My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call, literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least he's cheap.
The executive that hired Accenture paid them with OPM (pronounced "opium", known as "other people's money"). Accenture is a safe choice because nobody got fired for hiring Accenture. This executive likely jumped ship to another venture before the project failed, in the interim heralding themselves as a leader of a major strategic initiative. Long gone.
Hertz hired a new CIO in 2015, and you can't just come in and keep the ship running in the same direction. You need new, big, flashy changes! Not just $32M, actually over $400M in changes, to prove the CIO knows what he's doing. Compare the article with the CIO's self provided description of his 3 years at Hertz(from his Linkedin):
> I was hired by Hertz to integrate and optimize technology infrastructure following the acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car brands into Hertz Global Holdings. Reported to the CEO and led a team of 1,200 professionals in eCommerce delivery, customer digital experience, digital business processes and communications, information security, IT operations and delivery, and new digital ventures. Consolidated car rental systems, transitioning from legacy mainframe to the Cloud and rebuilding the fleet reservation and accounting system to streamline all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Aligned digital initiatives (IoT, AI, CRM, Big Data, Mobile) into the strategic business planning process.
> My Achievements Include:
> § Drove technology integration of the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car brands. Transitioned Mainframe/Cobol to Cloud/Microservices to support the new technology infrastructure utilizing an agile development cycle.
> § Reduced technology spend by 20% and enhanced customer service and product offerings through a complete system project redesign (CRM, Fleet, Rental, Reservation, Data Warehouse).
> § Improved marketing and revenue segmentation by optimizing technology to more effectively align brand/service offerings to Corporate vs. Leisure consumers.
> § Realized a 35% increase in website visits and 12% growth in conversion rates by spearheading redesign and modernization of the e-commerce platform utilizing microservices technology and AWS Cloud environment.
This tells you everything you need to know about the kind of person that hires Accenture and what motivates them. Accenture will always be Accenture (and Deloitte, EY, PwC) as long as there's this CIO personality flaw of burning money doing flashy things without accomplishing much. Or in this case, anything at all.
That’s the problem. They hired a CIO and not a CTO to rebuild their online presences. CTO creates revenue and CIO reduces costs. Big difference. CIO rely on consultants and CTOs rely on internal software teams.
I’m kind of surprised to see that the CV of a CIO like that is filled with the same meaningless drivel that mine is.
Like, I could write these exact same things, and they’d be true, except I’d have to scale the number of employees down to 15… and change a few instances of car.
not sure about the case here, but a common executive play I've seen at bigcorps is:
1. take credit for what was in-flight when you came in
2. kick off massive projects which you can't possibly be around to measure before you bounce to the next gig
3. switch roles / bounce and blame it on your successor (if anyone bothers to follow up / ask)
I'm not one of the best freelancers in the world, but I suspect that if I were, I would say there's no amount of money you could pay me, because I'm already making all the money I want working on projects I am interested in. The fact that, in our reality, Hertz went with Accenture, probably indicates they have other dysfunctions as well, and would be a pain to work with.
Companies hire Accenture and other firms like that usually because their demands are so challenging that only big firms can give a shot at that. On top of that usually the contracts provide so much strong guarantees to the Client that only these firms can afford and this is a tremendous incentive for closing the deal. It's a common strategy also to sell the initial contract at low margins with the outlook that the deal will continue and will bring other money with less risky maintenance streams. In a short summary in the vast majority of the cases these kind of projects already start with a lot of risk and on shaky grounds.
Mostly its a "no one gets fired for choosing IBM" thing.
Imagine the position of the CTO if the project went to a smaller sized, not so well known, consulting firm, and it failed. The CTO would be responsible for the failure.
But with firms like Accenture, it would be the firms fault as they "are the experts".
Sadly, IT knowledge is low enough in the general population that this shifting of blame will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
Such consulting companies are on paper quite well suited for these kind of jobs: you can easily ramp and down teams in a matter of weeks, consultants already have experience with your project, they do have experts in all possible areas. Additionally, usually upper management in both companies already know each other so if you need something why don't you go and ask a person you know about this? I actually think it's almost sells itself.
Accenture & Co. won't tell you though that the experts will only stay for the first week in the projects (afterwards they need to go and honeypot a new customer), and they won't mention that the developers only need to pass a behavioural interview for getting hired (absolutely no code required) and that they have a constant massive turnover so that people stay usually in your project for 3-6 months, or that there is basically no coder that has more than 3 years of experience.
I wonder the same thing. The article has the section: "How Hertz Could Have Done Things Differently". I think the obvious answer is: Hire an in-house development team that has some sense of responsibility and attachment to the company.
If you're Hertz, your website is central to what you do, it's how most people will rent a car. It's something you should do in-house.
Billable Hours! This is why contracts should be outcome based and not based on hours. I don't care if the solution takes you ten days, or 10 minutes, it's the outcome that matters.
Yeah--improper incentives cause all kinds of problems.
Once there was an enormous tanker truck fire under an overpass in the Bay Area on a major freeway. A section of the overpass collapsed.
The state asked for bids, but the contract had an interesting feature: substantial sums would be paid for each calendar day the work was completed ahead of schedule.
One contractor underbid everyone by a substantial margin, and got to work 24-7.
Wikipedia:
A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident.
The state offered money for early completion, and got an early completion. I don't necessary see anything wrong with that as long as quality standards were met, and the final cost wasn't outrageous.
This is a case where this was "gamed" by Accenture and Hertz was just clueless, but it can happen the other way around. (Unreasonable) outcome based, and the contracting firm gets stuck with an impossible, money-losing project. Or some unexpected thing happens and same result.
There is a reason you have billable hours. It is so that you can sell the customer technical advisory services over an extended time period without making any promises. Typically, this is backed by a "use it lose it" clause. Outcomes are better for consultants and customers.
This is mainly for interns and T&M, interns juice project profits but regular employees don't really, project managers are incentivized to keep project costs down so they tend to under staff projects rather than staff fillers.
A client paid me $7,500 for a site in 2011, approved the final version, but never got around to giving me the hosting information. It never went live. The screenshots were fine portfolio pieces and I spent their money, but I’m still annoyed by that.
Don't feel bad. I paid a consultant over $10,000 a year ago and didn't go live with their code. The reason was not them, it was me. I did something without asking our dev team and it was a bad idea. By the time I got to my senses, I had spent over 10K. The consultant was great though. As founders, we sometimes do shitty and idiotic things.
That's business. Shifting sands to one degree or another. Sometimes markets change, sometimes strategy changes. If a project no longer makes sense, you drop it, sunk costs are sunk costs.
That’s not so bad. In my 20+ year career I’ve worked on a ton of projects which were internally killed, so essentially we poured our hearts and souls into products that never saw the light of day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience.
I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t necessarily intended to make a dent in anything, but just to keep teams busy and justify headcount.
I used to work for a R&D department. We created new things, but nothing went beyond a demo, or some patent applications, or company internal news. It felt that the top brass didn't actually want new things as there always was a danger of cannibalizing some legacy business.
Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.
"Content Management – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the website."
If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.
This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.
The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or a million. What you get with that license is... the world's most complex and difficult content management system, that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.
There is a certain class of high scale enterprise client that always voices strong prefernce for AEM. I think it might be because AEM at one point was ahead of their competitors and so a lot of the existing enterprise level companies use it in production and have experience on it? Or maybe they think everyone at that operating scale is using it, and so it must be the best choice... truth is the development experience is painful and it usually isn't the best tool.
My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event. They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event site.
Analyst reports, compelling demos at conferences, ecosystem of professional services partners with a relationship with the software vendor (implied promise of escalation of issues), 24x7x365 SLAs, competitor success stories using the same technology, existing training materials along with distant promise of developing in-house expertise by working along-side system integrators.
Just curious, which OSS CMS would you recommend for that kind of site?
I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).
Wagtail, you get a great CMS on top of a powerful framework (Django). Best part of Wagtail is that it doesn’t get in the way of Django so you can drop it into any Django project with ease.
I've done so many AEM sites for clients with more money than sense. I had to quit the agency business to get away from it. It's absolutely sensible for a big company with complex requirements to buy an off-the-shelf enterprise software package even at a substantial price tag, it's just that AEM absolutely sucks at almost everything. They sell it with the stupid Adobe Marketing Cloud saying you'll get CMS, analytics, A/B testing, ad targeting, yadda yadda in one giant package. Only they're all just a mishmash of acquisitions that don't integrate well at all and none of them are close to the best products for their task. They made for a very compelling sales pitch back in like 2013 when options were more limited and enterprise CMS was a busy space, but no one should be fooled by this in the 2020s.
Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.
Yes, a lot of "strategic partnerships", "joint ventures" and the like.
Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in a totally different market.
"Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in deal negotiations :)
The consultancy I worked for didn't sell or promote that kind of tech, but I still got exposed to it at various clients. Seems like a top-down approach, some upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it, then demanding the devs use it no matter the fit.
Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your anyways building a custom frontend.
> upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it
And closing that deal and having their reports implement the roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.
The modern version of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is "nobody got fired by using a brand name the boss recognizes". That is what AEM does that Drupal does not.
The boss doesn't know what content management even is, but they have heard of Photoshop and Acrobat so AEM must be good.
Guarantee they ran an RFP process for the CMS. AEM does everything its not intuitive and overly complex. Just like Concur does everything and but everyone hates it yet its defacto expense program at large companies.
Can't you use similar logic to tell your boss that nasa, energy.gov, the beatles, weather.com, tbs and all those other older-people-know-about-this sites all use drupal?
At least it's tolerable at all compared to the shitshow that is AEM.
it's suited mostly for large multinationals.
I havent used drupal or wordpress at that scale, but if you have website that you need to rollout to >30 countries in many languages AEM might be for you.
How do I transfer out of AEM? I’m a junior dev at a company that uses AEM and I realized long ago that I’m wasting my time with it, but I have trouble landing interviews with AEM as my primary dev experience. I’m not an AEM author, I use Java every day.
My friend also wasn't enthusiastic about AEM at his workplace, he wanted just "ordinary" Java. But Java is just a tool and one often lands in some legacy or overgrown enterprise solution.
I advised him to do AEM certifications. He did and then contract recruiters has started to flood him. He collects tons of cash as independent AEM consultant now. And with Java, he does "fulfilling" Java stuff on the side.
You have to wonder what proportion of GDP is money sloshing around like this but not providing any real value. The consultants got their paychecks and spent their money in the real economy, but there seems to be a great deal of waste in the B2B space.
I have this theory that B2B is actually most of the economy; and, that, somehow, real people are only ancillary to that. Like a patina if human customers over a huge mound of B2B ... motion.
But how can that be? At the end of the day some consumer must foot the bill and cover all the additional costs of B2B services. Ultimately businesses are only comfortable paying others businesses because they found a way to make money (i.e. sell to customers, somewhere down the line)
I shitload of the economy is directly or indirectly government funded. In Australia defence, health/hospital/disability/aged/mental health care (even if private), education all levels (even private), public infrastructure and construction, and government owned enterprises (Australia Post/NBN etc.). They will get their funding through budget.
Something something quantitative easing and productivity gains from globalization and automation outpacing the half-life of these unprofitable wild goose chases
Some executive had the budget for it, it wasn't paid for out of his pocket. They can't get outcompeted by a more efficient competitor because every big business is like this. In some fields smaller competitors can eat their lunch, but the dinosaurs persist because they make so much surplus by being big. Hertz charges what, 3x what your local no-name car rental place charges for the same product? But a business traveller doesn't care because they're expensing it and just want whoever's got a spot at the airport.
I own a computer; my company buys a computer for me to do work. If the economy consists of mothing but people, companies, and computers, it'll be twice as big as you'd think it'd be.
Then, you need people to manage the computers — but now you need twice the number of people to do that than you think you would.
You need to ship computers, recycle computers, ...
The economy isn't zero-sum: I think the nonpeople economy is only limited by our ability to run companies, and there's no limit ti the wealth of a company? Maybe? I dunno...
governement in most economies is even more Gargantuous. just for US, 37% on average (since 1970s) of gdp is governement spending ("tax" revenue+debt). here an historical gov on gdp table:
A lot of resources are being "wasted" by everyone all the time. Think about the gym memberships and exercise equipment that people buy and never use. Or online courses and books that don't get consumed. Or clothes and shoes that are never worn, or food that gets thrown out. There's "waste" everywhere, but only big businesses can afford to lose this much at once, so that catches our attention. Fortunately, there's usually a selection process that makes sure those businesses don't live too long.
edit: how many discontinued google products are there? They're got to be worth tens of billions in developer costs and perhaps more in opportunity costs.
It's about comparing global economies in terms of actual, physical production output instead of GDP numbers that include nonsense like the big "service" companies. Results are unsurprising.
> Accenture and Hertz engage in phase 1 of the project, producing a “solution blueprint” that describes the functionality, business processes, technology, and security aspects of the envisioned solution. Fees paid to Accenture for this phase total $7M.
7 million dollars for requirements gathering?
Hertz should have known better. I'd pay just to see these contracts for entertainment value.
Entirely feasible if there are a multitude of teams at Hertz with hands in the cookie jar.
Trying to coordinate between 10+ managers of varying seniority (in a legacy company who's struggling with tech) and prevent scope creep at the same time is an absolute nightmare scenario.
I'd hate to be the Business Analyst in charge of that.
Tech consulting, of the type Accenture does, is so weird. I once got staffed on a multimillion dollar project to "predict general macroeconomic activity."
The story described in this article just sounds so classic. I'm consistently surprised that more consultants don't get sued.
My only interaction with Accenture was years ago. They air-dropped like 100 recent grads and few account managers to build a very complex system like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters. And I know for a fact they used underhanded techniques to maintain their foothold at the expense of the quality of the product.
There was a production issue that was somewhere between the system they built and the one I was working on. A "mole" on their team who preferred the company of our team relayed to us that the Accenture manager told their team not to help debug the issue and to let us flounder so the project sponsors would think they needed them.
I know someone who's a low-level manager there, most of her team is in India. You tend to get the onshore team for show for the first few weeks and then they shift you onto the cheaper team.
Accenture outsourced the IT depts of major companies in the 90s, as such they are embedded in their non IT business units and can intercept sales of one off projects.
Those companies who thought IT was an annoying cost with nerdy ugly employees rather than the core efficiency driver of their business then became utterly dependent on Accenture and at best could swap them for either equivalent junk from IBM or Deloitte or went further down the toilet with TCS.
What's notable is the lawsuit, Accenture will usually eat money for a failed project in hopes of keeping Future project jectd and general reputation.
Hertz must be terminating the overall relationship.
Honestly, having worked directly & indirectly for a multitude of large enterprises over the last couple of decades, every large organisation suffers from this.
It doesn't matter if their private, local, state, or federal government, charity, or whatever - the larger the organisation, the less efficient, and more failed projects there will be.
My personal opinion is that this is caused by a combination of communication overhead, politics, and larger organisations giving more places for useless / lazy people to hide.
if your billion dollar business relies on the web site working well, you wouldn't think of trusting it to a small freelancer that quotes you 50k or whatever, it's almost like they start with a budget in mind (7 digits ought to do it) and then find someone who will take that much money
disclaimer: I have no experience here but I think this lecture on pricing design touches on it, that big corps aren't going to touch you if you're not charging them outrageous fees
It's not just a website. They were merging at least three different enterprise level backend plus deploying the front end to thousands of locations. That's a gigantic effort.
Large companies do pay software vendors to fly out and deploy new browser based software at their locations. Deploying means training staff, hardware integrations, etc. I’ve had several clients over the years request this. If you have someone willing to fly out to do it for a fat bonus check, why not?
> In its revised suit, Hertz states that Accenture represented that they had “the best talent in the world"
> Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing claims.
Colour me surprised.
> Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.
> Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.
> Despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only
So, like always, they sold a fantasy to a bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy, then farmed the work out to the cheapst developers possible and pocketed the difference.
> bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy...
At some point, someone with technical acumen took stock of the situation and said "this is garbage". Why does this step always come last?
WTF. "They said they were the best, but they lied!" I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them. You either have them inhouse (but you've overlooked them for years) or you engage an inspector/reviewer to vet the claims or review previous work. I buy a car, I can get a private inspection done. I buy a house, I get a house inspector to verify the claims.
> I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them
They very likely did (and negatively), but no excecutive ever wants to hear that, so they just barrel ahead anyway. Because what do those lowly peons know, right?
Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
> They very likely did (and negatively), but no excecutive ever wants to hear that, so they just barrel ahead anyway. Because what do those lowly peons know, right?
I was fired from a project because I told an executive the wrong thing about how shitty a product was that I was trying to save after a contractor fucked it up, thus revealing the ruse of my boss.
> Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
This was why I was hired there in the first place, so basically I was hired as the fall guy and then my boss executed on that plan.
> From the executive side it’s hard too.
I'm sure it was stressful, lucky for my boss he was able to successfully pass the buck and still works there to this day. I've also heard from customers of my current company that the company that "recylced" me is not doing well in my former bosses department, so perhaps he will not survive forever?
Sometimes comes first but the outcome is the same regardless.
I was once brought in to sit on early discussions with a consulting group. I pointed out very real problems with their ideas about how to solve our problem. That was on the morning of day 1. I was explicitly uninvited before day 2 for "not being a team player."
3 years later we were in court suing this consulting group for millions.
The more stories I hear about this, the more I'm inclined to be an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel because apparently they get paid a lot, do a terrible job, and nothing happens to them.
It's nice if you only consider the end state. Since it's such a good deal, a lot of employees want it. The price execs paid to get there was to play corporate politics for 20 years.
I'll take an uncertain payoff as an entrepreneur or job as a developer over that - thanks for reminding me.
Exactly this. It requires a special kind of personality + special kind of liver and stamina. All the parties and events and "all nighters" to attend while juggling all the political stuff is no easy thing to do. All of this also requires a lot of sacrifices - forget family time, personal hobbies (nobody became C level executive while fishing alone on weekends) and etc.
At one point, I got sick of interviewing for tech jobs, so I searched "CEO" on job portals and found a surprising number of very well paid jobs I nearly qualified for (just need to learn to read financial statements better).
I ended up taking a tech job anyway but once I retire from this, I'll probably apply to an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel job.
I'd say recreation.gov by Booz Allen Hamilton is pretty good. Some of the policies are disputed (e.g., racing for camp sites), but the technology works very well.
At my current job (gov. agency) we use this internal tool - think marine traffic combined with flightradar24 - and it is great. Truly awesome.
It's been developed for almost 10 years now, by a relatively large consulting firm.
But I believe a large part of the success comes down to the following:
- The core dev. team is still mostly the same. When you think about it, 8-10 years is pretty much an eternity in the world of software development, so it's pretty incredible that they've managed to retain so many members.
- Development cycles are very fast, and communication between end-user (us) and the product manager is very good. There's very little red-tape or committees between us.
With that said - even though the product is quite extensive, the number of users is quite small, only around 500 active. And they are all gov. workers, though in different departments.
On the other hand, I've also seen some dogshit products in the wild. Usually in the scale has been much, much larger - and the budgets, too.
Observations from those have been pretty much the inverse of the one I mentioned above. Huge, huge teams - always new people. Insane turnover. Getting new features takes years, and everything goes through multiple levels of bureaucracy. By the time something has been implemented, interest has changed.
The large scale consulting firms collectively pull in hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year and they're mostly _okay_, you just don't hear about them because nobody writes a front page HN article about "that one time I paid Deloitte $300k to implement an internal dashboard and it turned out mediocre".
I've been part of a handful of these projects. You have to understand that these types of projects are, from the start, never intended to be smashing successes. Nobody says "everything is going great and we have a ton of smart, capable people working here, we should also hire some consultants". No, once your company or project is at the phase where you're hiring consultants, 9 times out of 10 its because shit has hit the fan and you need someone to pull you out of the mud, and quick. Consulting engagements are almost always band-aid fixes just trying to achieve a level of mediocrity.
And as much as people shit on the "24 year olds who don't know anything", the sad truth is that 24 year olds (aka people with 2-3 years experience in consulting that are now on their 8th project doing this exact same type of implementation) may not have much experience, but they still are probably more productive than the vast majority of knuckle dragging drones that work in corporate america. When I was one of those 24 year old consultants, most of my projects were roles where I was supporting "IT admins" who literally had trouble remembering how to open Excel. The people that these consultants are meant to supplement aren't your "average HN commenter", they're not even "average redditor". They're "average facebook poster".
Software costs always grow exponentially. Having 1,800 IT systems sounds silly, but combining them into one system would not take X*1800 hours, it would take X^1800 hours.
Yep, over 1 billion dollars billed by IBM for a system that caused countless errors in public servant paychecks (under and over payments). The wikipedia even references a woman's suicide that was blamed on financial difficulties following continuous underpayments.
people interested in this shitshow may also want to keep tabs on the federal government's new navy/coast guard frigate and icebreaker shipbuilding program, which is going to end up wildly over budget
It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms.
The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence.
This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.
When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client.
If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.
(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.
I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.
There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things.
1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better.
2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable.
3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.
When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label.
Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.
Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.
Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.
Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.
I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town).
I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.
It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.
The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make money by squeezing labor salaries. you can’t raise rates because moral hazard - you’d have immediate incentive to pocket the margin. behold the stable state.
This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates.
It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
Picking a consultant is like picking a tradesperson -- the competent ones already have more business than they can service, so they'd be doing you a favor by taking you on, which usually means an introduction from an existing client is needed.
Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500
I don't know where the parent worked, but I expect the rates are 120€-180€ (company billing, not your salary). It's just that most other companies pay smaller salaries as there traditionally was very few tech companies with competitive pay. It's been slowly improving though.
They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers
I've seen it repeatedly, how they think you'll get the same quality product outsourced to the cheapest consultancy in India is beyond me.
The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.
> Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.
Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting had an expensive divorce in 1997ish, and Andersen Consulting became Accenture.
A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.
AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....
Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted outside support for an initiative or to sink someone else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go against the executive that brings them in
I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them.
At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.
It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.
The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.
LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the entire program basically in flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box, like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to make the change.
Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.
Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.
I’m not even sure insane match what you just described at that point.
Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.
Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out.
Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.
Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?
If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste.
Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.
My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)
I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.
BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.
Cutting and pasting with scissors and actual paste sounds pretty awful. But what I was hoping to get more insight about, if the task was to draw tens of thousands of pages of flowcharts (not text), would a 1980's PC (maybe 16mb RAM, 5.25" floppies, no GUI) be more efficient than a pen and paper? Even on a modern PC, I can often draw a flowchart quite a bit faster than I can create it in Lucidcharts or similar software.
I dunno. I myself was pretty clueless about PCs at that time. I owned a Kaypro from the early 1980s that ran CP/M, but I never touched a PC running Windows (or even just DOS) until 1994. They weren't part of the centralized IT departments I worked in. They WERE part of a sorta grass roots revolt by the user departments, setting up their own Lotus spreadsheets, whatever, as a way of bypassing the slow bureaucratic centralized IT departments.
I don't know. I speculate: So, like, the consulting company has to sell... something. They develop a... what was it called...a system development life cycle methodology? Maybe partly sincere, maybe partly bullshit, I dunno. I remember it visually as a shelf of several manuals. I imagine top AA partners selling to the top execs. Then everybody down the hierarchy doing what they've been told to do, being, not evil, but just respectful of the hierarchy. Also, many of those AA people only knowing the AA way, not having the experience, the confidence to be sure that the AA way was insane. Also, the way AA worked then "Up or Out", you are always competing with your peers. Not good for your career to rock the boat, to attack the methodology that the top partners had sold UAL.
And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.
I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.
When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from.
Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs.
I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.
Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india
Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training.
On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing.
On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.
St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.
When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin.
I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.
I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey.
Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow.
I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.
I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.
"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow"
I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.
Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.
It was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be.
I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.
kid/no kid is one thing, but were you able to deliver the insights they expected? I know I'd be pissed if I paid a high rate expecting an expert and then got a guy who doesn't know either.
Consultants and agencies typically give all of the actual work to young 22-28 year olds. Leadership focuses on acquiring new business. Once they get your business they really do not care what happens beyond generally fulfilling the contracted requirements.
My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later)
1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks.
I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
I worked at a computer store in my local town for a while. I got paid $9.00/hr repairing Macs and PCs. Often having 7-8 on my bench at a time. All were being billed at $59/hr. I didn't stick around long!
speaking of agencies and horrors !
I too did a 6 months stint at a "digital agency". To be fair I still think they were one of the better ones. But it was just not for me:
1) EXCESSIVE Timekeeping (I had to log every hour basically I was at work, felt like an inmate). Sure that is there business I get it. But it's not for me.
2) Many projects(Same-Same): I also learn that for my personality (and sanity) i work better if I can focus on one or two long term projects.
Doing 5 little projects different days of the week, was horrible. To rephrase, dealing with 5 different clients a week was horrible, 7/10 times you basically just undid half the work you did previous week. Since you know, "requirements change" or it took them two weeks to let me know "oh it has to work like this not that, I thought you will know this" type convos.
Anywhoo programming can be wonderful or it can be awful !
My first job billed my time at $200/hr and my salary was $28k. I was 21 and they would literally put me on projects solo. Once a client was on retainer the execs disappeared and let fresh college grads do the work, it’s a total scam.
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
Yeah all that is true.. but what is even worse is the relationship between "account execs" and "Decision makers". Only reason they keep getting the work are those to players.
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers.
Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
> Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
That one got the added "benefit" of Congress and POTUS directly meddling. So you get to restart parts with new contractors, changes in direction just as you got the last 20% of bugs fixed etc and that's assuming you work with honest suppliers
Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing your clients".
Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ...
Joke.
But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".
The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org.
I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure?
I suspect that might be the case.
If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
This is why these large companies often form "innovation" units that are spun out as separate entities or at lest setup as separate orgs sheltered from internal politics by the C suite.
It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
I have seen a company spin up and after 2 years spin out a seperate innovation unit, and when it was a proper seperate entity outsource their core IT to the unit... Which was then branded a big success! It was liberating to see such systemic incompetence; The people were all highly educated but as a group just can't seem to organize effectively.
This Sounds like financial engineering. It is possible the people involved were incompetent, either individually or as a group. But this sounds like an incentive problem. Competence, misdirected.
> Branded as a success
I fear you aren't cyncical enough.
Was it a filure? Did the company's balance sheet improve? Did the company's stock price increase? Did the spinout attract a load of investment for its (pre-destined) success and turn that into a rich revenue stream?
Markets -- for both debt and equity -- are mostly idiotic machines on short timeframes. Your ability to generate free cash flow puts a floor on your price. Others' imagination and available liquidity are the only ceilings.
Additionally, these types of spin outs can behave like generational wealth. They may be incompetent idiots, but who cares? Daddy's money is more than you can raise and mommy's rolodex is richer than you could possibly imagine.
The problem isn't just the experience or capabilities it's the internal politics.
You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.
The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.
I'd say this is rather distribution at work. To build software competitively you need fairly good people and not a lot them would want to end up at Hertz. Places like Hertz are not tech companies which also often makes them very low margine, capital deprived and of limited scalability. Therefore, they cannot offer the compensation like top 20% of the players. The difference of compensation between top 20% and rest of the players is just amazing and reflects market forces operating in talent distribution that has sharp peak than other professions.
Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.
> Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I just want to point out that this isn't just legacy corps - I previously worked for a manager who went straight from a theory heavy CS degree to a theory heavy PhD to consultancy to management.
You still get companies like this where some middle manager with 0 years of SWE experience has to hire Software Engineers with 5+.
1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)
2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
Agile/Scrum is perfect for such consulting engagements - there is a measurable easily reportable progress every sprint while nothing real gets achieved in any reasonable time, and the customer seeing/accepting that incremental progress is de-facto almost waiving its right to demand the final result.
> It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough,
Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
And then you get posts from experts like you convinced there’s really some big picture goal to technology; that you’re not just optimizing for employment yourself.
I actually genuinely value doing a good job. I genuinely hate being put under pressure to deliver stuff that looks good but is actually bad. It feels awful to me. I've built my career around avoiding this.
I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it.
Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
You can certainly take pride in your work and build a good product all the same though. Big consulting companies usually deliver bad products because their structure makes it almost impossible to do anything else.
London has some of the biggest consultancy firms and I can confirm LinkedIn networks with these firms are majority newly grads.
Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts.
New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved.
I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.
Their purpose isn't to understand the cloud. It's to fill buzzword bingo and look good when some bloated company hires some mercenaries for their internal power politics.
Worked for someone almost as cynical as this. We always had mixed in more senior people to keep things under control, but lots of newly grads. Tbf though, the client will also ok these people on the project, but they often have no clue about IT qualifications and only see the cheaper price tag compared to the more experienced. My company also tried to avoid such projects, but sometimes the money was too good or a strategic partner comes along.
100% true and even if you offer a more higher caliber consultancy instead of these India outsourcing companies, the legacy corporations and their management will never want to admit that they know nothing about tech or their business.
Because the executives themselves have used iPhone or web browser they often think they know best what features the app needs, they claim that they don' need analytics or metrics from users and they don't want any advice from professionals. They just need bunch of "coders to do that coding thing or whatever".
On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
> The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Well, first they usually roll out a 40 year old "partner" (and that's the end-goal here- you want to be made "partner") who will show some diagrams in a PowerPoint or even diagram some stuff on a whiteboard, and never seen again. When shit hits the fan, they bust out a "SWAT Team" which is a few people with actual experience in an attempt to unfuck whatever those 24-year-olds screwed up.
You just describe Boeing's relationship with HCL and Infosys. I had to get out because I just felt like I was wasting my life bullshitting and delivering zero value to anyone.
I've never had a job or worked in an office. When I was still actively freelancing, most of my clients were startups and small businesses. Later, I started getting some contracts with larger businesses.
The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.
it kinda reminds me of the whole aca website debacle. in both cases, they tried to use one of these large, general outsourcing firms for technology work and in both cases it ended up with nobody on either side knowing what they were doing.
if there's a lesson, i'm pretty sure it's "if you choose to outsource something because it's sufficiently special that you don't feel comfortable doing it, make sure you outsource it to someone who specializes in what you need done."
I learned how to do proper project management by doing everything wrong at an internship during my college years.
The main stakeholder was always busy and in meetings, so I would mostly clock-in and clock-out after having waited outside the meeting room for hours while coding on what we had agreed upon on a very hurried 15 minute meeting months ago.
After 6 months of not having meetings, and having no access to any data, specifications, or feedback, the end result was a glorified Lorem Ipsum placeholder of a forum with a chat applet on the sidebar that I'm relieved didn't ever go live.
421 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadAre you sure? It's not a name that inspires confidence.
> I was hired by Hertz to integrate and optimize technology infrastructure following the acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car brands into Hertz Global Holdings. Reported to the CEO and led a team of 1,200 professionals in eCommerce delivery, customer digital experience, digital business processes and communications, information security, IT operations and delivery, and new digital ventures. Consolidated car rental systems, transitioning from legacy mainframe to the Cloud and rebuilding the fleet reservation and accounting system to streamline all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Aligned digital initiatives (IoT, AI, CRM, Big Data, Mobile) into the strategic business planning process.
> My Achievements Include:
> § Drove technology integration of the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car brands. Transitioned Mainframe/Cobol to Cloud/Microservices to support the new technology infrastructure utilizing an agile development cycle.
> § Reduced technology spend by 20% and enhanced customer service and product offerings through a complete system project redesign (CRM, Fleet, Rental, Reservation, Data Warehouse).
> § Improved marketing and revenue segmentation by optimizing technology to more effectively align brand/service offerings to Corporate vs. Leisure consumers.
> § Realized a 35% increase in website visits and 12% growth in conversion rates by spearheading redesign and modernization of the e-commerce platform utilizing microservices technology and AWS Cloud environment.
Veteran CIO provides his team with accountability, board exposure, and continual feedback to turn them into tomorrow’s IT leaders.
These all look like your typical resume inflating BS.
Reminds me of the Silicon Valley series satire from Mike Judge.
He hasn't heard about gradient descent, not by name, not by maths. He was quite impressed when I described it to him, in fact.
If it didn't happen to me, and i still have written records, i wouldn't believe it today.
Like, I could write these exact same things, and they’d be true, except I’d have to scale the number of employees down to 15… and change a few instances of car.
The cheapest people possible.
Then again, Accenture shows they can be a nightmare too.
Imagine the position of the CTO if the project went to a smaller sized, not so well known, consulting firm, and it failed. The CTO would be responsible for the failure.
But with firms like Accenture, it would be the firms fault as they "are the experts".
Sadly, IT knowledge is low enough in the general population that this shifting of blame will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
If you're Hertz, your website is central to what you do, it's how most people will rent a car. It's something you should do in-house.
My general impression was that my role was actually "budget filler".
Saved up for a laptop and a driving course, so can't complain.
Once there was an enormous tanker truck fire under an overpass in the Bay Area on a major freeway. A section of the overpass collapsed.
The state asked for bids, but the contract had an interesting feature: substantial sums would be paid for each calendar day the work was completed ahead of schedule.
One contractor underbid everyone by a substantial margin, and got to work 24-7.
Wikipedia:
A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident.
This is a case where this was "gamed" by Accenture and Hertz was just clueless, but it can happen the other way around. (Unreasonable) outcome based, and the contracting firm gets stuck with an impossible, money-losing project. Or some unexpected thing happens and same result.
There's a reason why billable hours is a thing.
I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t necessarily intended to make a dent in anything, but just to keep teams busy and justify headcount.
Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.
I used to read https://thedailywtf.com/ and it was full of stories of consultancy project that failed in the most horrible and insane ways.
If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.
This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.
The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or a million. What you get with that license is... the world's most complex and difficult content management system, that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.
My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event. They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event site.
I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).
Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.
Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in a totally different market.
"Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in deal negotiations :)
Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your anyways building a custom frontend.
And closing that deal and having their reports implement the roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.
It’s tailor made for this. Management will always sign off because they’ve heard of Adobe.
The boss doesn't know what content management even is, but they have heard of Photoshop and Acrobat so AEM must be good.
At least it's tolerable at all compared to the shitshow that is AEM.
just an example of the kind of companies that use it. apple, intel,etc .e.g https://jobs.apple.com/en-in/details/200207733/aem-engineer
I advised him to do AEM certifications. He did and then contract recruiters has started to flood him. He collects tons of cash as independent AEM consultant now. And with Java, he does "fulfilling" Java stuff on the side.
Then, you need people to manage the computers — but now you need twice the number of people to do that than you think you would.
You need to ship computers, recycle computers, ...
The economy isn't zero-sum: I think the nonpeople economy is only limited by our ability to run companies, and there's no limit ti the wealth of a company? Maybe? I dunno...
[]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
edit: how many discontinued google products are there? They're got to be worth tens of billions in developer costs and perhaps more in opportunity costs.
It's about comparing global economies in terms of actual, physical production output instead of GDP numbers that include nonsense like the big "service" companies. Results are unsurprising.
7 million dollars for requirements gathering?
Hertz should have known better. I'd pay just to see these contracts for entertainment value.
Trying to coordinate between 10+ managers of varying seniority (in a legacy company who's struggling with tech) and prevent scope creep at the same time is an absolute nightmare scenario.
I'd hate to be the Business Analyst in charge of that.
That's a whole team of business analysts to create so many spreadsheets.
The story described in this article just sounds so classic. I'm consistently surprised that more consultants don't get sued.
Mind you, this was over ten years ago.
Maybe TCS outbid them on the low end and they're pivoting back to inshore
Those companies who thought IT was an annoying cost with nerdy ugly employees rather than the core efficiency driver of their business then became utterly dependent on Accenture and at best could swap them for either equivalent junk from IBM or Deloitte or went further down the toilet with TCS.
What's notable is the lawsuit, Accenture will usually eat money for a failed project in hopes of keeping Future project jectd and general reputation.
Hertz must be terminating the overall relationship.
It doesn't matter if their private, local, state, or federal government, charity, or whatever - the larger the organisation, the less efficient, and more failed projects there will be.
My personal opinion is that this is caused by a combination of communication overhead, politics, and larger organisations giving more places for useless / lazy people to hide.
if your billion dollar business relies on the web site working well, you wouldn't think of trusting it to a small freelancer that quotes you 50k or whatever, it's almost like they start with a budget in mind (7 digits ought to do it) and then find someone who will take that much money
disclaimer: I have no experience here but I think this lecture on pricing design touches on it, that big corps aren't going to touch you if you're not charging them outrageous fees
[0] https://youtu.be/RKXZ7t_RiOE
> Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing claims.
Colour me surprised.
> Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.
> Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.
> Despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only
So, like always, they sold a fantasy to a bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy, then farmed the work out to the cheapst developers possible and pocketed the difference.
At some point, someone with technical acumen took stock of the situation and said "this is garbage". Why does this step always come last?
WTF. "They said they were the best, but they lied!" I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them. You either have them inhouse (but you've overlooked them for years) or you engage an inspector/reviewer to vet the claims or review previous work. I buy a car, I can get a private inspection done. I buy a house, I get a house inspector to verify the claims.
They very likely did (and negatively), but no excecutive ever wants to hear that, so they just barrel ahead anyway. Because what do those lowly peons know, right?
Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
From the executive side it’s hard too.
I was fired from a project because I told an executive the wrong thing about how shitty a product was that I was trying to save after a contractor fucked it up, thus revealing the ruse of my boss.
> Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
This was why I was hired there in the first place, so basically I was hired as the fall guy and then my boss executed on that plan.
> From the executive side it’s hard too.
I'm sure it was stressful, lucky for my boss he was able to successfully pass the buck and still works there to this day. I've also heard from customers of my current company that the company that "recylced" me is not doing well in my former bosses department, so perhaps he will not survive forever?
Either way: fuck useless execs.
Sometimes comes first but the outcome is the same regardless.
I was once brought in to sit on early discussions with a consulting group. I pointed out very real problems with their ideas about how to solve our problem. That was on the morning of day 1. I was explicitly uninvited before day 2 for "not being a team player."
3 years later we were in court suing this consulting group for millions.
Not true! They get multi-million dollar golden parachutes when they decide they're tired of playing business and would rather play golf.
I'll take an uncertain payoff as an entrepreneur or job as a developer over that - thanks for reminding me.
I ended up taking a tech job anyway but once I retire from this, I'll probably apply to an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel job.
Even the so called success stories seem ... mediocre at best.
Has anyone been part of such a project at a firm like that?
It's been developed for almost 10 years now, by a relatively large consulting firm.
But I believe a large part of the success comes down to the following:
- The core dev. team is still mostly the same. When you think about it, 8-10 years is pretty much an eternity in the world of software development, so it's pretty incredible that they've managed to retain so many members.
- Development cycles are very fast, and communication between end-user (us) and the product manager is very good. There's very little red-tape or committees between us.
With that said - even though the product is quite extensive, the number of users is quite small, only around 500 active. And they are all gov. workers, though in different departments.
On the other hand, I've also seen some dogshit products in the wild. Usually in the scale has been much, much larger - and the budgets, too.
Observations from those have been pretty much the inverse of the one I mentioned above. Huge, huge teams - always new people. Insane turnover. Getting new features takes years, and everything goes through multiple levels of bureaucracy. By the time something has been implemented, interest has changed.
I've been part of a handful of these projects. You have to understand that these types of projects are, from the start, never intended to be smashing successes. Nobody says "everything is going great and we have a ton of smart, capable people working here, we should also hire some consultants". No, once your company or project is at the phase where you're hiring consultants, 9 times out of 10 its because shit has hit the fan and you need someone to pull you out of the mud, and quick. Consulting engagements are almost always band-aid fixes just trying to achieve a level of mediocrity.
And as much as people shit on the "24 year olds who don't know anything", the sad truth is that 24 year olds (aka people with 2-3 years experience in consulting that are now on their 8th project doing this exact same type of implementation) may not have much experience, but they still are probably more productive than the vast majority of knuckle dragging drones that work in corporate america. When I was one of those 24 year old consultants, most of my projects were roles where I was supporting "IT admins" who literally had trouble remembering how to open Excel. The people that these consultants are meant to supplement aren't your "average HN commenter", they're not even "average redditor". They're "average facebook poster".
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+go...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence.
This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.
I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.
(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.
Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.
Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.
Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.
It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.
The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
And not for a cheap fee either!
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.
AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.
It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.
The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.
It. Was. Insane.
"Let's sync this week for the pre-sprint Jira climbing"
(Hey, what are the worst bits of waterfall and agile? Let's combine them into our methodology!)
Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.
Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out. Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.
Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.
My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)
I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.
BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.
And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.
I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.
Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.
I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.
I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.
I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.
Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.
I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.
1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks.
I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
1) EXCESSIVE Timekeeping (I had to log every hour basically I was at work, felt like an inmate). Sure that is there business I get it. But it's not for me.
2) Many projects(Same-Same): I also learn that for my personality (and sanity) i work better if I can focus on one or two long term projects. Doing 5 little projects different days of the week, was horrible. To rephrase, dealing with 5 different clients a week was horrible, 7/10 times you basically just undid half the work you did previous week. Since you know, "requirements change" or it took them two weeks to let me know "oh it has to work like this not that, I thought you will know this" type convos.
Anywhoo programming can be wonderful or it can be awful !
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
Never again.
Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
The consultant way.
Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ...
Joke.
But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".
I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure?
I suspect that might be the case.
If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
> Branded as a success
I fear you aren't cyncical enough.
Was it a filure? Did the company's balance sheet improve? Did the company's stock price increase? Did the spinout attract a load of investment for its (pre-destined) success and turn that into a rich revenue stream?
Markets -- for both debt and equity -- are mostly idiotic machines on short timeframes. Your ability to generate free cash flow puts a floor on your price. Others' imagination and available liquidity are the only ceilings.
Additionally, these types of spin outs can behave like generational wealth. They may be incompetent idiots, but who cares? Daddy's money is more than you can raise and mommy's rolodex is richer than you could possibly imagine.
You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.
The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.
Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.
I just want to point out that this isn't just legacy corps - I previously worked for a manager who went straight from a theory heavy CS degree to a theory heavy PhD to consultancy to management.
You still get companies like this where some middle manager with 0 years of SWE experience has to hire Software Engineers with 5+.
1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)
2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it.
Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts.
New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved.
I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.
On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
#TRUESTORY
The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.
if there's a lesson, i'm pretty sure it's "if you choose to outsource something because it's sufficiently special that you don't feel comfortable doing it, make sure you outsource it to someone who specializes in what you need done."
The main stakeholder was always busy and in meetings, so I would mostly clock-in and clock-out after having waited outside the meeting room for hours while coding on what we had agreed upon on a very hurried 15 minute meeting months ago.
After 6 months of not having meetings, and having no access to any data, specifications, or feedback, the end result was a glorified Lorem Ipsum placeholder of a forum with a chat applet on the sidebar that I'm relieved didn't ever go live.