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.
Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.
Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.
I’m not even sure insane match what you just described at that point.
Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.
Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out.
Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.
Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?
If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste.
Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.
My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)
I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.
BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.
Cutting and pasting with scissors and actual paste sounds pretty awful. But what I was hoping to get more insight about, if the task was to draw tens of thousands of pages of flowcharts (not text), would a 1980's PC (maybe 16mb RAM, 5.25" floppies, no GUI) be more efficient than a pen and paper? Even on a modern PC, I can often draw a flowchart quite a bit faster than I can create it in Lucidcharts or similar software.
I dunno. I myself was pretty clueless about PCs at that time. I owned a Kaypro from the early 1980s that ran CP/M, but I never touched a PC running Windows (or even just DOS) until 1994. They weren't part of the centralized IT departments I worked in. They WERE part of a sorta grass roots revolt by the user departments, setting up their own Lotus spreadsheets, whatever, as a way of bypassing the slow bureaucratic centralized IT departments.
I don't know. I speculate: So, like, the consulting company has to sell... something. They develop a... what was it called...a system development life cycle methodology? Maybe partly sincere, maybe partly bullshit, I dunno. I remember it visually as a shelf of several manuals. I imagine top AA partners selling to the top execs. Then everybody down the hierarchy doing what they've been told to do, being, not evil, but just respectful of the hierarchy. Also, many of those AA people only knowing the AA way, not having the experience, the confidence to be sure that the AA way was insane. Also, the way AA worked then "Up or Out", you are always competing with your peers. Not good for your career to rock the boat, to attack the methodology that the top partners had sold UAL.
And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.
I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.
Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training.
On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing.
On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.
Consultants and agencies typically give all of the actual work to young 22-28 year olds. Leadership focuses on acquiring new business. Once they get your business they really do not care what happens beyond generally fulfilling the contracted requirements.
When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin.
I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.
I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey.
Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow.
I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.
I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.
"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow"
I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.
Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.
It was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be.
I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.
St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.
kid/no kid is one thing, but were you able to deliver the insights they expected? I know I'd be pissed if I paid a high rate expecting an expert and then got a guy who doesn't know either.
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.
Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs.
I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.
Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
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
Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted outside support for an initiative or to sink someone else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go against the executive that brings them in
I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them.
At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.
It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.
The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.
The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.
> Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.
Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting had an expensive divorce in 1997ish, and Andersen Consulting became Accenture.
A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.
AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....
If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.
I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town).
I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.
It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.
The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client.
If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.
(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.
I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.
There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things.
1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better.
2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable.
3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.
When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label.
Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.
Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.
Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.
Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make money by squeezing labor salaries. you can’t raise rates because moral hazard - you’d have immediate incentive to pocket the margin. behold the stable state.
This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates.
It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
Picking a consultant is like picking a tradesperson -- the competent ones already have more business than they can service, so they'd be doing you a favor by taking you on, which usually means an introduction from an existing client is needed.
Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500
I don't know where the parent worked, but I expect the rates are 120€-180€ (company billing, not your salary). It's just that most other companies pay smaller salaries as there traditionally was very few tech companies with competitive pay. It's been slowly improving though.
They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers
I've seen it repeatedly, how they think you'll get the same quality product outsourced to the cheapest consultancy in India is beyond me.
The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers.
Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
> Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.
That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
That one got the added "benefit" of Congress and POTUS directly meddling. So you get to restart parts with new contractors, changes in direction just as you got the last 20% of bugs fixed etc and that's assuming you work with honest suppliers
My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later)
1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks.
I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
speaking of agencies and horrors !
I too did a 6 months stint at a "digital agency". To be fair I still think they were one of the better ones. But it was just not for me:
1) EXCESSIVE Timekeeping (I had to log every hour basically I was at work, felt like an inmate). Sure that is there business I get it. But it's not for me.
2) Many projects(Same-Same): I also learn that for my personality (and sanity) i work better if I can focus on one or two long term projects.
Doing 5 little projects different days of the week, was horrible. To rephrase, dealing with 5 different clients a week was horrible, 7/10 times you basically just undid half the work you did previous week. Since you know, "requirements change" or it took them two weeks to let me know "oh it has to work like this not that, I thought you will know this" type convos.
Anywhoo programming can be wonderful or it can be awful !
I worked at a computer store in my local town for a while. I got paid $9.00/hr repairing Macs and PCs. Often having 7-8 on my bench at a time. All were being billed at $59/hr. I didn't stick around long!
My first job billed my time at $200/hr and my salary was $28k. I was 21 and they would literally put me on projects solo. Once a client was on retainer the execs disappeared and let fresh college grads do the work, it’s a total scam.
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org.
I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure?
I suspect that might be the case.
If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
This is why these large companies often form "innovation" units that are spun out as separate entities or at lest setup as separate orgs sheltered from internal politics by the C suite.
It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
I have seen a company spin up and after 2 years spin out a seperate innovation unit, and when it was a proper seperate entity outsource their core IT to the unit... Which was then branded a big success! It was liberating to see such systemic incompetence; The people were all highly educated but as a group just can't seem to organize effectively.
This Sounds like financial engineering. It is possible the people involved were incompetent, either individually or as a group. But this sounds like an incentive problem. Competence, misdirected.
> Branded as a success
I fear you aren't cyncical enough.
Was it a filure? Did the company's balance sheet improve? Did the company's stock price increase? Did the spinout attract a load of investment for its (pre-destined) success and turn that into a rich revenue stream?
Markets -- for both debt and equity -- are mostly idiotic machines on short timeframes. Your ability to generate free cash flow puts a floor on your price. Others' imagination and available liquidity are the only ceilings.
Additionally, these types of spin outs can behave like generational wealth. They may be incompetent idiots, but who cares? Daddy's money is more than you can raise and mommy's rolodex is richer than you could possibly imagine.
The problem isn't just the experience or capabilities it's the internal politics.
You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.
The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.
> Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
I just want to point out that this isn't just legacy corps - I previously worked for a manager who went straight from a theory heavy CS degree to a theory heavy PhD to consultancy to management.
You still get companies like this where some middle manager with 0 years of SWE experience has to hire Software Engineers with 5+.
I'd say this is rather distribution at work. To build software competitively you need fairly good people and not a lot them would want to end up at Hertz. Places like Hertz are not tech companies which also often makes them very low margine, capital deprived and of limited scalability. Therefore, they cannot offer the compensation like top 20% of the players. The difference of compensation between top 20% and rest of the players is just amazing and reflects market forces operating in talent distribution that has sharp peak than other professions.
Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.
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.
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.