It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms.
The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence.
This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.
LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the entire program basically in flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box, like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to make the change.
Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training.
On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing.
On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.
When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from.
did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers.
Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later)
1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks.
I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
My first job billed my time at $200/hr and my salary was $28k. I was 21 and they would literally put me on projects solo. Once a client was on retainer the execs disappeared and let fresh college grads do the work, it’s a total scam.
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)
2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
Agile/Scrum is perfect for such consulting engagements - there is a measurable easily reportable progress every sprint while nothing real gets achieved in any reasonable time, and the customer seeing/accepting that incremental progress is de-facto almost waiving its right to demand the final result.
100% true and even if you offer a more higher caliber consultancy instead of these India outsourcing companies, the legacy corporations and their management will never want to admit that they know nothing about tech or their business.
Because the executives themselves have used iPhone or web browser they often think they know best what features the app needs, they claim that they don' need analytics or metrics from users and they don't want any advice from professionals. They just need bunch of "coders to do that coding thing or whatever".
On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
Worked for someone almost as cynical as this. We always had mixed in more senior people to keep things under control, but lots of newly grads. Tbf though, the client will also ok these people on the project, but they often have no clue about IT qualifications and only see the cheaper price tag compared to the more experienced. My company also tried to avoid such projects, but sometimes the money was too good or a strategic partner comes along.
You just describe Boeing's relationship with HCL and Infosys. I had to get out because I just felt like I was wasting my life bullshitting and delivering zero value to anyone.
London has some of the biggest consultancy firms and I can confirm LinkedIn networks with these firms are majority newly grads.
Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts.
New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved.
I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.
Their purpose isn't to understand the cloud. It's to fill buzzword bingo and look good when some bloated company hires some mercenaries for their internal power politics.
Yeah all that is true.. but what is even worse is the relationship between "account execs" and "Decision makers". Only reason they keep getting the work are those to players.
> The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Well, first they usually roll out a 40 year old "partner" (and that's the end-goal here- you want to be made "partner") who will show some diagrams in a PowerPoint or even diagram some stuff on a whiteboard, and never seen again. When shit hits the fan, they bust out a "SWAT Team" which is a few people with actual experience in an attempt to unfuck whatever those 24-year-olds screwed up.
I've never had a job or worked in an office. When I was still actively freelancing, most of my clients were startups and small businesses. Later, I started getting some contracts with larger businesses.
The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.
Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing your clients".
Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ...
Joke.
But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".
> It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough,
Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
And then you get posts from experts like you convinced there’s really some big picture goal to technology; that you’re not just optimizing for employment yourself.
I actually genuinely value doing a good job. I genuinely hate being put under pressure to deliver stuff that looks good but is actually bad. It feels awful to me. I've built my career around avoiding this.
I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it.
Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
You can certainly take pride in your work and build a good product all the same though. Big consulting companies usually deliver bad products because their structure makes it almost impossible to do anything else.
> In its revised suit, Hertz states that Accenture represented that they had “the best talent in the world"
> Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing claims.
Colour me surprised.
> Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.
> Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.
> Despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only
So, like always, they sold a fantasy to a bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy, then farmed the work out to the cheapst developers possible and pocketed the difference.
The more stories I hear about this, the more I'm inclined to be an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel because apparently they get paid a lot, do a terrible job, and nothing happens to them.
It's nice if you only consider the end state. Since it's such a good deal, a lot of employees want it. The price execs paid to get there was to play corporate politics for 20 years.
I'll take an uncertain payoff as an entrepreneur or job as a developer over that - thanks for reminding me.
At one point, I got sick of interviewing for tech jobs, so I searched "CEO" on job portals and found a surprising number of very well paid jobs I nearly qualified for (just need to learn to read financial statements better).
I ended up taking a tech job anyway but once I retire from this, I'll probably apply to an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel job.
> bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy...
At some point, someone with technical acumen took stock of the situation and said "this is garbage". Why does this step always come last?
WTF. "They said they were the best, but they lied!" I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them. You either have them inhouse (but you've overlooked them for years) or you engage an inspector/reviewer to vet the claims or review previous work. I buy a car, I can get a private inspection done. I buy a house, I get a house inspector to verify the claims.
Sometimes comes first but the outcome is the same regardless.
I was once brought in to sit on early discussions with a consulting group. I pointed out very real problems with their ideas about how to solve our problem. That was on the morning of day 1. I was explicitly uninvited before day 2 for "not being a team player."
3 years later we were in court suing this consulting group for millions.
> I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them
They very likely did (and negatively), but no excecutive ever wants to hear that, so they just barrel ahead anyway. Because what do those lowly peons know, right?
Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
"Content Management – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the website."
If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.
This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.
The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or a million. What you get with that license is... the world's most complex and difficult content management system, that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.
I've done so many AEM sites for clients with more money than sense. I had to quit the agency business to get away from it. It's absolutely sensible for a big company with complex requirements to buy an off-the-shelf enterprise software package even at a substantial price tag, it's just that AEM absolutely sucks at almost everything. They sell it with the stupid Adobe Marketing Cloud saying you'll get CMS, analytics, A/B testing, ad targeting, yadda yadda in one giant package. Only they're all just a mishmash of acquisitions that don't integrate well at all and none of them are close to the best products for their task. They made for a very compelling sales pitch back in like 2013 when options were more limited and enterprise CMS was a busy space, but no one should be fooled by this in the 2020s.
Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.
Yes, a lot of "strategic partnerships", "joint ventures" and the like.
Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in a totally different market.
"Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in deal negotiations :)
The consultancy I worked for didn't sell or promote that kind of tech, but I still got exposed to it at various clients. Seems like a top-down approach, some upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it, then demanding the devs use it no matter the fit.
Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your anyways building a custom frontend.
> upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it
And closing that deal and having their reports implement the roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.
There is a certain class of high scale enterprise client that always voices strong prefernce for AEM. I think it might be because AEM at one point was ahead of their competitors and so a lot of the existing enterprise level companies use it in production and have experience on it? Or maybe they think everyone at that operating scale is using it, and so it must be the best choice... truth is the development experience is painful and it usually isn't the best tool.
My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event. They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event site.
Analyst reports, compelling demos at conferences, ecosystem of professional services partners with a relationship with the software vendor (implied promise of escalation of issues), 24x7x365 SLAs, competitor success stories using the same technology, existing training materials along with distant promise of developing in-house expertise by working along-side system integrators.
Just curious, which OSS CMS would you recommend for that kind of site?
I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).
I was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same issues.
I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world. One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we billed them no less than 20 million.
I think I mentally checked out at 6 months in when I realized I couldn't fight against the current. Management was incompetent, half of my team mates had no experience or ability to work as software developers, and all the individual contributors were the ones with the pressure to deliver and work on weekends. Yeah, I'm not going to work extra hours because you don't know how to say no when the client tells you they want this extra feature and they also want to cut down the timeline.
The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
It is so bizarre that blowing $20M on a large, complex project that obviously fails can be rebranded as success. Its harder to pull that off with smaller projects and less stakeholders, but if a project is big enough, you can obfuscate the details and make it look like a win.
> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
It's also usually that the big companies are so incompetent that paying 20 million dollars for nothing is still cheaper than hiring their own people to do it in house and ending up paying 40 million dollar for a team that will actually break stuff down and make everything worse.
It's not so much that their own people, i.e. the actual doers are incompetent, its thats the management structure is, so they are set up for failure. And yes it might take longer, and cost more, as they need to hire etc opex, get more scrutiny, can't try and fix the problem by throwing more devs at it at a drop of a hat etc.
As far as I can tell, this sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing is pretty normal for these massive consulting companies.
Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them.
Their layers of consultants then tie up a ton of your time/resources over the next 12 months figuring out what they actually should be doing, and why what the Expert said only has a passing resemblence to what's actually needed. So there's then rounds of discussion on how this and that change will be a variance, all billable extras.
After the 12 months is up, nothing is delivered in a workable state, it gets rejected, sent back for changes. This is all more billable variances, because of course it was delivered to the approved spec, and if you squint, and really push the definitions of words then it might vaguely resemble what it is that the spec said.
I've seen this play out multiple times.
The only surprising thing here (to me) is that Hertz pulled the plug while their spend was only $32M. Well done Hertz.
I can only hope that someone learned their lesson to stop using consulting groups for this kind of thing. I won't be holding my breath on that one, though.
I’m pretty much convinced you can replace any consulting firm (of any size/developer count) with 4-6 competent in-house developers and have a better product at the end of the year.
You have to wonder what proportion of GDP is money sloshing around like this but not providing any real value. The consultants got their paychecks and spent their money in the real economy, but there seems to be a great deal of waste in the B2B space.
A lot of resources are being "wasted" by everyone all the time. Think about the gym memberships and exercise equipment that people buy and never use. Or online courses and books that don't get consumed. Or clothes and shoes that are never worn, or food that gets thrown out. There's "waste" everywhere, but only big businesses can afford to lose this much at once, so that catches our attention. Fortunately, there's usually a selection process that makes sure those businesses don't live too long.
edit: how many discontinued google products are there? They're got to be worth tens of billions in developer costs and perhaps more in opportunity costs.
I have this theory that B2B is actually most of the economy; and, that, somehow, real people are only ancillary to that. Like a patina if human customers over a huge mound of B2B ... motion.
governement in most economies is even more Gargantuous. just for US, 37% on average (since 1970s) of gdp is governement spending ("tax" revenue+debt). here an historical gov on gdp table:
But how can that be? At the end of the day some consumer must foot the bill and cover all the additional costs of B2B services. Ultimately businesses are only comfortable paying others businesses because they found a way to make money (i.e. sell to customers, somewhere down the line)
It's about comparing global economies in terms of actual, physical production output instead of GDP numbers that include nonsense like the big "service" companies. Results are unsurprising.
IT Companies, especially ones that outsource have had it coming for years.
I am an Indian (though I only worked for a year in IT before leaving for actual work), and let me tell you, we Indian IT developers are a complex bunch.
3 out of 100 know the actual work, actual technology, impact of choices, etc.
80 out of 100 just get by, as in, do the bare minimum required to get by the day and the task assigned to them. The remaining are bootlickers who get promoted to management.
And there are no qualms about ethics. Want to pass a test by commenting some code? "we will do it once to check first, then we will repeat it without commenting" (and the latter will never happen). I would not be surprised if they have a "test" set of code, solely to pass the specs and an internal "actual" code that will be delivered to the customer.
Also, after 20 years or so of outsourcing, I am sure most of my fellows in MNC IT companies have set up practices and navigation rules to deftly distribute the blame such that even senior management is clueless about whom to punish in case of a failure like this.
The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation. It doesn't matter if someone outsources to India or not, but if you are getting something for really cheap you are buying shit and being scammed. There are obviously good high quality Indian developers too, but they are not going to be working for these low cost sweatshops that get contracts from Fortune 500 legacy corps.
> The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation.
Any proof of that statement? Or are you one of those people who believes in the invisible hand of providence the way religious people believe in God?
Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African slaves were well compensated for their extreme talent in picking cotton under inhuman conditions? They were obviously receiving higher compensation than whites, who would have died under the same conditions.
Man, that good ol' magic of the market huh? Never fails.
I mean, if you pay 32million for a website, it's obviously going to be good, right? Or at least, it'll go live, right?
sorry if that was a bit mean, but honestly you seem to be naively believing in something that does not actually exist, and then assuming people who are unlucky are in fact untalented <3
A client paid me $7,500 for a site in 2011, approved the final version, but never got around to giving me the hosting information. It never went live. The screenshots were fine portfolio pieces and I spent their money, but I’m still annoyed by that.
Don't feel bad. I paid a consultant over $10,000 a year ago and didn't go live with their code. The reason was not them, it was me. I did something without asking our dev team and it was a bad idea. By the time I got to my senses, I had spent over 10K. The consultant was great though. As founders, we sometimes do shitty and idiotic things.
That’s not so bad. In my 20+ year career I’ve worked on a ton of projects which were internally killed, so essentially we poured our hearts and souls into products that never saw the light of day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience.
I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t necessarily intended to make a dent in anything, but just to keep teams busy and justify headcount.
I used to work for a R&D department. We created new things, but nothing went beyond a demo, or some patent applications, or company internal news. It felt that the top brass didn't actually want new things as there always was a danger of cannibalizing some legacy business.
Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.
That's business. Shifting sands to one degree or another. Sometimes markets change, sometimes strategy changes. If a project no longer makes sense, you drop it, sunk costs are sunk costs.
Readit News
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.
I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
It. Was. Insane.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)
2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
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.
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.
#TRUESTORY
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.
The consultant way.
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".
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.
Never again.
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.
> Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing claims.
Colour me surprised.
> Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.
> Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.
> Despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only
So, like always, they sold a fantasy to a bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a fantasy, then farmed the work out to the cheapst developers possible and pocketed the difference.
I'll take an uncertain payoff as an entrepreneur or job as a developer over that - thanks for reminding me.
Not true! They get multi-million dollar golden parachutes when they decide they're tired of playing business and would rather play golf.
I ended up taking a tech job anyway but once I retire from this, I'll probably apply to an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel job.
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At some point, someone with technical acumen took stock of the situation and said "this is garbage". Why does this step always come last?
WTF. "They said they were the best, but they lied!" I bet you as Hertz had some competent technical folks who could have vetted them. You either have them inhouse (but you've overlooked them for years) or you engage an inspector/reviewer to vet the claims or review previous work. I buy a car, I can get a private inspection done. I buy a house, I get a house inspector to verify the claims.
Sometimes comes first but the outcome is the same regardless.
I was once brought in to sit on early discussions with a consulting group. I pointed out very real problems with their ideas about how to solve our problem. That was on the morning of day 1. I was explicitly uninvited before day 2 for "not being a team player."
3 years later we were in court suing this consulting group for millions.
They very likely did (and negatively), but no excecutive ever wants to hear that, so they just barrel ahead anyway. Because what do those lowly peons know, right?
Then there’s always the risk that the internal Hertz guys are just terrible and just trying to keep the contractors out to make sure they aren’t exposed.
From the executive side it’s hard too.
If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.
This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.
The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or a million. What you get with that license is... the world's most complex and difficult content management system, that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.
Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.
Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in a totally different market.
"Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in deal negotiations :)
It’s tailor made for this. Management will always sign off because they’ve heard of Adobe.
Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your anyways building a custom frontend.
And closing that deal and having their reports implement the roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.
My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event. They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event site.
I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).
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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.
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.
An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour. (Apple makes ~1700.00 per second ..)
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.
Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them.
Their layers of consultants then tie up a ton of your time/resources over the next 12 months figuring out what they actually should be doing, and why what the Expert said only has a passing resemblence to what's actually needed. So there's then rounds of discussion on how this and that change will be a variance, all billable extras.
After the 12 months is up, nothing is delivered in a workable state, it gets rejected, sent back for changes. This is all more billable variances, because of course it was delivered to the approved spec, and if you squint, and really push the definitions of words then it might vaguely resemble what it is that the spec said.
I've seen this play out multiple times.
The only surprising thing here (to me) is that Hertz pulled the plug while their spend was only $32M. Well done Hertz.
I can only hope that someone learned their lesson to stop using consulting groups for this kind of thing. I won't be holding my breath on that one, though.
Regardless of what your project is.
If things go wrong, you get to blame the outside company for screwing it up.
Setup a team internally and your neck is on the line if they fail to deliver.
edit: how many discontinued google products are there? They're got to be worth tens of billions in developer costs and perhaps more in opportunity costs.
[]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
It's about comparing global economies in terms of actual, physical production output instead of GDP numbers that include nonsense like the big "service" companies. Results are unsurprising.
I am an Indian (though I only worked for a year in IT before leaving for actual work), and let me tell you, we Indian IT developers are a complex bunch.
3 out of 100 know the actual work, actual technology, impact of choices, etc. 80 out of 100 just get by, as in, do the bare minimum required to get by the day and the task assigned to them. The remaining are bootlickers who get promoted to management.
And there are no qualms about ethics. Want to pass a test by commenting some code? "we will do it once to check first, then we will repeat it without commenting" (and the latter will never happen). I would not be surprised if they have a "test" set of code, solely to pass the specs and an internal "actual" code that will be delivered to the customer.
Also, after 20 years or so of outsourcing, I am sure most of my fellows in MNC IT companies have set up practices and navigation rules to deftly distribute the blame such that even senior management is clueless about whom to punish in case of a failure like this.
Any proof of that statement? Or are you one of those people who believes in the invisible hand of providence the way religious people believe in God?
Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African slaves were well compensated for their extreme talent in picking cotton under inhuman conditions? They were obviously receiving higher compensation than whites, who would have died under the same conditions.
Man, that good ol' magic of the market huh? Never fails.
I mean, if you pay 32million for a website, it's obviously going to be good, right? Or at least, it'll go live, right?
sorry if that was a bit mean, but honestly you seem to be naively believing in something that does not actually exist, and then assuming people who are unlucky are in fact untalented <3
I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t necessarily intended to make a dent in anything, but just to keep teams busy and justify headcount.
Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.