Comment by blunte
7 years ago
I've lived this. Myself and a very expensive team of EY kids were waiting eagerly every day for anyone in corp management to throw us any kind of tasks.
On the rare occasion that we were given a task, we would all descend upon one computer like vultures, group-solving the problem typically in 60minutes or less. Then it was back to doing nothing.
Diplomacy (the game) became our primary activity. It was fun, but such a terrible waste of time, talent, and money.
That's awesome. What group were you in?
I wasn't EY, I was in through a small local firm. And we billed much less :). So the weekends when the EY guys didn't fly home, they had a few hundred $ to burn. We lived well on the weekends!
What are EY kids?
Earnest and Young placed contractors?
Yes, billed at $120/hr for a recent college grad programmer, with per-diems and weekend travel allowances to go back home (fly cross-country). I should note that this was pre dot-com bust... late 1990s, so $120/hr was pretty good then.
But the client company had more cash-flow than they could burn, so they didn't care. Unsurprisingly, they hit serious financial difficulties within a few years.