Why the longggg hours?
I know every consultant complains about the long hours, but why exactly the long hours?
tons of hours wasted on the road? endless meetings? waiting for others to get something done? or it is some task that truly takes dozens of hours?
Say someone is really efficient at solving consulting problems on his own, would he be able not to have super long hours like others? Can long hours by any chance avoidable?
Thanks!
From my experience the office hours are about 9am - 9/10pm (with some nights stretched to 11/12pm) but that's for when you're at the office all day (some firms operate this 'home office' model).
For firms with a lot of travel (MBBs) the long hours are due to early flights to meet clients. If I'm going from London to Paris and I need to be at the client's meeting at 9am I need to take the 6:30/7am flight landing at 8am. This means I have to be in the airport by 5am and will have a 3am wake up. Nightmare.
As for the actual tasks, meetings don't tend to be too bad unless they're the kick-off or delivery as they are the longest and require sharing the most information. The normal day-to-day work isn't too crazy in terms of time it takes but things like data dumps, industry/market analysis and fully understanding the client's business (and where they stand in the market) can take a while. This can happen in particular with niche market segments or in smaller geographies.
T2 strategy firm here. My experience has been long hours (8-9AM until ~10pm or past midnight depending on the project).
However, very little time is wasted. Teams are very efficient and there is low to no downtime. This is far preferable to me than working long hours with long periods of downtime or endless review cycles. Days go by very quickly, it's common to look at the clock and be shocked that it's already 5pm or later.
Since you accomplish so much in a day, your technical and strategy skills both improve at a very fast pace as well.
I don't think being highly capable will greatly reduce the hours worked. First, the industry is full of highly capable people; those that aren't get pushed out. So to imply you're more capable than the norm means you're really something special. Second, project work is divided based on both strengths and development areas. So ideally you'll always be challenged and not be able to coast. Third, there is almost always room for improvement, whether in outputs or going deeper on a particular area. If you're more capable, your work should reflect higher quality and potentially quantity.
Fourth, if the team is crushing late every day and you're rolling out at 6 because you think your work is stellar, you're going to look like a bit of a jackass. That doesn't mean people sit around to just do more work, but peers will assume you're cutting corners (and to be honest, you probably are if you're leaving hours early every day).
The most often case when I see people working unnecessarily work late hours is if they're not as technically competent as their peers. In that case, a good manager will usually reassign work to be efficient.
Exactly. That's a thing key to MC. In IB you work perhaps 15-16 hour days but you get about 9-10 of effective work. In MC your 12-13 hour days are really 12-13 hours of work.
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