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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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 :)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this!
I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
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.
It. Was. Insane.
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Scott Adam’s has this covered.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
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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.
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“Consulting is a test. You pass when you leave.” - Unknown
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.
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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
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The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
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Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.
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LOL!
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.
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And "managing expectations." If I heard that phrase once I heard it every day.
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I was being billed at > $300/hr when I first got out of school at 21 as consultant. 24 would make someone a senior consultant!
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.
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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.
How much of that $$$ did you get to keep?
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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).
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I think it’s two things that are pretty basic:
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.
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Sometimes, I've worked at consulting shops that actually delivered quality though they were large-ish but not Accenture/IBM sized
Making yourself rich off the backs of your workers isn't exactly a new idea, this is just more blatant than usual.
You said it perfectly.
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.
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Hey! You would do great over at /r/consulting
Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
have seen it described in telecom industry as "dinosaurs mating"
…moments before the asteroid strikes.
Literally perfect analogy, going to remember this.
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.
#TRUESTORY
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.
Learning by doing, while billing your clients $xxx/hr
The consultant way.
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".
Good god. Can we have a recession where it's only these bullshit companies that get weeded out?
> 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 that's why you shouldn't be that afraid of competing against them as a startup.
haha oh boy, I have a similar story to tell about $!0mm IT project we (not me) gave to M______y.
Never again.
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.
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> nothing happens to them.
Not true! They get multi-million dollar golden parachutes when they decide they're tired of playing business and would rather play golf.
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.
> Why does this step always come last?
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.
From the executive side it’s hard too.
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If it doesn't come last, you don't hear about it because it doesn't make the news
"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 :)
> 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.
It’s tailor made for this. Management will always sign off because they’ve heard of Adobe.
As someone who holds a certification as an AEM Business Solutions Specialist (possibly lapsed by now) I have to agree. It's hot garbage.
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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.
If you're talking about Sanity, feel like I should mention Directus. Been wonderful for a few projects and completely open source.
> 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.
Seen loads of strapi around too; has its warts but it’s easy enough for frontend folks to manage. :)
Why anyone would pick that over a bunch of very mature open source offerings (with much larger developer communities) is beyond me.
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).
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Another variation on "Nobody ever got fired for buying ${big_corp}"
Would like to know what open source CMS offering has a very mature offering? Wordpress is fine for a blog/news site.
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Examples?
IBM WebSphere enters the chat...
Or as it used to be known, CQ5. You wouldn't expect Adobe to have built this themselves, would you?
I've been doing AEM projects for a decade. You are not wrong.
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.
>> a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world
An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour. (Apple makes ~1700.00 per second ..)
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> 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.
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I was also on the Hertz project and the oil project at Accenture. Hiya danny_taco!
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.
Regardless of what your project is.
For an exec, one of the big consulting firms is a safe choice.
If things go wrong, you get to blame the outside company for screwing it up.
Setup a team internally and your neck is on the line if they fail to deliver.
Good luck staffing a team of 4-6 competent in house developers
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Consultant nonsense is what convinced me the Pointy-Haired Boss popularized in Dilbert is the true IRL face of management.
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:
[]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
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)
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I'd wager only 5-10% of all money is actually used in an exchange for real value. Everything else is just rotating through the bureaucrats.
Lovely: a form of Bastiat’s Broken Windows fallacy. I think you’re on to a great insight!
Read this related Twitter thread recently: https://twitter.com/crim_thought/status/1549554660184231936
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.
You should read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber if you haven't already.
The jobless percentage of population would shoot up by double digit basis points if not for bullshit jobs that just move money around.
I ask myself the same question
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
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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.
Tens of billions, if not more, at Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I had a similar experience but with a contract 10x that amount. It was baffling.
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...
> aging digital presence
Never had any problem renting cars online from hertz, unsure what the problem is.
Since renting apparently works fine, the backend APIs seems to be working.
A page redesign? I can not care less what the page looked like as long as I can find the rent botton.
> 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.
Isn't the big 4 usually KPMG, EY, Deloitte, and PWC?
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).
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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'd be fascinated to know if they still do this. That was the Accenture model in the 80s and 90s, but then they went hard for outsourcing.
Maybe TCS outbid them on the low end and they're pivoting back to inshore
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What kind of underhanded techniques?
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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.
32mil? thats chump change, Oregon paid Oracle 240mil for an obamacare site that was never delivered
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2016/09...
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.
Boy, I bet the founder of TinyPilot doesn't feel so bad anymore.
Yeah, at least they eventually got a working system out of it.
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.
>My Achievements Include [...]
These all look like your typical resume inflating BS.
Reminds me of the Silicon Valley series satire from Mike Judge.
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https://www.cio.com/article/191244/how-one-cio-and-hockey-co... (2021)
Veteran CIO provides his team with accountability, board exposure, and continual feedback to turn them into tomorrow’s IT leaders.
That’s the problem. They hired a CIO and not a CTO to rebuild their online presences. CTO creates revenue and CIO reduces costs. Big difference. CIO rely on consultants and CTOs rely on internal software teams.
I'm sure microservices and AWS and cloud were the reasons for the growth.
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.
>nobody got fired for hiring Accenture
Are you sure? It's not a name that inspires confidence.
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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.
> My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m
The cheapest people possible.
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 often wonder how much it would cost to literally hire the best freelancers in the market today to build their alternative to this monstrosity
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 really think the skills and "product" would be better. The managing and structure could be a nightmare though.
Then again, Accenture shows they can be a nightmare too.
Probably much less. The issue is finding those folks (or getting hold of their time).
100x cheaper.
On some level it serves them right hiring Accenture for that.
I used to read https://thedailywtf.com/ and it was full of stories of consultancy project that failed in the most horrible and insane ways.
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
like IBM is doing this now, zero chance their system is usable https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/inventory-visibility?topic=data-...
or this mckinsey whitepaper that's clearly not a thing you can use without a bespoke contract https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Retail/...
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.
I've never heard of a truly successful project by these large scale consulting firms.
Even the so called success stories seem ... mediocre at best.
Has anyone been part of such a project at a firm like that?
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.
Does the name of the consulting firm sound like Lord of the Rings Elven character?
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.
The ultimate measure of a tech systems integrator is how many CIOs were fired as a result of hiring your firm.
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.
What an incredible story. I'm amazed that modern businesses stay alive.
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.
I'd love to see the statement of work and bill of materials for this. I feel like this isn't Accenture's first rodeo.
I was an intern in Accenture in 2010.
My general impression was that my role was actually "budget filler".
Saved up for a laptop and a driving course, so can't complain.
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.
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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.
The UK’s NHS can top that, with the infamous Capita contract that cost billions and delivered nothing.
One expects this kind of behavior from the government, but business setting huge pile of cash on fire still attracts attention.
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.
The £10bn one under Tony Blair?
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.
Here's what I'd do.
- Monolithic Haskell web application.
- Very little JavaScript.
- Small team of people who know what they're doing.
- A couple of servers.
- Postgres and Redis.
With the remaining $31,500,000, I would buy weapons for Ukraine.
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.
React, .Net Core, Kubernetes, Azure, CosmosDB
I've never witnessed a single skilled professional working at Accenture in 10+ years of IT career. Period.
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.
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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.
Accenture sucks.
Early .NET was basically Java, wasn't it? Java devs should have picked it up pretty easily.
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 read somewhere that it was based on Delphi because the same guy made both.
"Hertz gets Hertz treatment from Web Agency"
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.
$7m / $200/hr = 35,000 hours, means a team of almost 20 people working for a year.
That's a whole team of business analysts to create so many spreadsheets.
I don't understand why anyone would think $32 million is a reasonable price point for a car rental site to begin with.
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.
If the front-end is a website, deploying it to thousands of locations is as difficult as deploying it to one.
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I could do it for $5M, and it would work.
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it's psychological but maybe also pragmatic
if your billion dollar business relies on the web site working well, you wouldn't think of trusting it to a small freelancer that quotes you 50k or whatever, it's almost like they start with a budget in mind (7 digits ought to do it) and then find someone who will take that much money
disclaimer: I have no experience here but I think this lecture on pricing design touches on it, that big corps aren't going to touch you if you're not charging them outrageous fees
[0] https://youtu.be/RKXZ7t_RiOE
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.
this reminds me a bit of the canadian federal government and the phoenix payroll system.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+go...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
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.
--
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!
I guess the TinyPilot guy got off easy
That certainly sounds like Accenture.
Found the web agency that did that dudes e-commerce website lol
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.
I’ve yet to hear of someone paying Accenture to do dev work and having a good experience. I’d be curious if any such story exists.
At what point will these lauded MBA programs teach people how to hire and manage consultants? This is a predictable failure mode.
> 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've been hearing about this lawsuit for years now, but I've never seen what the ruling was.
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.
Please, sincerely, explain it to me.
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".
Said another way, I think this covers “how they got so big” but not “how do they provide value.”
I guess I have to admit they provide some value, but capture 99% for themselves?
Makes me wonder if they’re actually destroying value overall?
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Thank you for this history.
As someone who focuses on being effective and efficient, this hurts my soul.
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 love stories like this bc it means there is more work for competent people like me to fix.
Proving the theory about infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare may be suspect.
My only experience with accenture was when they were brought in for a year long engagement to build some splunk dashboards.
I sat near the consultants, and they would just spend all day working on projects for other clients.
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."
Another web agency failure post on HN today. Interesting trend!
From Oc 2019.
Could not find what's the latest status of this case. Anyone?
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.
This sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing seems to be rather typical for these major consulting firms, as far as I can tell.
Never hire Accenture to do software development.
Nice to see the business model is still working.
(/me looks at the account here for OPSEC risks)
Apparently my experience at the State of Colorado and Accenture wasn't an anomaly.
Quite often such "bad looking" business deals are actually well-planned money laundering or kickback schemes.
Prob need to add the "2019" tag to this, for reference. But def a classic case, as others said.
When I read this I thought immediately, “Why is this even news ? Of course this happened?”
They could have given me a million dollars and I would have happily made this for them.
Did Hertz not buy the "Quality Insurance" when they hired Accenture?
I'm a bit shocked that my stories are a bit similar
The title of the article is so confusing..heheee...
Yep, and the U.S. government paid Deloitte way more for a vaccine-registration site that never went live: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-m...
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.
since this was from 2019, I tried to search to see what the outcome of this was and I couldn't find much
lol Accenture, could go with PwC they would do the same but on Azure.
TCS is the new Accenture.
Ouch. That Hertz!
I think it mega Hertz.
For 1% of the cost they could have paid me :)