Comment by pembrook
4 years ago
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.
Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
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I’m not even sure insane match what you just described at that point.
Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.
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Say what you will about the Jira process, there is no climbing involved...
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Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?
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How can the people who came up with this and put this system in place not know how insane this sounds?
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Scott Adam’s has this covered.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
Ha! When I visit the link the page includes several banner ads for...Hertz!
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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.
Consultants and agencies typically give all of the actual work to young 22-28 year olds. Leadership focuses on acquiring new business. Once they get your business they really do not care what happens beyond generally fulfilling the contracted requirements.
"Orientation program?" Did they not send you to CAPS in St. Charles?
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kid/no kid is one thing, but were you able to deliver the insights they expected? I know I'd be pissed if I paid a high rate expecting an expert and then got a guy who doesn't know either.
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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.
I wonder what country this is..
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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
They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing.
The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted outside support for an initiative or to sink someone else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go against the executive that brings them in
I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them.
At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.
It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.
The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.
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The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.
Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.
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Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
Yeah well https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-franc...
A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at least for a while...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
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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.
If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.
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Did you read the title?
When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
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If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms playing that game.
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I accepted an offer this year for $150k as a sr assoc at a big 4 consultancy doing "dev" work, so for me, it was worth it. 3 years as a dev before
They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers
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your sales game needs to be world class though. that’s all that really matters.
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.
> Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
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And "managing expectations." If I heard that phrase once I heard it every day.
As overused as it is, it still has a core usefulness. Over-promising and under-delivering is never a good thing no matter what the situation.
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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.
speaking of agencies and horrors ! I too did a 6 months stint at a "digital agency". To be fair I still think they were one of the better ones. But it was just not for me:
1) EXCESSIVE Timekeeping (I had to log every hour basically I was at work, felt like an inmate). Sure that is there business I get it. But it's not for me.
2) Many projects(Same-Same): I also learn that for my personality (and sanity) i work better if I can focus on one or two long term projects. Doing 5 little projects different days of the week, was horrible. To rephrase, dealing with 5 different clients a week was horrible, 7/10 times you basically just undid half the work you did previous week. Since you know, "requirements change" or it took them two weeks to let me know "oh it has to work like this not that, I thought you will know this" type convos.
Anywhoo programming can be wonderful or it can be awful !
I worked at a computer store in my local town for a while. I got paid $9.00/hr repairing Macs and PCs. Often having 7-8 on my bench at a time. All were being billed at $59/hr. I didn't stick around long!
My first job billed my time at $200/hr and my salary was $28k. I was 21 and they would literally put me on projects solo. Once a client was on retainer the execs disappeared and let fresh college grads do the work, it’s a total scam.
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
How much of that $$$ did you get to keep?
I was billed out at around $300 an hour and paid salary of 75K plus porfit sharing (sometimes) and bonus based on billability
1/10th usually
The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org.
I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure?
I suspect that might be the case.
If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
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> Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I just want to point out that this isn't just legacy corps - I previously worked for a manager who went straight from a theory heavy CS degree to a theory heavy PhD to consultancy to management.
You still get companies like this where some middle manager with 0 years of SWE experience has to hire Software Engineers with 5+.
I'd say this is rather distribution at work. To build software competitively you need fairly good people and not a lot them would want to end up at Hertz. Places like Hertz are not tech companies which also often makes them very low margine, capital deprived and of limited scalability. Therefore, they cannot offer the compensation like top 20% of the players. The difference of compensation between top 20% and rest of the players is just amazing and reflects market forces operating in talent distribution that has sharp peak than other professions.
Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.
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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.
Yeah, also what are you gonna do with all the people you hired for a once every few year website overhaul?
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.
But usually the customer is the one prioritizing the backlog no? At least in all the project I've worked in the PO was always on the customer side.
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.