Comment by danny_taco

4 years ago

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.

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danny_taco

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game_the0ry  4 years ago

> 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.

  • eternalban  4 years ago

    >> 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 ..)

    • eadmund  4 years ago

      > An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour.

      ExxonMobil made $23 billion in profit in 2021; that works out to just over three days and three hours to get to $20 million.

      Shell made $20.6 billion in profit in 2021; it would take them even longer.

      The other majors made even less.

      A project which wastes over three days of profits is hugely expensive.

      2 replies →

    • zhte415  4 years ago

      Motivation and constraint is completely driven by what budget or cost centre one's in. These can be schizophrenically distant, and work to the detriment of the organisation, in organisations that still insist they're one team.

      Another perspective on the 20M is the salaries and total running cost of an office of 1500 in Southeast Asia for ayear (or potentially Latin America, or Africa, but I'm less familiar with pricing there than in EA/SEA).

pvarangot  4 years ago

> 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.

  • captaincaveman  4 years ago

    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.

    • cebert  4 years ago

      Generally speaking individuals who work at large contracting firms either do so due to immigration status or because they’re either not experienced or technically incompetent. The tech market offers full-time positions with wonderful salaries. Why would anyone want to work at one of these firms? It’s because they can’t land any better job and can hide their moving between multiple projects frequently due to ineptness as “short term projects”.