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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 !
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!
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.
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.
> 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+.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
"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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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 was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same issues.
I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world. One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we billed them no less than 20 million.
I think I mentally checked out at 6 months in when I realized I couldn't fight against the current. Management was incompetent, half of my team mates had no experience or ability to work as software developers, and all the individual contributors were the ones with the pressure to deliver and work on weekends. Yeah, I'm not going to work extra hours because you don't know how to say no when the client tells you they want this extra feature and they also want to cut down the timeline.
The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
It is so bizarre that blowing $20M on a large, complex project that obviously fails can be rebranded as success. Its harder to pull that off with smaller projects and less stakeholders, but if a project is big enough, you can obfuscate the details and make it look like a win.
You’re completely right, and I apparently cannot use units(1) to save my life. I have no idea how I screwed that one up so badly. I was more wrong than the original poster.
Motivation and constraint is completely driven by what budget or cost centre one's in. These can be schizophrenically distant, and work to the detriment of the organisation, in organisations that still insist they're one team.
Another perspective on the 20M is the salaries and total running cost of an office of 1500 in Southeast Asia for ayear (or potentially Latin America, or Africa, but I'm less familiar with pricing there than in EA/SEA).
> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
It's also usually that the big companies are so incompetent that paying 20 million dollars for nothing is still cheaper than hiring their own people to do it in house and ending up paying 40 million dollar for a team that will actually break stuff down and make everything worse.
It's not so much that their own people, i.e. the actual doers are incompetent, its thats the management structure is, so they are set up for failure. And yes it might take longer, and cost more, as they need to hire etc opex, get more scrutiny, can't try and fix the problem by throwing more devs at it at a drop of a hat etc.
Generally speaking individuals who work at large contracting firms either do so due to immigration status or because they’re either not experienced or technically incompetent. The tech market offers full-time positions with wonderful salaries. Why would anyone want to work at one of these firms? It’s because they can’t land any better job and can hide their moving between multiple projects frequently due to ineptness as “short term projects”.
As far as I can tell, this sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing is pretty normal for these massive consulting companies.
Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them.
Their layers of consultants then tie up a ton of your time/resources over the next 12 months figuring out what they actually should be doing, and why what the Expert said only has a passing resemblence to what's actually needed. So there's then rounds of discussion on how this and that change will be a variance, all billable extras.
After the 12 months is up, nothing is delivered in a workable state, it gets rejected, sent back for changes. This is all more billable variances, because of course it was delivered to the approved spec, and if you squint, and really push the definitions of words then it might vaguely resemble what it is that the spec said.
I've seen this play out multiple times.
The only surprising thing here (to me) is that Hertz pulled the plug while their spend was only $32M. Well done Hertz.
I can only hope that someone learned their lesson to stop using consulting groups for this kind of thing. I won't be holding my breath on that one, though.
I’m pretty much convinced you can replace any consulting firm (of any size/developer count) with 4-6 competent in-house developers and have a better product at the end of the year.
Clearly they have the budget for a 32M failure. I’m inclined to think they’d be saving money.
Now whether they will or want to (the executives anyway) is a different question.
It’s much easier to tell your boss that the project failed despite the hundreds of developers working on it. Clearly nobody would have been able to do a good job of it.
> Clearly they have the budget for a 32M failure. I’m inclined to think they’d be saving money.
The company would, but the relevant executive would be worse off. A $xx million consulting engagement failing is the consulting firm’s fault (politically speaking). Hiring and directing a $y million team that fails is the fault of the exec in charge.
Executives in large companies are frequently not the bumbling idiots they’re portrayed as - their decisions make perfect sense in terms of protecting and advancing influence within the company, which wins out over good execution in driving decisions.
I know it's hard. As a reasonably competent developer, why is it so hard for 5 of us to exist in one room? I know lack of hiring expertise is a big factor, I know salary is a big factor, but shouldn't this problem be solvable?
hy is it so hard to consistently find qualified individuals? Do most other industries experience this same problem at the same scale?
Most people aren’t competent. Most people are also poor at evaluating competence. And most orgs don’t actually have harsh hiring and firing policies to try and address this. Not that they would work anyway because of (2).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
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.
IT Companies, especially ones that outsource have had it coming for years.
I am an Indian (though I only worked for a year in IT before leaving for actual work), and let me tell you, we Indian IT developers are a complex bunch.
3 out of 100 know the actual work, actual technology, impact of choices, etc.
80 out of 100 just get by, as in, do the bare minimum required to get by the day and the task assigned to them. The remaining are bootlickers who get promoted to management.
And there are no qualms about ethics. Want to pass a test by commenting some code? "we will do it once to check first, then we will repeat it without commenting" (and the latter will never happen). I would not be surprised if they have a "test" set of code, solely to pass the specs and an internal "actual" code that will be delivered to the customer.
Also, after 20 years or so of outsourcing, I am sure most of my fellows in MNC IT companies have set up practices and navigation rules to deftly distribute the blame such that even senior management is clueless about whom to punish in case of a failure like this.
The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation. It doesn't matter if someone outsources to India or not, but if you are getting something for really cheap you are buying shit and being scammed. There are obviously good high quality Indian developers too, but they are not going to be working for these low cost sweatshops that get contracts from Fortune 500 legacy corps.
> The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation.
Any proof of that statement? Or are you one of those people who believes in the invisible hand of providence the way religious people believe in God?
Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African slaves were well compensated for their extreme talent in picking cotton under inhuman conditions? They were obviously receiving higher compensation than whites, who would have died under the same conditions.
Man, that good ol' magic of the market huh? Never fails.
I mean, if you pay 32million for a website, it's obviously going to be good, right? Or at least, it'll go live, right?
sorry if that was a bit mean, but honestly you seem to be naively believing in something that does not actually exist, and then assuming people who are unlucky are in fact untalented <3
” Any proof of that statement? Or are you one of those people who believes in the invisible hand of providence the way religious people believe in God?”
It’s inherent fact of the reality we live in. People like money and higher compensation.
”Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African sl…”
Slavery is opposite of free market. I don’t know why you bring up such an bad example.
There are many ways of proving. The Quran is a huge proof. The fact that it detailed lost knowledge that was not available elsewhere at the time (one example[1], and there are more similar to it) is another proof. Also, check out provingislam.com.
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 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.
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.
When people say "software is eating the world," this is what they are talking about. When mastering the software development cycle becomes a strong differentiator in an industry, inept companies (like Hertz in this case) get fleeced by rent-a-coder firms that get paid the same no matter the usefulness or reusability of their code. They end up, hopefully, spiralling into irrelevance while competitors who are able to harness software to their advantage win out over time.
Hertz is even suing Accenture to recoup the development cost, but it seems they are missing the bigger problem, which is that their aging digital presence has probably harmed their ability to acquire or retain customers to a bigger extent than the lost cost of development...
> Never had any problem renting cars online from hertz, unsure what the problem is.
Just a few weeks ago, I showed up at a Hertz location to pick up a car rental I had already paid for. They refused to give me the car saying that they didn't have some kind of required booking number in their system and that I would have to pay a second time to get the car. I showed them the withdrawal from my bank account, and the email receipt that Hertz had sent me saying that I had paid. They had all of my information in their system and the car was ready to go, they just insisted that I needed to pay again because their system did not have some number that they required. I spent 3 hour on hold with their customer support phone number, and they were unable to help. I eventually told them to go f themselves, disputed the charge on my credit card, and rented a car from the booth next to them at the airport. Hertz is a completely incompetent company, and that's before getting into the horror stories of returned rentals that they've reported as stolen, landing people in jail for the crime of renting a car from Hertz and returning it on time. I will never do business with Hertz (or Thrifty, which is also Hertz) again.
The big4 (D, EY, Accenture, EY) are the absolute last people I would call for any tech project, ever. I worked in one (very briefly) and could not understand why anyone with a modicum of technical experience would pick them for technical work.
They can do good work for some things, like regulation, audit, tax, etc -- there's a decent chance that whoever wrote the regulation you have to comply with works for one of the big4, which is quite advantageous.
However, for a technical project, complete boondoggle.
That's the big four accounting firms. They're referring to the big four consultancy firms (which arguably isn't just four, and EY happens to be in). Also, Accenture was the consulting division of Arthur Andersen (which is involved in the Enron scandal).
The big 4 accounting firms are also the big 4 consulting firms. Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG all have both large accounting arms as well as massive consulting arms.
There's also the "Big 3" or "MBB" which refers to the big 3 prestigious strategy consulting firms, Mckinsey, Bain, and BCG.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there's "WITCH" which is the consulting firms generally known as "body shops" that hire for quantity over quality. That's companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant.
Accenture usually isn't included in any of the acronyms, it's just kinda an outlier despite how big it is. It's very much the same as how technically Microsoft isn't part of "FAANG", but whenever someone does say "FAANG" they typically just mean "the big tech companies" and you subconsciously think of MS as included in that.
I always hated that acronym, mainly because it classifies Netflix under the same umbrella as Microsoft (while I'll acknowledge that they're tech-savvy, Netflix has been (and still is) mainly a media company).
yes - Big 4 Auditors. For some reason, people also use Big 4 to refer to big technical implementation/System Integration consulting shops too, even though there are clearly more than four: Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Accenture, IBM, etc. Cognizant and Capgemini are creeping up there too
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.
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.
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.
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.
I worked as a vendor in a large telco project run by Accenture. In the middle of the project they “changed methodologies” - at the customer’s expense. Despite (IMO) selecting the right methodology up front being the whole point of hiring a company like Accenture, the managers at the telco were totally fine with this change - they were all working their asses off to ensure they got a gig at Accenture once the project was complete, they didn’t care about the telco at all.
The manager I worked under was absolutely complicit in this process of ripping off the customer. And while he was one of the worst managers I’ve ever worked with, he was very good at his main job, which - as I came to understand - was to get a job at Accenture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a background in electricity regulation and policy analysis. A good friend (who knows nothing about energy regulation or science got assigned as a senior consultant in one of the big 5 consulting firms to advise a national energy producer on their technical and economic strategy for a new plant.
So, she asked me if I could spare a few hours to sit with her and get her up to speed on electricity regulation and policy so that she would "know all about it" for the kickoff meeting in two days time...
> According to a presentation at a MuleSoft conference in 2018 they had at the time around 1,800 IT systems, 6 database vendors, and 30 rental processing systems
'30 rental processing systems' interesting opportunity. the airbnb / squarespace rental ecosystem has a bunch of standards for syncing bookings, but I think they mostly amount to exchanging ical files. would be neat to develop a modern open protocol for inventory + then develop a hosting business around it -- applications in cars, retail (like that 'pointy' company google bought), sharing economy
What you describe is basically open source ERP exchange protocols, which will never happen, as enterprise ERP software is designed to lock companies in for generations of maintenance contracts.
We were supposed to get all this with the promise of SOA, SOAP, data routers etc, but that never really happened outside of the enterprise.
I am not surprised by a single thing in this article. My parents local rental car company was purchased by Hertz 20 years ago and I got to see first hand the IT mess they brought to the acquisition.
Funny enough, when Hertz brought DTAG (Dollar / Thrifty) they might have purchased part ownership of a software Company called BlueBird Systems which developed a modern front end system built on Progress, which was light years ahead of Hertz internal nonsense at the time according to people I spoke with.
The car rental software world was a weird and wonderful place. They even had their own operating systems called SuperDos once upon a time specifically built to run dumb terminals throught multi-mux's over phone lines. When Enterprise innovated and used satellites to connect their locations together, the industry thought they were mad. Turns out their ability to do real time yeild management of their fleets was a game changer and enabled them to grow at an astounding pace and unseated Hertz very quickly.
The entire industry is filled with crazy consolidation, public / private takeovers and companies thinking their way is the better way to do it. Astounding levels of tech debt, hubris, money and larger than life personalities. A near perfect ecosystem for consultant grift.
Hey, I gotta idea. The ocean covers up stuff we want to see. So, let's just boil off the ocean.
Why, oh why, doesn't high-end project management training include case studies of mission-critical systems in large long-lived organizations? Large === hundreds of thousands of people affected. Long-lived === centuries. I'm thinking of, for example, the signaling systems in the New York City subways. You get the idea.
You can't just delete and replace a big system like that like you can a malfunctioning virtual machine at a cloud provider. You have to work with what you have. And, a decade out, you'll still have to work with what you had back then, just less of it.
Any gang of $200/hr fresh-out-of-school devs can do a greenfield system. But maintenance is hard. Upgrading existing business processes without disrupting the business is hard.
In health care, EPIC seems be able (mostly) to do that. Peoplesoft. We don't hear from the govt much, but Social Security seems to be doing it.
What track record of successful business process upgrades do the big-four contractors have? That would be the question to ask.
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.
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.
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".
Seen this way too many times to recount in a comment. Stupid company hires stupid company to do massive project, neither side is competent to do anything but waste/collect money.
I talked once with an airline who had outsourced their entire dev and dev management to some foreign companies; they wanted to hire a mobile dev to go to where the team was and try to figure out why nothing was getting done, as they had no in house knowledge about mobile at all. I said hell no. Nothing ever shipped that I saw and I think they gave up and went back to in house again eventually. Just because you are a big company doesn't mean you have a clue.
I once worked at a startup that came very close to securing a development contract with <TELCO> to build an early App Store like functionality for them. There was a major consulting group, like Accenture, bidding against us. In meetings with us TELCO would relay to us all the wonderful things this consulting company promised, which made absolutely no sense to us given the budget TELCO had given us. We figured the consulting company must already have those capabilities built for other telco clients, and must be benefitting from their massive scale. I figured the TELCO IT team knew how to due diligence these kinds of things well, being that it was their entire job.
We lost the sale because we told TELCO honestly that we could deliver what they wanted in the budget they had set. So TELCO went with the consulting company.
18 months later the consulting company came to us and offered to give us a subcontract to complete the project, within the scope we had originally offered to TELCO, for the same amount we had offered TELCO! We were stunned and could not understand how this could possibly make any sense economically. We had a meeting with the consulting company and took a look at the project status. It was a colossal pile of shit. Nevertheless, the consulting company promised that we would only be responsible for the scope they had laid out, which we were very comfortable delivering.
We were about to sign a contract to do so, and one of our advisors said we should flip the desks, run out of the negotiation, under no circumstances sign the contract, and for good measure close the offices for a month and not answer any phone calls or emails from the consulting company.
According to him getting involved in that project was in the very best case scenario going to destroy our morale and therefore destroy our team. And in the worst case would enmesh us in litigation and ruin all of our careers.
We thought hard about it, because we needed the money, but ultimately we didn't sign the contract.
Years later I met someone who worked for the consulting company and they told me that the project was an internal meme for a colossal disaster and shitshow. Apparently several consultants had nervous breakdowns over it. And one partner left the company. Meanwhile the project never saw light at TELCO.
I work for one of these large companies. I’ve witnessed a couple breakdowns pretty far up the org chart. I don’t mean crying on conference calls (that’s pretty normal) I mean like breakdowns resulting in hospitalization.
Accenture and other large SI firms are responsible for the majority of public and private sector complex and large software delivery projects. Many of them are resoundingly successful and deliver a great deal of value to businesses and their end users. Some do go wrong due to poor management and individual failures, but it would be unfair to tarnish entire industries based on these isolated incidents (full disclosure: I've worked for several consulting and SI firms in the past).
I worked for Accenture's previous encarnation (Andersen Consulting) in the early 1990s. It was my first job, I was a staff consultant. I obviously was not privy to the higher levels of the project and I left after a year for a better opportunity, so I also don't know how the project ended up. But everything seemed well run (if heavyweight on staff) and we delivered well tested code that worked.
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.
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.
Out of curiousity, what would the HN crowd recommend for the tech stack for a project like this? They had Angular, Mulesoft, and some other cruft I'm sure thrown in. What technology/languages/frameworks would work well enough to support Hertz and their subsidiaries for now and into the future?
Here's what I'd choose as someone who hasn't done something like this in his 25 year career: Some front-end framework (is React still relevant?), Java/SpringBoot, Kubernetes/KNative, some mesh, some back-end mainframe integration with their legacy systems...
Angular was a reasonable choice - it's well suited to "enterprise" web applications as it has standard ways of doing things the Angular way in contrast to React which has 3 - 5 options for different things. Certainly back when it was chosen, there's no issue in this choice.
Mulesoft, personally hate it - but it's definitely an option if you're trying to abstract out a whole bunch of legacy systems into clean APIs. Personally, I'd probably create some lightweight integration components in custom code (whatever language you like) deployed in containers on some scalable cloud platform over buying a chunk of enterprise middleware and trying to find the skilled resource to configure it. But, I don't think Mulesoft was a death knell here - merely a bit of a money pit. Same thing for AEM.
Overall, it doesn't look like they were choosing unreasonable tools to do the various things they wanted. e.g. they weren't trying to use Salesforce as a transactional database platform.
You could definitely pick a better stack, largely from open source, and deploy to the hyper-scale cloud provider of your choice - but I don't think the tech stack that's what screwed this project up overall.
To be fair, mulesoft is not an obstacle here, it lets you expose a http API using the built-in components, generate an OAS description pretty easily. Performance can be shaky but just chuck Varnish in front and hire a guy who knows how to read GC logs for a week to tune the STW-pauses and presto, you can handle >10k r/s on a laptop.
Agreed. At this point, I view anyone who worked for more than six months at any of the big IT consulting companies - and especially accounting firms pretending to be IT consulting companies - with deep suspicion.
I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer comes from!
Using a throwaway here, but I stayed at Accenture for much too long (years). I ended up moving to a household-name tech company and never looked back. This move was not intentional. Despite having glowing performance reviews as an hands-on engineer, my business group felt my skills were mismatched. And they were - they wanted specific certified consultants in the business group and my expertise was building general cloud-native systems.
The very unfortunate thing is most of my ex-colleagues have climbed the ladder to a point with no perceived way down or up. They think they are “managers” and believe they are equivalent to one in tech, but no tech company wants some 7+ year tenure Accenture “manager” managing their engineering teams when all they’ve done is sent out product specs to an offshore team. Even if that offshore team is awful, they’re still doing the hard work of architecting and creating the code. The onshore “manager” is just a face for the team.
Some are genuinely good at their job, but they’ll need to transition to non-tech F500 companies to do anything with a similar prestige to what they’re doing now.
Making a "career" at one of these dead-end IT consulting firms is a real danger every tech person should be aware of.
I mean, if you don't get fired, make a nice salary, and you don't care about actually doing interesting work with technology, then I suppose it's not that bad.
If you try to change jobs, especially if you decide you wanted to actually learn real tech, it's a real burden.
I worked at a small company who bid on an RFP against Accenture back in 2000ish. We bid way lower than Accenture and we were already established at the state government agency with a great track record.
I remember while the proposal evaluation process was happening, Accenture sent their proposed PM to the town where the agency was based and he literally bought a house there to show Accenture's commitment to the agency. Of course he sold it after the project was awarded.
Accenture was awarded the contract, who then came to us and hired our company as a subcontractor to actually do most of the development work with the exception of the project management and two other devs. So the agency paid millions of dollars to get Accenture but in the end still got us essentially. Nice use of taxpayer dollars there.
On the plus side, since Accenture was so tight with Microsoft at the time, Microsoft got Accenture to agree to use .NET for that project which wasn't even publicly available yet..let alone complete. It would look good for Microsoft to show that a state agency had adopted .NET and they had planned to do a case study on the project. So we got to use .NET before many other developers. There was 0 documentation, so that was fun, but we got access to the actual MS devs working on the nuts and bolts of .NET. Fun times.
It was very similar, at least based on what little I knew of Java. Most of the devs, including myself on that project were coming from classic ASP / COM background so it was a very new way to do things. The project was initially proposed to use the ASP/COM architecture and Accenture switched to .NET about a month into the project start (during the design phase). I don't know if that was planned or MS pressured them once they became aware of it. It was a high profile project at the time so I'm sure there were plenty of politics happening in the background that those of us on the dev side weren't aware of.
I'll never understand how you can be blind to the fact that most of these "consultancies" can't consult properly because they are hired fresh from uni and never have gotten any real experience and learn on the job. Almost all of them. What's the average number of years a consultant stays in such a company? From my social network I'd say it's around 2-3 years.
Large corporations and states have increasing inefficiencies of scale. I remember reading an article posted on HN about a guy who got paid $17K for a static HTML page.
Full Time Employee is a funny institution in many countries. Leave a comment below if you had ever (or regularly) been asked to report 8 hours a day on a time sheet even if you actually worked 4.
You have to find different project codes to make it “look right”. If you feel bad and bring up to your manager that you have some downtime, it becomes their problem and they have to find you more work but then you might be overloaded other times. So most people don’t rock the boat, why bother?
So around the country, most FTE jobs in large corporations are like this. People sitting around the watercooler or in meetings, getting lunch and doing one or two things per day. Government employees, too.
With the rise of automation, we’ll have even more productivity. Hopefully with UBI people can start being more honest and work 20 hour workweeks, and spend the rest of the time with their family or pursuing hobbies.
> 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.
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?
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
Do Accenture and IBM have any truly satisfied clients? Anyone have a positive story (more than acceptable) with one of the professional services firms?
Corporate stupidity and expensive consulting go hand in hand. It's easy to blame Accenture here but arguably, it's Hertz that messed up here. They should know better. Did people get fired over this? The CIO apparently left with a nice juicy big package. Probably that was no accident and the writing was on the wall around that time.
This level of spending and failure reeks of severe levels of incompetence, negligence, and stupidity. They probably have layers of management covering each other's asses. And now they are forking cash over to lawyers as well. Maybe the lawyers do better than the consultant, but either way, they'll get payed a lot. They'll squeeze them hard probably. Easier to point fingers at Accenture than to admit management and leadership was asleep at the wheel for years.
Of course, Accenture probably dropped the ball here as well. But what are they going to do when faced with a customer this dumb asking for all sorts of things and probably constantly moving the goal posts? Say no? Of course not.
So, they did the obvious thing: pick expensive enterprise solutions and dangle nice sounding buzzwords in front of the customer. Tell them what they want to hear basically. And then pick some boring/conservative technologies and go to work. Angular was still reasonably fashionable around the time and 25 year old "senior" Javascript "specialists" are a dime a dozen. So it's not surprising that that became a thing. And we're all so agile these days that you wouldn't believe it. Standard sales pitch and practice for the last 2 decades.
The reality is of course that Hertz signed up for classic waterfall complete with blueprints and everything and Accenture was smart enough to not go fixed rate here. Better still, Accenture was smart enough to realize that IBM, Oracle, and others also were in on the action so they did not take responsibility for any of that; only for their part. Classic recipe for lots of scope creep and budget overruns. Which of course happened and was probably encouraged to happen.
That CIO looks like he knew what he was doing. Big spending, fat pay check, and be gone and take the package when the shit hits the fan.
Sometimes a big budget is detrimental to project success.
With a small budget you are forced to find or assemble a small skilled team. With a big budget you end up funding a bureaucracy of middle managers and a big unskilled team.
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
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.
I used to work with Hertz at a shady Tribeca ad agency. Some schmoozy account exec had convinced them that view based conversion credit was equal to click based credit. So a programmatically bought banner ad, even unseen, had equal weight to an active customer searching and buying.
Made my media buying strategy that much more difficult. To question the scheme was verboten, view=intent was sacrosanct.
...and of course, at the end of the article, the author offers to sell some kind of project assessment. My assessment is that it is not money that will buy greatness. You need to have engagement. This is why this kind of project seems to be doomed from the beginning. Large enterprises are sadly not driven by highly motivated people. The project scope is humongous. You have all kinds of legacy to take into account. To compare with Uber, which has a platform written from scratch by a (probably) highly motivated team is just ... whishful thinking. It is just very hard to create a common goal and motivated people in such a large project. Throw in a global consulting firm and you have recipe for disaster. I've worked for 14 years as a developer consultant and I know that the top priority goal is to get the customer to pay the bills, if your project produces something great it is nice, but the thing that will get the bosses moving are unpaid invoices. Nowadays I'm with a product company
I'm surprised not to see this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWLv4tQsz4
"Accidenture" - I think it was a whole satire site originally, but can't find it now. It had been pointed out by some Accenture people I was on a course with.
I have been on the dark side of that world but let's keep the stories for another day. Here is a different mini-story on how big companies save money and fatten their margin.
In the early to mid-00s, a popular scripting language called ActionScript (sister of ECMAScript) powers Flash. A large Outsourcing company contacted me to ramp up a development team for a high triple-digit thousand dollars project. They had bought/inherited a code library, one of the most beautifully written codebases -- Object Oriented Java-Styled code with well-documented comments. I emailed the original programmer (part of the same forum group, I think), and he replied that if I need help, he is there.
The company was trying to set up a team to start with the code and build an entire application. When asked, why not just talk to the original author of the code, and he will do it easily instead of struggling for many months. It will take ages for the team to understand how things are written and why.
Well, the idea is all about cost and margins. They seriously don't care how good or even if the project completes. Their only motive was the number of hours and code volume (number of lines). They even factored in attrition from the team and the replacement cost in money and time.
So, the original programmer cost them $100 /hr (a good amount during that time), so the company spent a set budget to get just the needed framework. Then, they got a trainer (me) at about $20 /hr, which was costly (but had to) at that time (and geographic location). Finally, they cut and save by training those "engineers" who thought they could write ActionScript by clicking on the timeline on Flash.
There are excellent Services/Consulting companies and even brilliant teams inside these big companies. However, most people are just optimizing on volume and billable hours and have no care in the world about pride, dignity, or what the final product will be.
Sounds about right. I have never ever seen a web consulting group deliver anything that isn't complete trash, late, never, or some combination thereof.
Individual consultants can be okay. Consulting firms tend to be complete trash and make a living off the technically ignorant. Seems to be worse in web than other areas.
The hospital I work for just outsourced the majority of IT to Accenture in what I am sure will become one of the worst mistakes they have ever made. The 10% if us they kept are now going to be just doing cat herding work with all our contractors. It's..... a whole thing.
I was once engaged by a client on a 100 million plus project simply to check the prime contractor consulting companies work actually met the contract. The consulting company resented me to the point of hatred. More companies should do this.
I'm smelling a potential situation where the website was never the goal, just siphon off money and use the website as a blind. Lower management no doubt guessed what was going on, but didn't want to risk losing their jobs.
Lots of people with anecdotes of how useless/disastrous big consultancies are.
It's the old "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM". It is easy to justify this kind of outsourcing decision, these are multi-billion dollar companies and they must be that successful for a reason. Right? Whereas if you do something in house and it goes titsup, then the first question will be "why didn't you get an experienced consultancy to do it?"
So my question is how do we influence senior management away from the mentality of employing consultants as they default decision and instead look at all the options fairly.
Problem number one is Accenture outsources all development to the cheapest bidder. Usually in India. Plenty of great Indian engineers, but they want the cheapest. I do wonder how difficult Hertz legacy systems made this on them though. Starting anew is not an option and I have little doubt Hertz existing infrastructure was a mess for the same reasons the new infrastructure is a mess. Lots of companies have become reliant on software, bit treated its development like a commodity to be purchased. Not a core part of the business for which they must hire internally.
AEM is the biggest piece of shit software I have ever had the misfortune of using.
90% of the functionality they claimed to support did not work. It was way way harder to use than anything else I've seen.
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Going into consulting: I will never go back. The problem is that all of the good devs leave once they realize the clients are assholes and are in complete control. Then you are left with people who are ambivalent to what they are making, or too bad at their job to make it anywhere else.
I've never experienced such micromanagement, rudeness, sabotage, and meanness in my entire life. And it doesn't even pay that well!
If you know Accenture you also know that they love to hire fresh graduates and put them on projects as quickly as possible. Needless to say as a developer coming directly from university or a bootcamp you rarely have experience with writing good tests or documentation, developing maintainable enterprise software at all.
The only thing I'm wondering is how companies can be so naive thinking they get experts with multiple YoE from Accenture.
> The company launches a major end-to-end technology upgrade program that includes outsourcing operations of its legacy systems to IBM
That right there is a warning sign. It may make sense to outsource legacy systems after their replacement is ready; it makes no sense to outsource them before it has even been started.
I really don’t understand how Accenture is as big as they are or how they truly provide value to the world.
I just don’t understand it. Im not trying to be sarcastic. I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand this since I created my own consulting firm years ago.
Because failures like these are rare every few years and Accenture does several hundred projects of this size a year. If you need a tech consultancy for any project above 100 people they really are one of the first choices, if you upgrade SAP or any system touched by more than a few thousand people Accenture is likely on the top of the Head of IT's mind, and that's if they can afford them.
Once a company reaches a sufficient size, they need someone like Accenture, its really as simple as that. Every FAANG or F500, really none of them do it themselves. Why would they do use any of their own expensive engineers on their back-end systems. The value is in outsourcing to someone with economies of scale for several months instead of hiring FTEs or reallocating existing staff for an x month project every 5 years.
Arthur Andersen was the largest and most successful accounting firms, as such they had deep business contacts with basically the entire business world.
As mainframes moved from the white glove ivory tower to more access for programmers, then to minicomputers, then especially in the microcomputer revolution of the 1990s, Arthur Andersen was well connected to sell IT and development services to a very very large range of clients. This wing was "Andersen Consulting".
Andersen Consulting's partners got tired of taking all these sweet revenues and shoveling them to the tax partners of Arthur Andersen, so they split off in 1998 or 1997 or so, and became Accenture.
Also around this time, Accenture signed many deals to outsource entire IT departments to them. Stupid companies not seeing IT as one of the primary efficiency and market advantages (see:Amazon) but instead as an annoying cost center jumped at the chance. This made them beholden to Accenture.
Anyway, Accenture had the salespeople and contacts, the size, and the reputation of being able to deliver large projects, or they'd stick them out. Would they be great? No. But they'd stick it out.
All the big 6: CoopersLybrand, Ernst and Young, Deloitte, Price Waterhouse, KPMG, were all in on it at this point. But Accenture had the largest partner-to-workerbee ratio, so they raked in the cash. Accenture had the ability to hire armies of workers, rarely from computer science backgrounds, crash course them in programming over 6 weeks, and then shuttle them off to be vastly overpriced consultants. They even had their own private college for this (St. Charles).
Basically, they had contacts and a good enough pipeline to create worker bee programmers for large projects.
The partners generally came up the ranks so they could speak the IT lingo, and they were promoted/selected based on ability to produce revenue and sales. With the huge size and contacts and labor pool, plus happily jumping into any and all software implementation.
Accenture and their ilk were also key for supplying huge numbers of people for SAP and other package implementations. Basically, these software companies couldn't muster the armies of implementers necessary to install and customize their software. Accenture and their ilk could. These ERP packages likely helped fuel the productivity boom (all of it went to the rich) of the Clinton era as computers went from 10s of MHz to gigahertz processers as well as memory and storage increases and the internet boomed.
You probably can't imagine an executive management team that is ignorant of IT and IT practices, and of course the old enterprises have plenty of these. These execs just wanted to hand off these annoying things to someone, and Accenture was there for them.
Modern executives need to be IT-aware. I'd say this is only very very very recent, with the rise of Amazon. Before then you'd have the CEO that proudly annouced they don't even know how to use Email.
Those CEOs are a dying breed. Your orgs will live and die by navigating the IT landscape. Amazon sucks for many reasons, but they do a lot right, and one of those things is "don't use consultants, build it in-house".
ERP implementations likely provided value because of the lack of bespoke systems, instead people standardized and gained efficiencies. That was the value I would guess.
Outsourcing? Did it provide value? Maybe immediately on the books, enough to cook to hit the stock options and cash out.
Could companies have built internally? In an ideal world that's definitely a yes. Amazon sucks in so many ways, but one thing they don't is the fundamental value they place on their IT systems and workers.
Old school companies could not handle that culturally. Ugly nerds? Paid more than managers would be several levels up? Treat them respect? Structure the business around them? They couldn't handle it.
Accenture had the organizational gravitas with the execs. Through that came the temporary infusion of valued IT change. Were they vastly overpaying? Yeah. But that price tag meant they needed to take the implemented system seriously.
Ultimately Accenture kept showing up and selling services somehow, despite many many many other options. Should there be a kick-ass IT consultancy that competes with them and embarrasses them? Probably, but ... where are they? If Accenture was charging 250/hr for 50/hr talent, why didn't some leaner org at 150/hr with 100/hr talent (a fundamentally different tier of worker) vastly outperform them?
Well, the world is run by the rich, and they only respect the rich. It might be as cynical as they respect how Accenture rips off its workers and still delivers acceptable product, exactly like the execs in the companies like their companies to be run: extracting maximum value from the plebe workers.
Marketing and connections are so so powerful. As stated elsewhere, Accenture is generally a "safe" choice for an "important" project. And don't forget those "approved vendors" rigamarole that companies have. Because Accenture and their ilk extract so much excess from clients and labor, they can buffer the failure scenarios and throw more labor at the problem.
In large companies where budgets are abstract in relation to value, more that budgets align with how much power and influence a subsection of the org has, cost can become secondary.
And sweet jesus would I like to know how much kickbacks and the like exist in IT procurement. It must be extensive, based on the mystifying decisions I've seen in my career.
Reading the linked article all I could think was: Hertz doesn’t deserve to exist. It just seems like they’re a Frankenstein of 30 years of mediocre to poor decisions.
Ultimately I think a lot of companies that use Accenture don’t deserve to exist, and ultimately will be outcompeted.
In the US, most "markets" are largely dominated by monopoly, duopoly, or cartel conditions, and thus rent extraction. Combined with the efficacy and returns of lobbying congress for market barriers and subsidies, most companies are entrenched.
There are so many reforms needed in the US, but breaking up monopolies, or just stopping mergers, would be task #1. Price, creativity, options, innovation, worker empowerment, amount of employment, wages, all improve with more companies, more options, and more competition.
2) airport counter real estate or the real estate at the "car rental satellite facility" is probably hard to get
3) fleet sale discounting with the car companies
But #1 is probably the main one.
Car rentals are actually decent in competition, although there may have been a merger flurry at some point.
Yup, Enterprise, Avis, and Hertz own them all.
It would probably take self-driving so an off-airport lot could dispatch self-driving cars to someone.
Customer service at car rentals is awful, it always seems to take an hour to get a dumb piece of paper and someone that says "go to this spot"
Disclaimer: not an industry expert, but all I see is three companies with the market share and no one new in probably 40 years, awful IT and customer service, and companies mistakenly calling the cops on their own customers for not-stolen cars.
Right, but it doesn’t seem like it’s not a free market, there doesn’t sound like there’s legislation protecting these companies. Unlike what EVs have has to go up against with dealerships.
Extremely poor customer experience across the board sounds ripe for disruption. Companies just don’t understand how vulnerable this makes them. There’s absolutely no loyalty or connection built with a bad customer experience.
A few years from now there will be a startup that shows us a better way and we’ll have a hard time understanding why we put up with crappy customer experience and mediocrity for so long.
Interesting piece, but it would be nice if the author credited or cited the publication that most of it was copied from. Didn't even bother to remove its name where it makes no sense in its new context.
> A spokesperson for Accenture tells The Register...
I worked for companies like these. They Used every trick on the book to make the client dependent on them on maintenance. Including making it deliberatly slow to increase speed over the years.
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.
I worked for Andersen, Price Waterhouse, and a couple smaller firms after that. The stuff I saw induced anxiety in me on behalf of the client. If you actually showed initiative and did your job too thoroughly, they had no idea what to do with your work product.
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.