[HN Gopher] What's Accenture? (2020)
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What's Accenture? (2020)
Author : kgggvin
Score : 238 points
Date : 2021-04-28 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retool.com)
| sidpuri wrote:
| ah the large black hole of IT Consulting
| zabzonk wrote:
| "We have a problem"
|
| "Let's hire a consultancy firm to solve it!"
|
| A bit later:
|
| "Now we have ten problems, all sitting at desks we are paying
| for and are being charged ridiculous fees for a bunch of
| witless MBAs just out of college."
| 01100011 wrote:
| I'll say two things I know after 11 years consulting on embedded
| and smart grid projects at a company acquired by a company that
| was acquired by Accenture:
|
| - Not all of Accenture is fluff. They have capable folks that do
| real work and add value.
|
| - Services companies don't scale. They are dependent on how many
| bodies they can rent out. I laugh when I see the valuations of
| companies like Accenture and Palantir. They will never be the
| next Google. They'll survive and turn a profit, but there is no
| growth story.
| nopcode wrote:
| Accenture employs five hundred thousand people! This is roughly
| equivalent to Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Google's headcount
| COMBINED. They execute tens of thousands of projects _per year_.
|
| I'm sorry but anecdotal evidence (even by this community) is not
| relevant at all.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Most of these services companies, seem to thrive because
| executives in client companies can have someone to shift blame in
| case of implementation issues or roadblocks.
|
| The whole IT consulting thing is a "shift the blame" game, at-
| least in large corporations. You have a project, a specification
| is made, a consultant selected, work offloaded. Consultants aim
| is to increase billing hours. So they develop a barely spec
| fitting application with a lot of loose ends, so as to maximize
| the recurring maintenance revenue down the road.
| derryrover wrote:
| Interesting article. A lot of negative things here said about
| such consultancy firms. Some positive things must also be said:
|
| - Outsourcing IT problems is hard. It requires knowledge/skill.
| Outsourcing to a big firm is a relatively safe bet.
|
| - The consultancy firm then again outsourcing it to cheaper
| contractors again is not per definition bad. It actually improves
| the mechanics of capitalism. Also nothing stops the customer from
| outsourcing their project to a cheaper contractor themselves and
| cutting out the middleman (Accenture). But they don't want to
| carry that risk. Accenture can carry that risk.
|
| - Big consultancy firms build up a load of experience,
| connections and assets for dealing with specific problems. They
| can re-use solutions in a way that your typical middle-sized
| software team can never do.
|
| I have worked myself at a much smaller consultancy company more
| or less copycatting accenture (founders were ex-accenture
| employees). I moved on because I no longer liked the job and am
| now working in a more regular software dev company. What I
| noticed is that:
|
| - The ex-accenture managers knew better what had priority and
| were sharper challenging time estimates or refactoring initiated
| by dev-teams. Not always good for the dev-team, but often good
| for the project actually. (Bummer: dev-teams can be wrong often).
| Management often challenged dev-teams to whiteboard their
| solution. The manager put in the extra effort to understand this
| and if he still didnot understand the benefit then a refactoring
| was not done. (Yes this can be both good and bad depending on the
| technical level of your manager, see also my next bullet)
|
| - Anything more complex they would often simplify too much.
| Projects that exceeded expectations in complexity often failed. I
| expect this also to be the reason for all these failed projects
| for Accenture. If a problem doesnot fit in one of their standard
| slideshows then they lack the expertise to overcome this.
|
| -Sale-teams usually over-promise (often under pressure or flawed
| reward systems) and are totally not focusing on if the developers
| actually have the expertise to pull it off.
|
| - They also used more corporate flavored powertools (like
| Salesforce or ServiceNow). The average dev stays far away from
| those and prefers open source. Anyway, they would implement in
| weeks what takes several months to build in Django + React (or
| any other open-source combo).
|
| - They could leverage very average engineers to deliver quality
| work. As long as it was a commodity job.
| drumhead wrote:
| The old Anderson Consulting. Forced to change their name soon
| after they were spun off from the parent, so adopted Accenture.
| Which turned out to be a good thing because Arthur Anderson soon
| went bankrupt in the whole Enron debacle.
| alanm13 wrote:
| Yes, I forgot to mention this in my comment as well. That's the
| irony of it - they were arguably highly responsible for the
| turmoil that led to increased regulation via SOX, and now they
| make much of their revenue on SOX compliance.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > they were arguably highly responsible for the turmoil that
| led to increased regulation via SOX, and now they make much
| of their revenue on SOX compliance.
|
| No. Andersen Consulting started as a division within Arthur
| Andersen in the 1950s, but became a separate BU in 1989 and
| in effect a separate company by the late 90s. The split came
| about because AC's business (technology & business
| consulting) made much more money than AA's business
| (auditing).
|
| The Enron debacle took down AA in late 2001 because AA was
| Enron's auditor. AC (actually Accenture by that point) wasn't
| involved.
| darwingr wrote:
| It worked too. Most folks don't mention or know about it.
|
| >Arthur Andersen was charged with and found guilty of
| obstruction of justice for shredding the thousands of documents
| and deleting e-mails and company files that tied the firm to
| its audit of Enron.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Arthur_Andersen
| jorblumesea wrote:
| > which is also why more than 30% of Accenture's workforce is
| situated in lower cost labor markets like India.
|
| More importantly, 90% of the actual dev work is done by these low
| cost off shoring centers, and it's also not always India's best
| and brightest. There's some amazing and brilliant devs in India
| but they work for Google and the like.
|
| So you end up with spaghetti mess projects written by fairly
| unskilled overseas devs.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > While most of the big contracts you'll see in tech consulting
| are related to these kinds of big, legacy systems, that's not the
| only thing companies like Accenture do; they also build apps and
| websites, but at a larger scale. A great example is Accenture's
| recent (high profile) contract with Hertz: they were tasked with
| building Hertz a new website and mobile app. This kind of
| implementation work is very similar to what you'd expect a dev
| shop to work on.
|
| I heard Best Buy hired Accenture to take on all development of
| its website in about 2005, and that decision significantly
| impaired their ability to compete against Amazon for years.
|
| Early in my career I worked with a lot of outside contractors,
| and I remember being told by one or two of them that there were
| consulting companies that specialized in cleaning up the messes
| Accenture left behind. I don't know if that's actually true,
| though, and never really looked into it to verify.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "there's a good reason why Accenture has gotten so large and been
| so successful, and it's because they generally provide value to
| their clients"
|
| This is probably true if 'client' refers to the decision-maker,
| rather than the entity paying for the services.
|
| Say you're managing some massive government department, that
| definitely needs some particular change. You and your team don't
| have the skills, experience or even desire to do the work. But
| you can't be seen to do nothing. You can hire a consulting firm
| to do the work. It's not your money, after all, and your team
| cannot reasonably be expected to have these very specialist
| skills. So, you hire the firm. Whether the project succeeds or
| fails, the firm provided value to you (the person responsible for
| the decision). In the worst case, you get someone to blame, and
| your reputation is preserved because: how were you to know this
| famous firm would not deliver what they promised.
|
| If you use the word 'client' to refer to those who foot the bill
| (shareholders or taxpayers), then it might not be the case that
| thes mega consulting firms 'generally provide value to their
| clients'.
|
| This seems like a large enough instance of a principal-agent
| problem to be worth studying. And, for government contracts at
| least, the information is public.
|
| Has anyone done such a study?
| pantulis wrote:
| They can also provide some sort of "financing", like selling
| the build project at a loss and then recover it on the
| operation/maintenance phase.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Very much this, a few places out sourced their IT on the
| cheap to ACN during financial crisis, the problem then is
| clawing it back years later, when actually it now costs lots
| to support a terrible mess and is a drag on the company.
| pantulis wrote:
| I did not state that in a pejorative sense, though. For big
| enterprise customers the run costs is where the nicest
| profits are no matter how the delivery was done because
| they extend over many years.
|
| It's only that the scale of ACN allows them to perform
| these tricks.
| jboggan wrote:
| One time I beat the CFO of Arthur Andersen in a game of Monopoly
| while in Antarctica.
| bpiche wrote:
| Can you please elaborate on this exciting lede
| ff43f wrote:
| Stories like these make me wonder why don't I start a consulting
| firm. Pretty much every mega consulting firm seems to hire subpar
| developers and deliver low quality code. It seems like consulting
| is ripe for disruption. Or is it too hard to scale?
| gagejustins wrote:
| Hello! Author here - I had a few friends who worked at Accenture
| in the past, and always wondered what they do...and why they're
| worth so much. I dug in (we did the same for Salesforce and SAP
| previously on HN) and found...some weird stuff. Accenture has a
| pretty wild story, from being decently early on in computers to a
| contentious company split, and now to a massive publicly traded
| consulting firm. Hope you like it!
| dlojudice wrote:
| Interesting content. But I wonder what the purpose of this type
| of content is related to Retool? Do you see these types of
| companies as threats or competitors?
| gagejustins wrote:
| We're just focused on writing content that's interesting to
| developers, and somewhat related to internal tools :)
| eddywebs wrote:
| Amazing article ! Mind sharing the one on Salesforce? Cant find
| it on retool
| gagejustins wrote:
| Thanks :) here's the link:
| https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/
| wahooligan wrote:
| Seconding the other comments, this was a great write up.
|
| One data point for you, you can see how much Accenture got from
| the US Federal Government on USAspending.gov. ~2B over the past
| 12 months (source: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/6a40a8
| b7-77e4-2d39-6c0...).
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Good article, especially the bit with the Georgia contract.
| That went a bit deeper in the details, which I appreciated. A
| standard description of tech consultancies would have been too
| broad and unlikely to include info people didn't already know .
| honkdaddy wrote:
| I thought it was a great piece! Interesting, succinct, and well
| sourced.
| gagejustins wrote:
| Thanks :)
| ObserverNeutral wrote:
| How did you find the piece was shared in here in such a fast
| manner?
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me what all these terms are:
| Enterprise IT, legacy systems, dev shop? Every job advert for a
| software engineer asks for Java + React (slight exagerration).
|
| Also I still dont understand why companies with their own
| software departments are asking Accenture to work for them. If
| Accenture employees are often substandard why not just hire more
| devs themselves?
| cgh wrote:
| A local government won't have the software developers on staff
| to handle eg a new computerized transit ticketing system. I've
| also seen Accenture used to handle SAP rollouts, which can be
| immensely complex. I'm not saying they did a good job at either
| of these tasks, but that's what they were hired for.
|
| Re the terms you want explained, just use your favourite search
| engine. There are legitimate and established definitions for
| these things. Eg, your bank likely uses Cobol from the 1960s in
| its backend and they would dearly love to replace it because
| all of the original source is long gone. This is a legacy
| system.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| Enterprise IT: The systems that run the organization, basically
| everything run by an internal it group.
|
| Legacy systems: Any old software systems, usually enterprise
| IT, that are running your organization. Often 80's era in big
| companies, usually on a mainframe and most importantly, even
| though they are held together by hopes and prayers they usually
| do the job they are supposed to.
|
| Dev shop : derogatory term for a company who just provides
| developers, usually with poor oversight and project management
| controls.
|
| The problem with hiring more people is if I need 20 Devs for
| six months in a language I am never going to use again, not
| only do I need to hire 20 Devs, I need to hire the project
| managers, people managers, pay for their benefits or contracts,
| and then figure out how to fire or otherwise reallocate people
| with skills I don't need.
| Ologn wrote:
| I have been aware for a while how accounting companies had
| sidelines of IT consulting, some of which grew large and
| sometimes overshadowed the accounting end (Accenture/AA).
|
| What I was not aware of until more recently how the big
| advertising companies (WPP, Omnicom etc.) make a lot of money
| from IT consulting as well.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >And if you're a new college grad, associate positions can be
| fast ways to learn engineering on the job and get exposure to
| large scale systems that you wouldn't otherwise work with.
|
| Not sure about this part. when i was younger, i used to work for
| Avanade. Accenture joint venture with Microsoft. the only coding
| project that i ever done while i was there is porting an outdated
| Microsoft Outlook add-on to Visual Studio Office Tool (.Net
| based). Most of time you just sit on the side line and study for
| Microsoft cert. while going to event where you might meet Project
| Manager with project that might fit you.
| zer0faith wrote:
| This says it all: https://www.consulting.us/news/2197/accenture-
| sued-for-32-mi...
| protomyth wrote:
| A small word of advice. If you are a consultant and the company
| currently contracting you hires some folks from Accenture to help
| with a project, assume your life is going to be hell. Accenture
| is not a team player and is out to get all the business. You are
| just another pot of money that they need to add to their hoard.
| temp5565_65 wrote:
| Ex-Accenture dev here. The problem with Accenture teams back
| when I still worked there was that they had no middle ground
| with regards to team quality - you either got a team 50% made
| up of people that could (metaphorically) kill a dragon bare-
| handed, or you got a team that couldn't code their way out of a
| wet paper bag. They will either be a help, or a hindrance.
| protomyth wrote:
| That's fairly typical for large staffing companies. The
| problem with Accenture was how aggressively they went after
| other consultants. You really needed to watch your back
| because they actively tried to make the rest of us look bad.
| I saw it a couple of times and had friends who experienced
| the same thing. Its best to make sure every damn
| communication is documented with them in the mix.
|
| It surely wasn't everyone, but enough of their onsite people
| pulled stunts that I am very wary of them.
| king_magic wrote:
| Accenture is primarily a PowerPoint consulting firm. Many
| companies around the world desperately need PowerPoints from
| external consultancies to help them plan out their innovation
| roadmaps, apparently. They pay a huge premium for expensive local
| consultants to create these PowerPoints, because Accenture uses
| big, bold colorful fonts in their presentations, and Accenture's
| clients simply don't have the necessary expertise to use these
| fonts.
|
| Also, occasionally, there is some actual dev/implementation work
| that accompanies the PowerPoints. This work is carried out,
| poorly, by offshore resources who are certified in as many
| certifications as possible. Certifications are extremely
| important for them, because otherwise, when these resources are
| on the bench, they'd have nothing else to do.
|
| Oh, also, Blockchain. And AI. These are important concepts for
| Accenture, and it's totally okay if clients pay millions of
| dollars for blockchain/AI solutions that massively disappoint,
| because innovation.
|
| Source: worked at a subsidiary of ACN for a few years, interacted
| with the ACN folks quite a bit, and while my description above is
| obviously snarky/sarcastic, it surprisingly isn't really that far
| from the truth.
|
| In summation, I have _absolutely no idea_ why Accenture is worth
| $140B.
| [deleted]
| Demoneeri wrote:
| It's always funny to see Silly Valley people that think they
| are so cool while working on yet another app that show ads.
|
| Meanwhile at Accenture, I just delivered again another
| successful project with a real impact. When a very large
| organization across different regions were struggling to
| produce schedules for thousand workers with different skill
| sets, different union rules, night and day shifts, they came to
| see us. Now, everything is automated and the client saves
| months of work.
|
| I sleep better at night knowing that I helped those workers now
| get access to their scheduled weeks in advance through a portal
| instead of having surprise night shifts thrown at them. Maybe I
| should make another app that track people online?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I can't really say if you're sarcastic or not, but the GP is
| spot on even if snarky.
|
| I've worked for Accenture (for way too long) and they can be
| characterised by a single statement that they make to the
| client when all is said and done and the client complains
| about the steaming pile of shite that was delivered:
|
| "But in this signed contract here, there is no requirement
| that says our software should work".
|
| Come on, every serious software engineer knows they are full
| of it.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's such a ridiculously large organization that I think
| broad generalizations are going to necessarily fall short -
| I also have the general impression that Accenture is highly
| proficient at burning money but there've got to be a number
| of good departments and teams buried somewhere in there.
| Demoneeri wrote:
| Like if an organization with >500 000 employees across the
| world is the same everywhere. You might have been working
| with incompetent people, but it's not my case. Successful
| projects are delivery every day.
|
| My worst experiences always come from working with
| Americans and I don't come to the conclusion that all
| Americans are incompetent.
| blabitty wrote:
| And I've worked on things that have far greater consequences
| then a scheduling app and have had to fix all the terrible
| problems caused by the over engineered over "solutioned"
| sales driven development done by Accenture and Booz and all
| the others. All while fighting off the ivory tower FUD their
| sales consultants are pushing at the executive level. There
| are some good people and engineers on an individual level at
| the consultant shops, but the corporate culture is
| nauseating.
| brian_herman wrote:
| Are you guys hiring? Can I send you my resume?
| sizzle wrote:
| How much $$$ could you have made developing this solution
| without the middleman (Accenture), how much did they bill the
| client, and how much of what they billed the client did they
| pay you for your work?
|
| Why not go straight to the source and sell your services for
| the full amount they billed as a consultant?
|
| This is HN after all, get that money you deserve or use that
| idea for a new start-up to solve client problems at scale
| adampk wrote:
| Do you mind elaborating on this? Are you assuming that the
| client has the know-how to be able to choose the right
| resource to execute on the project (if the project scope
| has actually been defined)?
| [deleted]
| Zealotux wrote:
| A friend of mine was one of the early employees at a company
| that is essentially making PowerPoint presentations for Google,
| highly profitable business, I was amazed at the amount of
| employees they were able to support just by making PowerPoints
| for one company.
| ndm000 wrote:
| I think the sentiment here (and in many comments) is
| interesting - I've been a consultant for over a decade and
| felt the same thing in the early parts of my career. Those
| are really expensive Powerpoints!
|
| In the last few years I've created some of those Powerpoints,
| and have realized the value in them (not saying that all are
| valuable). I've been asked questions like:
|
| - We're a year in to a data warehouse migration and have
| nothing to show for it. What happened, where do we go from
| here, and how much will it cost? - We'd like to outsource a
| call center, but don't know where to start both on the tech
| and process sides. Can you help? - We have a business idea,
| but know little about technology. Can you put together a
| plan, so that we know how much we'll need to invest? Oh, and
| can you design the architecture and tell us which cloud to
| use?
|
| There's _tons_ of rigorous analysis, interviews, and research
| that goes into answering these questions well enough that
| they can be trusted. Since it 's primarily an exercise in
| critical thinking, mileage probably varies depending on who
| is doing the work. There are plenty of bad Powerpoints I've
| seen out there that don't move the needle or add anything
| new.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Powerpoint gets derided by developers, because they think
| it's a deliverable.
|
| It's not.
|
| It's tool used to communicate a deliverable.
|
| The actual deliverable is knowledge of the processes,
| infrastructure, market, industry, options, etc. And an
| answer to an original question posed that required that
| knowledge.
|
| A good Powerpoint seems obvious -- because that's
| _literally_ the definition of a good presentation of the
| above deliverable.
|
| If I clearly communicate my summarized facts to you, and
| then draw an obvious conclusion, does that not seem
| obvious? But that's forgetting that before the
| presentation, and before the research behind the
| presentation, none of those facts were known!
| jeswin wrote:
| > In summation, I have absolutely no idea why Accenture is
| worth $140B.
|
| I'll tell you - because there are no alternatives.
|
| If you're a non-tech company (or the government), there is
| simply no way to hire the number of people needed for a large
| project. It's very, very difficult (if you aren't a software
| company) to build a team that's any better than what a
| consulting company will assemble for you. And besides, you
| might need them all only for a few years.
|
| That leaves the company (or govt) dependant on an IT services
| vendor. Now why Accenture? Scale. If you're the government (or
| Coca Cola), you can't risk going to a vendor who has a 1000
| employees. There would just not be enough depth if something
| goes wrong, and they'll lack mature Business Continuity
| processes. That leaves you with big IT vendors with global
| prescence.
|
| Now, you could take a chance with a smaller vendor. But if
| anything went wrong, you're going to get fired for it. With
| Accenture, you are less likely to.
| Vadoff wrote:
| For a company with 1000 people, if even 100 of them are great
| engineers, they could easily complete any project Coca Cola
| would want in reasonable time.
| laxmis wrote:
| An amusing description. As an ex Accenture person, I would say
| that the company develops and implements tons of critical
| business systems for its customers. One reason Accenture used
| to get a lot of flak from the tech side of any of their
| customers, is that they were traditionally close to the
| business users and execs in the customer organization. That
| gave them sufficient insurance in the event of failed projects
| unless these ended up in court.
|
| But they are a relatively innovative co who have outlived peers
| and pioneers like GEISCO, EDS and the like, who were not
| innovative at all. For example, some time or the other in their
| lives, they depended on a captive set of clients and then the
| rot set in.
|
| Today, Accenture is indistinguishable from Tata, Infosys and
| other successful outsourcers. Now you no longer find truckloads
| of Accenture partners and partner wannabes in tailgate parties
| e.g., when the Buckeyes visit Ann Arbor.
|
| The staffing mix has changed considerably. The ACN offices in
| and around the Great Lakes region do not confine their
| recruitment to Michigan, Michigan State, OSU or Case Western.
| There are more there now who are alumni of Bangalore and Mumbai
| universities.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So you saw a project that was on time, on budget, and viewed
| as a success by the client (not spun to be a success, but
| actually unreservedly a success)? Because I never have from
| projects driven by consultants, and while the plural of
| anecdote is not data, I literally have never seen anyone
| speak of outside consultants delivering except from very
| boutique consultancies.
| scrollbar wrote:
| Check out this post by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame on the
| topic, where he advocates for hiring consultancies
| https://sparktoro.com/blog/why-you-should-hire-agencies-
| cons...
|
| To be fair, I think your point about "except for very
| boutique consultancies" may apply to his recommendation. I
| can't imagine him advocating for an Accenture or similar,
| instead the message is bring on expertise for specific
| initiatives as needed.
| perardi wrote:
| "fame"
| harperlee wrote:
| I wrote something along these lines here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868839 (I quote
| below). Accenture tends to secure projects that are a
| little bit hand wavy in terms of requirements, because, as
| others have said, they are very close to the executives and
| are able to cater to what they expect. The comment:
|
| > If you gave out a time and materials contract without
| clear acceptance criteria, testing requirements, and
| verification / support / warranty detailed, you probably
| shouldn't be handling 100 million dollar budgets. This is
| the money quote.
|
| Big 4 companies (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG) are historically
| accounting auditing companies. And their culture is heavily
| skewed towards billing their employees to clients per
| hour/day, or per unit of service, as auditors and lawyers
| have been doing for more than a century. It is not in their
| DNA to "create products" but to "render services"; that is,
| to sell employees availability. Boundaries and scope of
| those traditional services are typically clearer than
| building a new unknown program from scratch.
|
| If you are hiring these firms for exploration of how do you
| work, how you should work, and a complete functioning
| system that sustains a big number of new processes that are
| not yet defined, you are in for a big bill; you better be
| sure that you have put on the time to think about what you
| are buying in written form. When you see big failed
| projects like those the problem lies in that no one stopped
| to research the complexity of the ask before entering into
| a contract.
|
| Even then, these consultancies normally are very flexible
| when a contract is actively harming the client, and the
| client wishes to change it / stop it (it would not be good
| for the business to do otherwise, because you want to see
| more after this contract is finished). When these costs go
| out of control is because internal politics in the client
| impede the rational decisions of killing projects, changing
| command, etc., and the sponsor keeps feeding money into the
| project to save their ass.
|
| Source: worked in big 4 for years.
| mym1990 wrote:
| The nature of almost all complex projects, whether in house
| or out are that they are under scoped to get approval and
| then run over budget and over time to get additional
| resources.
|
| FWIW yes, I have both seen and worked on projects that were
| delivered on time, on budget, and were considered a
| success, but those metrics are hardly an indicator of
| anything useful.
|
| Estimation isn't an exact science, and estimating exactly
| on target for a major project with a big team is about as
| hard as it gets.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I've seen plenty of in house projects of reasonable size
| and scope succeed (on time, on budget, users happy). I've
| yet to see comparably sized projects by consultancies
| succeed.
|
| Honestly, the -only- projects I've worked on that haven't
| succeeded, on time, on budget, involved consultancies.
| I'm not saying that's necessarily the consultancies'
| fault, but there are perverse incentives in place, on
| both sides, and that favors a lot of upfront design work
| and CYA, rather than agility, responsibility, and
| responding to new information.
| mechEpleb wrote:
| In house there's less incentive to underbid and
| overpromise
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Accomplishing hard things internally is one problem:
| accomplishing the hard thing.
|
| Doing the same as a consultant is two problems: (1) doing
| the hard thing & (2) finding the right internal people &
| getting necessary information out of them.
|
| Consultants are better at (1) than internal teams, more
| often than not. (Excluding modern tech companies)
|
| I have yet to be convinced that _anyone_ is good enough
| at (2), that a more successful plan isn 't avoiding it
| altogether
| pantulis wrote:
| I'd also add doing not only the hard thing, but also the
| non-sexy thing.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I hear you, and agree with you, except I've worked at
| multiple non-tech companies that still had better people
| than the consultants that were brought in.
|
| I worked for a tools company and we were the ones
| pointing out that the consultant's solution, intended to
| be a consumer application exposed to the world, was not
| written to actually have multiple nodes for any sort of
| scale up or fail-over. When they added that, we were the
| ones that pointed out it fell over at 10 RPS and didn't
| recover without human intervention. Etc.
|
| I think you're maybe explicitly thinking of internal IT
| groups, rather than internal software groups, and I would
| agree with that, because, again, misaligned incentives.
| IT is all about preventing change; you don't want to risk
| breaking key services, and so you try and ensure that
| every interest has a representative and that change only
| happens when all of them sign off on it. That is a very
| slow and very flawed way to create -new- things of value,
| and because of that, deferring all of that to a different
| entity makes a lot of sense. Just, that different entity
| can be an internal software group more efficiently than
| an external one, I've found.
| disabled wrote:
| This post is so thoughtful that I cannot do it justice.
|
| Creative consulting is also a scam and is often the opposite of
| creative. You ideally want these creative types in house to
| change things instead, because creative consulting really
| changes nothing.
|
| The promises of AI are also mostly a scam. The breakthroughs
| and discoveries made are often intellectually bankrupt. People
| drool from the correlations that are drawn from AI, even though
| there is no explanation for why this is occurring in real life.
| It is also making a lot of people's jobs into "BS jobs".
| [deleted]
| lostcolony wrote:
| More than just Accenture. Exact same experience with BCG and
| McKinsey.
| eplanit wrote:
| and IBM Global Services.
| not1ofU wrote:
| I seen a post on linked in the other day, where an employee
| of McK was using thier own child (~8 Yrs) to virtusignal McK
| (child had drawn some picture with, I "heart" McKinsey). I
| immediatly wondered if the child was aware of this:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55939224
|
| While searching for this link, the next link google offered
| was this:
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-
| and-s...
| sprkwd wrote:
| Deloitte.
| ramoz wrote:
| You're explaining your understanding of commercial consultancy,
| but are obviously (and you note at the end) not detailing your
| knowledge of systems integrators that don't always happen off-
| shore. For instance, many large companies in the valley have
| contracted engagements with Accenture as well as partnerships -
| especially Cloud. Any government work being done isn't
| offshore.
|
| https://www.thestreet.com/tech/news/accenture072020
| king_magic wrote:
| Yeah, I meant the whole thing to pretty much be tongue-in-
| cheek.
|
| That said, I'm very much aware of the onshore consulting that
| ACN does. And in my time in the ACN world, I was never once
| impressed with work ACN did - onshore or offshore.
| r366y6 wrote:
| I was software engineer at Accenture for 4 years and you
| literally made the best description I have ever heard of the
| company. And I want to add, forget any career progression if
| you want to stick with software development.
| afterburner wrote:
| It's a great way for management to cover their asses.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| Exactly. Management's job is to make decisions, and they
| outsource it to "consultants" to insulate themselves from
| blame. This is the true reason consulting firms exist and
| make so much money, this is the true service they provide.
| mym1990 wrote:
| You have no idea why Accenture is worth $140B because it seems
| like you have no idea what you're talking about in general. It
| would be a huge overstatement to say that the 500,000+
| employees of Accenture are focused on creating PowerPoints(not
| that you would know how to do a simple task like that anyways).
|
| Most consulting companies go to where the new money is and
| usually that's in buzzword fields like 'Blockchain' and
| 'AI'...these are 'important concepts' for many businesses right
| now, even if almost none of those businesses can figure out wtf
| it means. But guess what, many companies have more cash on hand
| but don't want to grow headcount 'just because', so the more
| expensive but less risky solution is to hire outside work to
| take moonshots on some projects. If it works, great, if it
| doesn't, next.
|
| Congratulations on working for a subsidiary of ACN for a few
| years though, I am sure that was the peak of you career. I'm
| sure your 'interactions with the ACN folks' is a good
| representation of the 500,000 employees and business models of
| the company.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| As I read the parent comment, I couldn't help but hearing it in
| Steve Burke's sarcastic-rant voice.
|
| Well done Steve, you've become iconic.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Also, they sell mostly-local, well dressed body-shopping drones
| to local companies, e.g. in Germany, where many companies
| require the "consultants" (body-shopped implementation slaves)
| to speak German. Salary is mediocre but not super bad and you
| have a chance to work in top companies and huge projects.
| [deleted]
| 88 wrote:
| Not defending Accenture here, but if you think management
| consulting is all about the PowerPoint slides you're missing
| the point.
| king_magic wrote:
| Who said anything about management consulting? I'm talking
| purely tech / "digital transformation".
|
| That said, my opinion of management consulting is similarly
| low.
| 88 wrote:
| If you think tech / digital transformation consulting is
| all about the PowerPoint slides you're missing the point.
| haswell wrote:
| I agree with you, but you have not offered anything solid
| to back this position.
| kube-system wrote:
| When I worked in consulting, the vast majority of my work
| was with companies that didn't have the staff and/or
| expertise to solve a particular problem. Then again, I
| didn't work at a big-four -- but I would imagine that a
| team that 25% has experience in doing a particular thing
| is still better than a team that has zero experience
| doing it.
|
| While people often criticize consulting companies for
| barely knowing what they're doing, the flip side of this
| is that the people at the company hiring them don't
| necessarily know what they're doing either :D There's a
| _lot_ of people coasting along in corporate IT.
| andreilys wrote:
| You're right, it's primarily about providing CYA insurance to
| dysfunctional management teams that need a third party to
| tell them what they already know and provide cover for an
| unpopular decision.
| osrec wrote:
| Or to blame failure on, last minute, for a project that is
| already nearing failure.
| gspr wrote:
| Enlighten us, then. Cause it sure seems that way to me.
| perardi wrote:
| That is savage.
|
| And disturbingly accurate, as once you strip away the
| admittedly really quite nice typography from Accenture
| documents like this, you are left with just absolute pablum.
|
| https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Asset...
|
| (Edit: Wow, they apparently used the phrase "Thought
| Leadership" in this file name without irony.)
| pwned1 wrote:
| I've always wondered what type of person it takes to create a
| presentation like that. Do they actually believe in the
| things they are putting on the slides, or do they know this
| is all BS but they're willing to do such soulless work for
| whatever they're getting paid to do so?
| koonsolo wrote:
| I once heard a salesguy say the following statement: "One
| of our customers accused me of selling them shit. But all
| we have is shit, so what do you expect?"
| mechEpleb wrote:
| >hey intern, here's the topic, here's some buzzwords,
| here's the word and slide count, you have 3 hours
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >COVID-19:5 new human truths that experiences need to address
| >How organizations should respond to the never normal
|
| This reads like those AI-generated documents.
| perardi wrote:
| A Markov Chain, but for bullshit.
| hirple wrote:
| Speaking as a consultant, these are terrible slides.
| codingdave wrote:
| Sadly, the ex-Accenture people who get exec jobs in-industry
| didn't learn from the PowerPoint overkill, either. I work for a
| company completely run by ex-consultants. Who spend all their
| time sharing PowerPoint decks. The next layer or two or three
| of management spend all their time building those decks. We get
| called into meetings to talk about upcoming meetings, and asked
| to give the content for various slides in those decks. We
| recently had an influx of new leaders and now there is
| political infighting over whose format of decks and slides is
| the right one to use.
|
| I clearly am also being snarky/sarcastic. They do know more
| than this and they do more than this. But there is a some real
| truth to the matter, that consultants never quite lose that
| idea that their job is to do snazzy presentations, and that
| ends up getting more focus than delivering product.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| And by and large their tech 'talent' is absolutely devoid of
| talent. They generally have no idea what they're doing in the
| cloud.
| fowkswe wrote:
| It's the economy of C players, AKA the Enterprise. There are
| hordes of bureaucrats spending other peoples money with
| reckless abandon.
|
| I once worked at a firm not unlike Accenture - essentially
| management consulting - and was on a project that ended up
| being a frontend reskin of a Fortune 500 company website.
|
| But at the project inception I was asked to scope the project
| and no one, either on our side, or the client side knew what
| the scope was. So I put line items in with pretty large time
| estimations as placeholders for the skinning their SaaS
| application as well as the website.
|
| The client glazed over the Gantt chart (created in MS Project)
| and signed off on it.
|
| In the end, we did design, frontend build and integration
| oversight on about 15 templates of their .com. This is the kind
| of thing any run of the mill digital agency could and would do
| for 50k. We charged them 2.1M.
|
| This kind of project (now with AI/ML/Blockchain!) is Accenture
| and the like's bread and butter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Your "C Player" sounds like a dream client. Signs off on the
| contract and makes regular payments.
|
| Or would you prefer to work w/ a client that lowballs you on
| fees, promises that that the requirements are final, and then
| balks at paying more in order to complete the inevitable
| expansion of requirements?
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| Who are the A and B players?
| defen wrote:
| Was there any sort of competitive bidding process? i.e. why
| did the Fortune 500 company choose your firm over others?
| 988747 wrote:
| You are spot on with "work carried out poorly by offshore
| resources". My current company made a business model from
| taking over projects that Accenture screwed up, and doing them
| properly. And boy, there is no shortage of such projects :)
| murph-almighty wrote:
| If only you could get the projects _prior_ to Accenture
| screwing them up. Just eliminate the middleman, yaknow?
| koonsolo wrote:
| At least they don't have to put any effort into setting
| customer expectations :D.
| xwolfi wrote:
| It's impossible, there are layers and layers of management
| that need to see Accenture fails before trying a more
| rational alternative.
|
| I'm not sure why, but we have consultants explaining us how
| an if/else business workflow is in fact an "AI robot
| employee" that we even need to give a human name to, before
| we switch to normal/cheaper if/else-enabled languages, once
| it fails to do if/else properly.
| sgt101 wrote:
| > I'm not sure why, but we have consultants explaining us
| how an if/else business workflow is in fact an "AI robot
| employee" that we even need to give a human name to,
| before we switch to normal/cheaper if/else-enabled
| languages, once it fails to do if/else properly.
|
| I will explain.
|
| MONEY.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| The reason Accenture is as successful as they are is
| because they have a top-notch sales engine. But it's well
| known they're just as full of BS as the big 4 consulting
| firms, except the big 4 have some niches that they're
| really good in. As far as I can tell, Accenture is a
| consulting sales engine with an offshore body shop
| attached.
| ep103 wrote:
| That is literally their purpose. Don't want to go through
| the hassle of offshoring your entire IT / enginering or
| other division, and will be gone before the inevitable
| rot and overages kick in? Accenture will happily do that
| for you, and figure out how to abuse the H1b program
| enough to fill as many bodies with offshore people in
| your onshore location as you need to justify your
| realestate purchase.
|
| I genuinely think accenture might be one of the most
| powerful companies in the world, just because of how many
| entire departments of so many major internaional
| corporations actually report to accenture management, not
| the parent company.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Accenture is just the one where the "white face" runs the
| show so they can charge higher bill rates. Companies HQed
| in India (TCS, Wipro, etc) just hire white people to talk
| to senior leaders (which is so common I have literally
| been called the "white face" multiple times as a
| Caucasian person delivering consulting services to
| enterprise IT orgs despite working for a company that
| only staffs on-shore).
| ep103 wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. I was in that role, though it took me a
| few months to figure out that that's really what it was.
| vendiddy wrote:
| Do you have any insight into how their sales engine
| works? I'm curious because it's a shame that projects go
| to companies like Accenture when are so many qualified
| teams out there.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| (A) Existing relation with customer (including pre-
| negotiated MLA that legal signed off on, and ranch rates)
| & (B) safety of a big company (if project fails, legal
| can threaten and Accenture will throw bodies at it to
| mostly-finish).
|
| Anyone who has never worked at a large enterprise
| probably doesn't understand how time consuming and
| annoying getting a new legal signoff can be.
|
| I've worked at both consulting companies and customers
| hiring and using consultants.
|
| When consulting is successful, it's usually because the
| client knows when they want built.
|
| When consulting is a failure, it's usually because the
| client is too incompetent to even clearly identify their
| own needs.
|
| And if the client, who by definition possesses the most
| detailed knowledge of the requirements, doesn't know what
| they need then the entire enterprise is doomed to
| failure.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| This is what Accenture is very good at - selling into large
| orgs.
| johncessna wrote:
| The US Federal government spends a lot of money on consulting.
| So do a lot of the fortune 500 companies.
| meepmorp wrote:
| If a single deli in New Jersey is worth $100m, $140B for
| Accidenture might be a bargain.
| itisit wrote:
| In my experience, 99.9% of the value in hiring a consultancy is
| to light a fire under the respective asses of one's employees.
| eweise wrote:
| Totally unfair characterization. I've seen them also produce
| word and excel docs.
| pantulis wrote:
| "Accenture is primarily a PowerPoint consulting firm"
|
| No, that would be McKinsey.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Hey, there's enough PowerPoint work for many different
| consultancy conpanies!
| [deleted]
| eplanit wrote:
| That's a _perfect_ description -- concise yet thorough, and
| very accurate (I've been a consultant for 23 years, and have
| worked on several projects with Accenture involved).
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Accenture and similar consulting companies are like the
| Kardashians of the business world.
|
| Where the Kardashians are famous for being famous, the consulting
| industrial complex makes money by making money. There's no
| "there" there, except a little arbitrage under a thin and pretty
| powerpoint facade. Mix in some former sorority girls and call
| them "consultants" [1], and, hey, you got a $100 billion dollar
| business.
|
| Side note - I really dig the Retool business blogs. The have one
| on Salesforce and SaaS which I found interesting.[2]
|
| [1] As a former frat "bro", I dated a couple
|
| [2] https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/
| srndsnd wrote:
| As far as I can tell, for the same reason that all consulting
| firms exist: so key decision makers have a scapegoat.
|
| When someone needs to justify a decision or identify a strategy,
| they can pass the work off to a consulting firm. In doing so,
| they get the best of both worlds. If they take the advice of the
| consulting firm, and all goes well, they're praised for bringing
| in the extra help. If they don't take the advice of the
| consulting firm, and all goes well, then they stuck to their guns
| and can take all the credit. If they take the advice of the
| consulting firm, and things go sour, then it was just "bad
| advice", they can pick another consultant and wipe their hands
| clean. And in the many instances where they don't take the
| advice, and things still go sour, it was the consultants fault
| for not providing the advice needed.
|
| What they actually say is far less important than their position
| as a stakeholder in the decision making process. In fact, as
| another commenter has already pointed out, the insight that a
| consulting firm will always provide is that you need more
| consultants. Few people truly love working with consultants, the
| advice is often dished out by overworked 20-somethings with
| little to no domain expertise, and yet, here we are.
|
| Source: I work for a similar firm targeting a specific niche, and
| many of my best friends are in similar roles, including at
| Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and EY.
| intended wrote:
| It's not fully without risk though - When a consultation fails,
| the person who pushed it is also tarred, and in proportion to
| the scale of the disruption and cost.
| haolez wrote:
| Complementing my answer to the parent, in my case, most of
| these pushes for consulting and hype stuff comes from other
| executives or stakeholders. I simply decide not to veto some
| initiatives, since they are not strategic.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Lord yes. Decision by committee and corporate guidelines.
| "X is a strategic partner" = can't be fired for 'partnering
| with them'. Even if it becomes a "why didn't anyone raise
| the alarm?!" it becomes "because everyone agreed to use
| them".
| haolez wrote:
| I'm currently the CTO of a "normal" company (i.e. not a
| startup) and I confess that, sometimes, I have the incentives
| for delegating responsibility for the outcome of non-strategic
| projects to third-parties, since my attention span is limited
| and I want to focus on strategic projects.
|
| I guess that this behavior can become very toxic for the
| company if the executive starts delegating responsibility for
| strategic projects as well.
| majormajor wrote:
| The "scapegoat" theory is the cynical take, but I don't see
| people often propose how to fix the situation.
|
| If we take as granted that Accenture and similar do low-
| quality work as judged by tech experts yet have a large
| business with a mostly-positive general-public reputation...
| how is some poor middle manager or non-technical executive in
| a company that finds themselves needing a technology solution
| supposed to pick a good vendor? Go with someone big an well-
| known? Nope, that's shit, apparently. Go with someone small
| and unknown? That seems even worse - how are they going to be
| qualified to judge the bidders?
| lostcolony wrote:
| 'a mostly-positive general-public reputation'
|
| Citation needed. Ideally pointing out -informed- general
| public reputation; after all, we had a person elected
| president due in large part to perceptions from the every
| man of his business acumen despite running -casinos- into
| the ground.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't think informed reputation is relevant when we're
| talking about procurement from enterprises or government
| _outside_ of more "technology native" companies.
|
| If you're hiring a company to do something you don't know
| how to do, you might not even know where to find informed
| opinions.
|
| If I was going to hire a plumber I'm sure there are some
| places that all the good plumbers know are scam artists,
| but I have no idea who the good plumbers are.
| awildshitposter wrote:
| AAA is an example company like that.
| ff43f wrote:
| If you step out of the tech bubble, you will see that
| these mega consulting firms are considered prestigious
| places to work especially in India and other developing
| world.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Prestigious to work for != company does good work.
| l332mn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure consulting firms exist primarily because they
| provide labor liquidity.
|
| > Few people truly love working with consultants
|
| This is kind of a prejudiced view, as consultants are often
| there long-term, and no different than other workers in
| practice. The only difference is who's got the formal
| responsibility for their contract.
| ep103 wrote:
| There are extremely good consultants. And there are extremely
| good offshore teams.
|
| These people do not come cheaper than onshore or inhouse
| hires.
|
| That's the easy way to know whether or not dealing with the
| new consultants / offshore team is going to go well, or be an
| awful long term experience.
| fasteo wrote:
| Having worked with them in the past - long time ago, like 25
| years ago - their business model goes like this:
|
| 1. Great insurance policy for the upper management: "Project
| failed ? Not my fault for sure: I hired the best and spent a huge
| amount of money... I am looking at you, middle management"
|
| 2. We need to make some major adjustment in our company and I do
| not have the guts to make them: Let Accenture make a great
| presentation recommending the actions I already know.
|
| 3. Accenture is up or out: If you are out, the partners will make
| sure you get a great position in some customer. In the future,
| you will contract with them of course.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Having worked with them in the past I can summarize them as
| having great presentations and NO substance. Any company that
| hires them will lose, and it is a sign of a company to short if
| they are public. The IT equivalent of the Darwin awards.
| Accenture continues to thrive.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| They mostly get government contracts so it's just a waste of
| tax payer's money.
| nopcode wrote:
| No they do not.
|
| Accenture's Public Sector ("government contracts") business
| is less than 20%.*
|
| * US Federal Government contracts are handled by a subsidiary
| though, Accenture Federal Services (AFS).
| JPKab wrote:
| I worked in this space in one of the biggest issues is the kind
| of company and the kind of dysfunction within this company that
| causes them to think that hiring consultants externally is a
| good idea.
|
| It's almost always not a good idea of course. It's a really
| really good way to minimize risk if you have some terrible
| position in government where there's no upside to performance
| but there's a huge downside to making the wrong decision that
| blows things up. You bring in external consultants they put a
| stamp on some solution which they can't ever implement and you
| can just point to them and say wasn't my fault.
| yelling_cat wrote:
| Dysfunction is manna for consultants.
|
| In one of my first jobs out of school clients at the large
| shipping company we were consulting to would regularly ask us
| for information other employees at that company had provided
| us. It struck me as odd, so I asked my manager about it. He
| explained that our work involved two departments at the
| company whose directors hated each other and wouldn't let
| their teams work together. Their employees used us as
| intermediaries to share info critical to doing their jobs
| without getting in trouble for it.
|
| Later in my career I was brought in by tech teams to
| recommend solutions that they'd already thoroughly researched
| and settled on, but didn't have the internal clout to get
| approved. Once the external expert OK'd it they'd get the
| budget and headcount they'd been asking for.
| tsjq wrote:
| Kinda similar to Cognizant, IBM, Capgemini, Infosys, Wipro, etc
| ?
| decafninja wrote:
| Along with Capgemini, I thought Accenture did stuff outside
| of tech outsourcing too?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Accenture is "split" into Technology, Digital, Strategy and
| a few others. In technology and digital they have
| implementation devs and in strategy they have power point
| warriors.
| rchaud wrote:
| Don't forget Canada's crown jewel of tech consulting, CGI.
| Responsible for the disastrous first version of
| healthcare.gov
| thrower123 wrote:
| Bingo. Don't forget Tata Consulting.
|
| It's basically the whole top of the H-1B sponsors list that
| aren't FAAMG
|
| https://h1bgrader.com/reports/sponsors/lca/2020
| S53Vflnr4n wrote:
| This is a good thing IMO. Accenture and the other body
| shops are a giant wealth redistribution machine. Its
| selfish to think that only FAANG employees should hold all
| the wealth. Let it trickle down to other less equal humans
| too.
| sprkwd wrote:
| and Deloitte.
| jahnu wrote:
| They are amazing at convincing naive/incompetent governments to
| part with large sums of money for very little work.
|
| E.g. here in Austria last year they made a website that was
| supposed to turbocharge Austrian businesses online sales.
|
| It was basically the equivalent of a wordpress blog of some shops
| and a very broken search facility that got reamed by the public.
| It cost EUR1.3m
|
| https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000124141852/kaufhaus-oest...
| [deleted]
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Avanade, an Accenture subsidiary focused on
| Microsoft-based tech solutions.
|
| An agency is by definition a financial institution that has
| organized brains for rent at a significant mark-up.
|
| Accenture's moats are risk, scale, and (as a result of scale) the
| depth and breadth of their partnerships and the services they
| offer.
|
| Whether they execute them well is often beside the point - nobody
| else is willing to do it at all at the risk and scale levels
| being proposed.
| sol_invictus wrote:
| Tl,dr: helps executives transfer risk
| cosmotic wrote:
| More like give them a scapegoat. The risk is still there and in
| the same place.
| pb82 wrote:
| Is that the real reason why those companies are hired? Judging
| by the comments here I wonder if there are any success stories
| at all.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| Depends on the firm.
|
| I work for a more technical focused niche consulting firm,
| and one of our specialties is large IT implementation project
| recovery. We are extremely successful, but it's dirty work
| that isn't super advertised.
| Phil987 wrote:
| As noted by another commenter, they employ 500k people and
| execute on thousand of projects per year. Most of those
| projects are likely success stories to some degree.
| WDCDev wrote:
| It is for a lot of executives, especially ones which are
| clueless about technology or who do not have a technology
| background but were promoted and told to "fix the TPS
| submission and reporting system!". These characters are
| typically corporate politicians who are great at talking but
| couldn't manage a team of 3 to boil a pot of water.
|
| They love consultancies. It's a total roll of the dice if
| their projects are successful or not. I've seen it go both
| ways.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Literally, Scapegoat as a Service.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| A friend of mine worked for an energy company who hired these
| guys. From what he told me what they did was create problems and
| sell overly expensive 'solutions'. As the years went by more and
| more of the company's budget went to their consultants without
| there being much of a return on investment. They basically ran
| the company into the ground as it nearly went under during the
| financial crisis and they've never really recovered.
|
| It's just one of those companies that makes money because they
| make money, much like Oracle or whatever local company always
| gets the government contracts in your country.
| sarsway wrote:
| Can confirm with some anecdotal evidence. Had to work with them
| once for a client. They were hired to create some web services.
|
| All they did was constantly spew out enterprise-y business
| bullshit statements, while trying to delay, stall, do as little
| work as possible and extract as much money from the contract as
| possible. (this was some semi-public funding gig)
|
| In the end they delivered some nodejs application, granted it
| works and does it job, but the amount billed and time invested
| was insane if you ask me.
|
| Much more focus on lobbying, talking, overselling, making
| things sound "proper and official", than actually being helpful
| with the engineering.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| I just came off a contract where I was subbed to Accenture, I
| was on the previous contract and they "inherited" me. Can
| confirm all this. Accenture's model is to wow the executives
| with slick presentations, buzz words, and name cachet. Then
| they bill insane hours designing and "solutioning" from many
| people who maybe log into the client network once a week but
| spend the rest of the time on the Accenture corporate
| network, maybe doing work for the project, maybe doing
| nothing, maybe double billing on another client, who knows?
| They can get a greenfield small app going at likely 5x the
| cost it should be but decorated with all sorts of fancy docs
| and presentations and runbooks and guides but on my project
| they tried to leverage that experience into taking over a
| large, established, legacy, enterprise system and from what I
| hear they are basically spinning in place doing nothing.
| grouphugs wrote:
| it's a nazi corporation, kill it. there's nothing else you need
| to know. all corporations are alt-right
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Pre-Covid, I was involved in a project to set up an outsourced
| tech support center. Of the competing vendors, Accenture had by
| far the slickest Experience Center, the largest meeting room with
| the most people, the best dressed top brass with coiffed hair,
| and the shiniest slides. But the people they trotted out as
| examples of their best tech talent were, by and large, clearly
| incompetent and/or from entirely the wrong domain, and this is
| the A-team they trot out to customers, not the B-team you
| actually get or the Z-team they downgrade to after launch when
| they think you aren't looking anymore.
|
| We ended up going with a much smaller player who knew what
| they're doing, and from whom we are by far the largest customer
| instead of just one among thousands. Zero regrets.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| This piece is largely positive about Accenture, and I have no
| beef with them, having never worked with them. However it is true
| to say that the public sector IT procurement landscape here in
| the UK is bedevilled by big beast companies who have only the
| vaguest grasp of technology, but who have successfully
| diversified into this lucrative sector largely on the basis of
| their very size being seen as making them a 'safe bet'. Of course
| the actual work is farmed out to undercompensated and
| underskilled offshore grunts.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 1 month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26577505
| darkcha0s wrote:
| Having worked a the consulting arm of a big 4, what this article
| (slightly) misses, is that auditing is a limited market (you can
| count how many Fortune 500 companies there are that need
| auditing), while there is a practically open ended amount of
| consulting projects (and monies).
|
| Mostly, these companies can't do consulting projects at companies
| they audit (conflict of interest). So the Big4 are mostly
| shifting away from auditing, and moving into more consulting.
|
| While I can echo a lot of the sentiment here, about powerpoint
| this, powerpoint that, subpar delivery, etc, from my experience I
| can also say there are very many talented individuals building
| extremely impressive solutions.
|
| What most people didn't mention, is that these firms see the
| solutions / market landscape as a whole, something that not every
| company can do. They can help an unattractive company (one that
| (ie.) techies may be less inclined to work at) develop cutting
| edge solutions, bringing experience from how the bigger players
| do it.
| tupac_speedrap wrote:
| From my experience Accenture is your typical high-attrition, low-
| wage consultancy body shop, they underbid and under deliver for
| bad work but they look attractive to the bean counters who don't
| have to work with their shite.
| temp5565_65 wrote:
| Ex-Accenture software dev here. I'll be honest, your experience
| as a dev is basically subject to an RNG. You could luck out and
| land on an amazing project, with an amazing client, and an
| amazing team. Sometimes the clients, or the team, or the work
| itself, will sap your will to live. For a starter job, it's fine.
| It's a job and they aren't discriminating when it comes to
| graduates/undergrads (or maybe that's impostor syndrome
| speaking), so it's a great way to get some experience on your CV
| to move on to better and greater things after the 24 months is
| up.
|
| Career progression for the technically-focused is non-existent. I
| legitimately felt like all technical functions were some sort of
| a vestigial growth that they haven't gotten around to removing.
| There are 13 levels of pay (I started at the second-lowest), and
| the top 8 I believe were reserved for the management track. Not a
| good sign if you don't like playing human politics.
|
| After seeing how the metaphorical sausage is made within the
| company, I'd definitely not hire them for any technical work. You
| might get an amazing team, or you might get an outsourced money
| sink that messes up so badly that it's just cheaper to build your
| own in the first place. The AI and blockchain hype that you see
| in this comment section is (or was, in my time) an actual thing.
| Of course it's ill-advised to rock the boat about this on the
| record, so I chose not to do so.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Accenture, case study:
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2467082/london-stock-e...
| bazza451 wrote:
| As an ex-consultant I would never hire a consultancy to do
| technical work or want to work there again now I've seen behind
| the curtain.
|
| The main issue is resourcing is pretty much ALWAYS awful as their
| goals (maximum resource billing) don't align with yours...people
| go on about it, but the term body shop is pretty apt.
|
| I was in a leadership position and its pretty standard operating
| procedure for you to ask for a senior Java developer and be told
| you're getting a junior Python test engineer just because it's
| whoever is sitting around twiddling their thumbs (...and that's
| from an internal perspective, if you're the client you'll just
| get lied to about their skills)
|
| This basically leads to teams being comprised mostly of people
| who have absolutely no clue what they are doing - Is no wonder
| that a lot of the projects either fail, go over budget or have
| severe performance/security issues...and as a bonus you'll get
| charged per day for a person as much as a permanent FAANG
| employee costs.
|
| Worst offender I saw in my time doing it was Sapient, they seem
| to just bring anyone off the street, pure incompetence.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| This is true for almost every consultancy. Avanade, Tata,
| Infosys.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Accenture and other big consulting firms have been plaguing
| Southern Europe for many years. They mostly operate by "earning"
| as many public contracts as possible and bringing in grossly
| underpaid and sometimes unqualified professionals (e.g. the first
| or second job of that uni friend who wasn't the sharpest tool in
| the shed).
|
| By doing this, consulting firms obtain a lot of liquidity
| (usually 5-6 figures for a small project and 7+ figures for the
| bigger ones) after a few months of subpar work.
|
| The socioeconomic consequences of allowing these companies to
| operate are pretty serious imo. Not only do they dump the
| salaries of all IT professionals and create a culture of wage
| theft, but they worsen the quality of every service they are
| allowed to work on. Their bugs and security holes make it harder
| to do your taxes, vote, get a doctor's appointment, etc.
| jakub_g wrote:
| IMO the root problem is that government projects in most
| countries are full of bullsh*t requirements, lack of technical
| depth of product owner; lots of paperwork etc; on top of that,
| huge scope, long planning phases, a lot of legal risks; and
| also potentially some behind the scenes corruption; all of
| which make it unlikely for smaller, responsible, non-bullshit
| companies to even bother applying for such projects.
|
| The only ones who can manage all the legal things, endless spec
| meetings etc. before the project starts, without bleeding
| themselves to death, are the behemoths like Accenture and
| similar.
| nopcode wrote:
| > Accenture doesn't break out their revenue by client type
|
| Yes they do, and they have been doing that since forever.
| https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet/
| mleo wrote:
| Basically, large consulting companies are just a box of
| chocolates/
|
| My first 14 years out of college was working for an IT consulting
| company that initially competed in same space with
| Anderson/Accenture, but later pivoted. Many people in my class in
| college went to Accenture after graduation, though few stayed
| more than a couple of years. It was seen as a resume starter
| before going back to MBA or other graduate programs.
|
| In my experience in similar realm, we had some good clients and
| some challenging clients. We provided good design/implementation
| resources on some projects and people fresh out of college (local
| and remote) with no practical experience on other project. Often,
| large consulting companies can only provide people that are
| available, not the best people for the job.
|
| Whether I or other team members were the best developers for any
| given project was easily debatable. However, almost everyone I
| worked with put in the effort to learn and deliver the project
| for the client.
|
| Consultants are brought in for many reasons and for different
| phases of projects. Some of those phases only result in
| PowerPoint and other "simple" deliverables. Some phases deliver
| tangible value. In most cases though, consultants are brought in
| due to businesses not having internal expertise or having failed
| internally to deliver already.
| temp5565_65 wrote:
| > It was seen as a resume starter before going back to MBA or
| other graduate programs.
|
| This was exactly my experience as an undergrad, and later
| graduate software dev.
|
| I'd venture that my skills were completely unsuited for the
| first couple of projects that I was placed on. I was utterly
| underqualified and not guided properly at all, though it
| remains to be seen how much this was Accenture's fault and how
| much it was the client's. I was definitely not worth the
| (rumoured) exorbitant hourly rates that our clients were
| charged for our expertise and work.
| jaren wrote:
| unbundle or die trying
| the__alchemist wrote:
| They're adept at winning government contracts, and exploiting the
| Military Industrial Complex.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm also pretty sure they are good at exploiting things like
| H1B's.
| alanm13 wrote:
| There seems to be a lot of misinformation here in the comments.
| Accenture makes a lot if not most of its revenue from SOX
| consulting. After Enron, Congress passed a law (Sarbanes-Oxley or
| "SOX") that required public companies to certify their "internal
| controls" over the processes used to create the financial
| statements. Essentially, the volume of daily transactions for
| accounting became un-auditable and the focus shifted to
| understanding how business processes, systems, and data interact
| to arrive at numbers that go into the financial statements.
|
| As a result, auditors have to have comfort over those processes
| and systems to sign their audit opinion. Most of the work
| Accenture does is creating flowcharts and diagrams on behalf of
| management that will help auditors understand those processes and
| systems... It saves time from auditors asking the same questions
| year after year and gives them a document to reference as audit
| support.
|
| The process of adopting SOX is extremely painful for newly public
| companies because it requires creation of robust documentation,
| as well as eliminating opportunities for data to be changed by
| creating business rules in systems that are used as part of
| business processes (for example, requiring multiple levels of
| approval for certain kinds of things). Companies are often
| willing to pay in range of $1M to $5M for varying levels of help
| with this process.
|
| Afterward Accenture often try to stick around and sell sexier
| things, like process improvement (since _theoretically_ they know
| all the processes from their initial scope they have an easier
| time identifying opportunities for improvement) or more ambitious
| things like blockchain /AI solutions, as some people have pointed
| out in this thread.
| cgh wrote:
| Yes, and to go along with this newly-acquired process
| knowledge, they pull in an SAP rollout. Massive amounts of
| money to be made here.
| klelatti wrote:
| Part of the reason why Accenture prospers is that rather than
| being seen as a possible source of competitive advantage much of
| the business world sees IT as being a minefield that has to be
| crossed.
|
| There have been so many (well publicised) disasters that the
| priority is to avoid the worst possible outcome whilst having
| someone who can be blamed if the worst does happen.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > Accenture has smaller divisions like Accenture Interactive that
| work on pretty cool stuff, like a partnership with Disney on a
| new innovation lab and a collaboration with Apple on iOS business
| solutions.
|
| Has anyone experience with their Accenture Industry X division?
| Especially what it is like to work for them?
| justbored123 wrote:
| I started my career in Accenture as a bright eye systems engineer
| that wanted to work with cool people and program computers and
| build cool stuff. O boy did they stomped that naive dream fast.
|
| I was basically one of the offshore resources in a third world
| country mentioned in the other comments that gets payed peanuts
| (USD 420 a month to be precise, minimum wage in my country) and
| has zero experience but gets sold like he is a senior engineer.
| All my team was like that, there were only trainees and 2 semi
| seniors on my team. My "architect" didn't knew Java at all, the
| language of the project, and the person sitting besides me didn't
| knew what a bubble sort was but was trying to implement a sorting
| algorithm in C as part of the software that controlled the entire
| mobile telecom network for Spain (did not end well).
|
| The culture is up or out, completely cutthroat, a nightmare. They
| apply something called "the tooth paste tube principle" to their
| employees: the more you squeeze, the more it comes out (I
| actually heard that from one of the managers there). The model is
| endless armies of low wage trainees on third world countries that
| get sold as "seniors" and get pay little so they will take as
| much overtime as possible to actually make a living wage. The
| good thing? They will hire almost anybody and they give you a
| month full time training free before you start, so if you want a
| place to start with a very low entry bar or are looking for free
| training, or you are a sociopath and like playing power games
| with people and walking over them, this is you place.
|
| If I sound bitter 15 years later it's because I still am.
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| Why are major telecoms companies asking Accenture for help? Do
| they not have their own devs? If Accenture employees are this
| bad you might as well hire anyone with software engineer on
| their CV.
| g_p wrote:
| Often in telecoms, the root issue is they don't want people
| on payroll. They're trying to outsource everything possible -
| their vendors now provide managed services etc. Telecoms
| companies in Europe at least are just financing a range of
| contracts to keep things running.
|
| Having to hire in more staff creates cost liabilities for
| them. They'd rather outsource things. That means they lose
| the skills in-house, and often end up needing consultants to
| help fill the gaps in their knowledge (after having lost
| their skilled people to the outsourcing companies, or other
| sectors).
|
| Some telecoms companies have outsourced their development to
| Tech Mahindra and others already... And yes, in my personal
| view, they'd be far better hiring random software engineers
| and undoing the decline in control and understanding of their
| own business they've overseen.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Spot on, its often middle management not really
| understanding engineering, and think they can do better by
| just have someone else do it for them, but total lack of
| foresight on the consequences, which to be fair they
| probably won't have to deal with before they switch jobs.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Indeed, you'd think that the whole business of telecom
| companies would be tech and they'd have in-house engineering
| resources to innovate and gain an edge on their
| competitors... in reality, a lot of it is outsourced to
| idiots from Accenture and similar.
|
| Here's an eye-opening post:
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| Why does vodafone need a CTO if they outsource everything?
|
| Youd think banks would be tech companies but they dont have
| a good rep for being a dev there in most cases
| csmattryder wrote:
| The story of how they took $32 million from Hertz for a website
| that never saw the light of day is a good read.
|
| > Despite having missed the deadline by five months, with no
| completed elements and weighed down by buggy code, Accenture told
| Hertz it would cost an additional $10m - on top of the $32m it
| had already been paid - to finish the project. [1]
|
| Good work, if you can get it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsu...
| spelunker wrote:
| There are lots of these stories. Remember when the FBI
| contracted SAIC to build a new case file system and it was so
| badly implemented they decided it couldn't be used?
|
| https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/fbi-virtual...
| curiousllama wrote:
| Working for a company like that is soul crushing in the most
| basic sense...
| discordance wrote:
| They screw up, and ask for more funding... how do they keep
| good enough relationships to keep getting new work?
| mywittyname wrote:
| A bunch of reasons: key decision makers being pretty far
| removed from the day-to-day of projects; everyone lying about
| how poorly the project is going to CYA; project timelines
| being so long that these projects end up losing visibility in
| the C-suite long before completion; etc.
|
| In some cases, like Hertz, they do actually damage their
| partners. But most of their clients are massive multinational
| conglomerates who can readily suffer from a string of failed
| multi-million dollar projects. Like any parasite, they know
| not to kill their host.
| Exmoor wrote:
| > Good work, if you can get it.
|
| I'm sure it is for whatever level of management you have to get
| to so that you maximize the ratio of
| BONUS_PAY:STRESS_OF_PROJECT_FAILURE, but to me it sounds like
| an absolutely nightmare. At the engineering level, I've found
| very few things a painful as having to put on a good face and
| pretend that my team is delivering something worth paying for
| when I know it's an absolute waste of resources for all
| involved. Thankfully my experience with this has been fairly
| minimal, but I _really_ never want to experience it again.
|
| (I know it was likely a flippant comment rather than a serious
| one, but it just kind of triggered a well of emotions in me)
| csmattryder wrote:
| Oh, of course, management.
|
| For the sorry saps caught in the cubicle-based nightmare,
| it's a likely hell. But to be one of the suited-and-booted
| dream sellers, I bet that's a bundle of fun.
| ep103 wrote:
| I had the opportunity to be one of those. The money was
| clearly good. And you quickly built a network that you
| could turn into your own business (which was actually
| expected. They expected you to ultimately not get promoted
| fast enough, start your own business, and if you were
| successful enough they would hire you back several levels
| higher).
|
| But it was also a very, I dare say off, not quite sick,
| culture. You are travelling 90% of the time. This has a
| tendency to destroy family and friend relationships at
| home, and make it hard to befriend anyone not living
| similarly, because you are never in the same city for more
| than a few weeks. You are never in one place long enough to
| develop a deep connection.
|
| You are alone in a new city after work, ever week, and your
| colleagues are all the type of people who chose that
| lifestyle too. The ones who chose that lifestyle for money
| are usually just doing it to put kids through college or
| after college, and will take a new job in a few years, so
| the people you really want to network with are the lifers.
| The lifers are people who chose that lifestyle because
| that's the type of lifestyle they actually want. There are
| a lot of interesting reasons to do that, some very good,
| some very bad, but none of them very normal.
|
| Then you have to look at the moral aspect of what you're
| doing. As I remember upper management putting it to me:
| "We're pirates. We steal from large corporations, and put
| it in our own pockets." And you do that, by providing
| services that garner their profit by pocketing the
| difference in capital that comes from shipping jobs from
| America to offshore locations, made possible by abusing the
| h1b program. And sometimes literally abusing the h1bs, its
| not like they have any rights in practice, once they're
| within the country.
|
| I dunno. I walked away. I think about the money sometimes,
| but I'm much happier with my more mundane, salaried life.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I worked at a company who did a lot of outsourcing with
| companies like Accenture. They tend to stick to contracts and
| the wording at all costs, so every feature had to be specced to
| hell. You can't just say "the site has a responsive design",
| you have to have screenshots of every page at every resolution
| and have what elements appear at each resolution.
|
| This took so much time it was almost always faster to simply do
| the work ourselves.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| To play devil's advocate here, this can go both ways; clients
| may well take the piss unless the contract is quite strict
| about agreed scope etc. For big contracts that can make the
| difference between coming in under or over budget, although
| something of this kind of rigour is prudent at all scales, as
| https://clientsfromhell.net regularly attests.
| ep103 wrote:
| I used to work at Accenture. I was quite literally the ivy
| league educated white face they used to interact with
| clients, so they didn't have to have clients interacting
| with their h1bs. Though it took a while to figure that out.
| We were pushed to ship to the letter of the contract,
| because they understood that that would create bugs that
| their offshore QA wouldn't catch. That meant that there
| would be an ability to sell support contracts after the
| initial contract completed to keep the code running, and
| would make it easier to sell the client on rewriting from
| scratch when the next iteration of whatever framework or
| product line we were integrating against came out in a few
| years.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I worked at a retail chain for a big project led by
| consultants. They only made stats of others work, and reskinned
| old slides.
|
| Millions were lost.
| rusk wrote:
| Another well known consultancy took the Irish government for
| well over EUR200m for a payroll system they never delivered.
| [0] and they never had to apologise even once.
|
| [0] is http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=8661
| humblepie wrote:
| Accenture built the PRESTO system (payment card for Toronto
| transit) and of course they store plaintext passwords
| (https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/1subk4/presto_card...)
| cm2187 wrote:
| As I am told very often on HN, security is expensive. It is
| expensive to use an off the shelves password hashing algorithm,
| or to use parameterized SQL queries...
| sgt wrote:
| Yes, in Computer Science, using parameterized SQL queries is
| considered a Hard Problem(tm). /s
| perardi wrote:
| And for a bit of a citation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_card
|
| And from personal experience:
|
| Jesus wept, Presto was a truly awful rollout, not least of
| which was the awful UX/UI of the terminals at the stations.
|
| Oh, and of course, in 2021, you still cannot tap-to-pay using
| NFC on your phone. Now, that may not be Accenture's fault; that
| could obviously and easily be the failure of sclerotic Canadian
| bureaucracy. But I would not be surprised if the back end
| simply does not support such a thing without another $50
| million in consulting fees.
| sumedh wrote:
| One of my friend works in one of these famous Indian outsourcing
| companies, one day the client asked her how much time will this
| change need, she said it can be done in hour.
|
| Her manager who was not in that meeting got to know that she gave
| a 1 hour estimate and was furious almost threatened to fire her
| and also told the team not to give any estimates to clients. The
| manager then had a meeting with the client and then gave a 1 week
| estimate for that simple change.
| aerique wrote:
| I can't even pick my nose in one hour.
|
| Or fix a typo in production.
| Jallal wrote:
| I obviously do not know the context, but as a manager, you have
| to be extremely cautious with the estimates provided to you by
| your team.
|
| First because human are notoriously bad at estimating the
| workload, and then because you never know what can happen in
| the meantime : it can be literally everything : a bug in the
| frameworks you use, someone who get ill, an hardware or network
| failure, etc.
|
| When you have the luxury to set the deadline, you always choose
| a safe one, that will guarantee you to be on track or ahead the
| schedule. As much as you can, never late.
|
| And yes, you also have to be careful before communicating to
| the client an estimate. he may then think that each of his
| request takes "one hour", and, as he now know "how to
| estimate", he would make you waste your time negotiating
| something that he perceive to be easy to do while it's not.
|
| Honestly, despite the fact that I do not think highly of
| Accenture, nothing shocking here regarding the management.
|
| Of course the fact that he charged for a full week of work is
| just a scam.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I worked at a company that used CapGemini. They were given
| the task of moving data from one drive to another.
|
| Took them a week. When they had finished, they had
| forgotten/didn't know that the parent folder needed to make
| child folders inherit permissions (Windows file server being
| used). They couldn't figure out what the cause of the problem
| was, despite being told. In the end an employee ticked the
| correct box and propagated permissions.
|
| These guys can't move files from one drive to another. In a
| week.
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