Part of the grift is that roughly one of ten of these unproven low-paid MBAs will be exceptional. So when one does a good job they'll use it as an example of typical performance. I see this happen with dev talent agencies and unproven software engineers. Only the great projects go in their portfolio and the satisfied clients are happy to appear on their website because they don't realize they just got lucky.
With software engineers some of the remaining 90% really are talented but spend most of the project learning on the job, fixing an issue in a few hours that a senior engineer in their stack could fix in 30 minutes with their arcane knowledge. Meanwhile the senior engineer goes to the scrums (they love to hide behind agile). It's a solid grift.
Yeah I mean I don't blame people for celebrating their successes and sexiest projects – I certainly don't include all my fails in my portfolio, heh.
What's interesting about this article (and the general state of management consulting) is that the cracks are beginning to show in these big firms that used to have a "nobody got fired for hiring EY" reputation.
With software engineers some of the remaining 90% really are talented but spend most of the project learning on the job, fixing an issue in a few hours that a senior engineer in their stack could fix in 30 minutes with their arcane knowledge. Meanwhile the senior engineer goes to the scrums (they love to hide behind agile). It's a solid grift.