As An MBA, Should You Join Google Or Consulting?

Would you, as a freshly minted MBA, join Google or a top-tier management consulting company? Or in the case of someone with work experience, is it worthwhile to switch from consulting to tech or vice- versa?  

This query was posed in Quora and drew mixed responses. Saikat Bhadra, who moved from consulting to join an internal consulting group at Google says he found almost 80% of the people are ex-consultants from McKinsey / Bain / BCG.

Pros and Cons

Listing the Pros and Cons of working at Google, he puts lesser hours of work, less travel, better perks, and an overall better quality of life in favour of the tech company.

With the employer as the client, there is no need for any strategy fluff and will require actual implementation. There would be opportunities to  interact with non-business types in product & engineering.

Learning avenues

More avenues are available to learn about entrepreneurship & innovation than in consulting. You would be able to work on interesting and innovating problems in a highly evolving industry.

However, you will work with only one client (Google) and one industry (Tech) and thus miss out on the chief assets of consulting, the plethora of client experience and learnings. Promotions may not be as fast as in consulting and salary growth will also be slower.

Working for a very large organisation, you will be only one of the hundreds or thousands of employees. You will not be the superstar of your organization; the product and engineers at Google get all the fame.

Your exit options will most probably be more limited to the tech industry while consulting leaves the playing field wide open.

You will also miss out on the structured approach to problems, communicating through decks, and the rest of the “consulting toolbox”.

Aparna Chennapragada, who works for Google says she chose to join Google over the top three strategy consulting firm for reasons like wanting to move to the valley, stay in tech, wanting to be a builder rather than an advisor and didn’t want to travel.

Rahul Prasad was faced with deciding between Google PM (product manager) and two of the top consulting firms in the Bay Area.

He says he did some research and found that a couple of years in consulting do not get you more than a level 5 PM at Google. Beyond a couple of years, Google views you as having lost touch with the technology world.

Associate Principals /Managers/Project Leads at consulting tend to enter on the strategy/business development side of tech. It becomes harder and harder to do product if you spend too much time at a consulting firm.

On the other hand, if you spend a 2-5 years at MBB, you will gain significant acceleration on the strategy/operations/business development side if you join Google at that point. The learning is much faster in consulting and the exposure to executives and board of director level issues is great.

Also, in the first four years salary tends to be comparable if you count  Google equity as compensation. After four years, consulting will pull far ahead of Google, unless you are an absolute superstar.

The Product Manager role at Google is arguably the most mobile role in tech in the Valley. You can join a 5 person startup as their VP of Product or you can join a 100 person startup as a VP or director of Product.

Former consultants may not have the skillset that a 5-person early stage consumer startup needs. Consumer startups need product and engineering. Enterprise startups need product, engineering, and a rolodex.

A senior associate / consultant at MBB might have a great network, but they may not have the warm contacts to make sales to COO or CTO level folks in large companies. Those relationships happen at the Associate Principal / Partner level.