up as a default wage.
I don't know how well this argument is backed by empirical observations but at least it's a sensible objection to a minimum wage. It's probably not the argument your professor made.
Under such circumstances a minimum wage can sabotage collective bargaining efforts and end up as a default wage
I don't see how as the collective bargaining strength comes from the amount of money they can force the business owner to loose by striking. Which a minimum wage wouldn't effect.
Also a minimum wage would mean that if things are really shit people could leave their job as employers that only pay minimum wage are in competition with other businesses that pay minimum wage for employees
I study economics and it's mostly pure ideology. In September I'm gonna drop economics of there's no modules that study real stuff. Like I've studied microeconomics and macroeconomics according to keynes and co and it's just pure ideology, none of it takes any kind of scientific approach to this social science. There's so many random models and graphs because economists just throw darts at random words and decide there's a correlation between them, and then when those models fall apart they have to make a new one to say "if model a fails, then model b is true".
The only good economics modules I've done are about economic history, because they're forced to talk about things that are actually real and happened
i was going to take business as my minor but then i decided to take something actually useful instead (sociology)
STEM and humanities must unite against the true evils, economics and especially BUSINESS majors.
At least my political economy course (which is about americas for some reason) was decent talked about how Cuba arguably has the best system in the latin america given their resources as well as how Western nations basically exploited the Americas.
The problem is all the STEM-bros, brosettes and brenbies also have 0 fucking clue about epistemology because that's not scientific enough and so while they hate the econ people for taking the easy way out it's not on the basis of they're all fucking stupid
Elon Musk is doing a fairly good job of convincing tech people that business people are fucking stupid
especially because the econ people still think he's a genius
brenbies
I have been looking for the enby version of bro for awhile now. Thank you.
profit = theft
