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Former IBM Watson data scientist here. At first I was annoyed by your comment, but then I realized how true it is and sulked instead. The good consultants are

Former IBM Watson data scientist here. At first I was annoyed by your comment, but then I realized how true it is and sulked instead. The good consultants are leaving as soon as they hit the end of their first promotion cycle. The duds stick around and assume the upper-level manager roles. The group is in bad shape now and poised to get worse in the coming years.

ethbro 9y ago
As someone who's worked in that space, I'll repost the short version of a comment I made before: it's an economics problem. Services Profit = Bid - Employee Cost + Upsales Bids are only so flexible. Employee cost is much easier to minimize. So inevitably, all consultancies trend towards providing the cheapest employees that will satisfy the customer. And if the customer isn't constantly vigilant, the quality can get pretty dire indeed (BAs who just learned to "code" yesterday).
- gaius 9y ago
  Funny you should mention BA, since they have had a series of high profile IT meltdowns since outsourcing...
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Sorry, in my use *Business Analyst (aka business majors who want to get into "that computer thing") BPO / offshoring is a whole other can of rotten worms.
    - gaius 9y ago
      I know, it just seemed apt :-)
- tootie 9y ago
  Holy shit man. This was literally my experience with Accenture. I worked side-by-side with them on a massive IT project. Their team was like 60 liberal arts grads willing to work 80 hours a week configuring some COTS software and 4 managers making sure they don't go home. I think they just use India now instead.
  - seibelj 9y ago
    One thing I love about HN is the willingness of people to name names in stories. I don't always do it because of fears of repercussion, but I appreciate people like you who do. Thanks for saying the word "Accenture".
    - tootie 9y ago
      People have very public debates about consumer brands. Apple or Google or whatever. These B2B businesses can stay out of the spotlight and get far less press. There's an open market for their services and their value is based on reputation, so why not express some unvarnished opinions? Especially when I'm being anonymous online.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ethbro 9y ago
      + ISG
    - yborg 9y ago
      In this case, the names are completely interchangeable. I had precisely the same experience years ago on a large ERP project on which Deloitte was the lead consultant. After the beachhead team (which was good) rolled off the project, the backfill consisted of an army of fresh-outs straight from Deloitte's consultant boot camp, billed out at a rate a developer with 6-7 years of experience should have cost.
  - barsonme 9y ago
    > I think they just use India now instead. Depending who you get this could be an upgrade. I've met some damn good Indian programmers who work for contracting shops (and, sadly make way less than they would in the states). But, I've also met some who literally don't know how to code.
    - rsj_hn 9y ago
      The ones you encounter in the U.S. are the cream of the crop. It gets very spotty when you look at western-based outsourcing shops like Accenture or Deloitte and then when you go to Persistent, Capgemini or Infosys it's a shitshow. Fundamentally, the problem is that these firms are used for work that is not valued by either the customer or the implementor. The primary concern is cost. If you are a developer for a tech company working on core products, you drive revenue and are important. If a feature you implement is marginally better than the competition, your firm can win the market and, due to economies of scale, the revenue gain will be huge. Because revenue is sensitive to small differences in quality, you want the best possible developers that you can afford. As a result, developers viewed as part of the firm's comparative advantage are paid well and treated well. But if you are a DBA working at walgreens, then you are not a part of the comparative advantage of the firm. If you are marginally better at your job, revenues will not go up. You are a cost that will be outsourced in a heartbeat if the firm could save a dollar. Or like doing landscaping at Google. Regardless of how awesome Google is, they are going to look at their landscaping expenditures purely as a cost. Revenues will not go up if you do a better job. Thus they don't care about getting the best possible landscaping, they want adequate landscaping, like water running out of a tap. That's the type of work that is passed on to these outsourcers. It may be technical in nature, but there is little to no perceived marginal gain in the work being of a higher quality than the minimum amount necessary to be fit for use: maintenance of products that companies no longer want to invest in, but they have service contracts in place that require maintenance. The goal is to minimize cost while not breaching the contract. Or bespoke work in the B2B space where you don't get the type of economies of scale that result in a meaningful revenue bump when one particular piece of code exceeds expectations. In all these things, the driver is the cheapest talent such that the output is adequate. That means that these jobs are not rewarding to the developers who do them, and so these firms have huge problems with turnover and keeping good developers motivated. Those developers who remain are the ones who don't mind working on code that no one cares about, being paid poorly to do it, and being treated as expendable. In other words, the least motivated, passionate developers are the ones who remain. It is no wonder that they will tend to be the least talented.
mercer 9y ago
Is it a bit like Deloitte? I keep hearing it's the shittiest of the bunch, but you do it for a while so you can move on and get a better job (or start your own company).
- geodel 9y ago
  In this business, there is no rock bottom. I have seen people who would not know how to work with Java classes without main method. They were working on $100M projects.
  - mark_edward 9y ago
    I really have a hard time believing there are people so incompetent employed as software engineers? How are they not caught out? How do they get hired?
    - camhenlin 9y ago
      Catching them would require that other engineers are probably pretty rude or mean to them. Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. I think most software engineers are more likely to be a little on the friendly side and instead give the bad dev a pointer in the right direction or a few minutes of mentoring here and there. Then, eventually, the bad dev becomes an ok dev, and so on.
      - azinman2 9y ago
        I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit. Update: I’m not saying this is a good thing, just an industry observation.
        camhenlin 9y ago
        Sounds like you work on some pretty toxic teams or are yourself toxic
notfromhere 9y ago
Don't feel bad. All the good IBM employees are former IBM employees
Bucephalus355 9y ago
I was shocked to see this comment as it rang so true for me. I worked at Oracle for many years, and I think it's a pretty well run company, but this theme of "the smart people leave, the dumb people stay and promote other dumb people" is very true. Mark Hurd is the current CEO, and I think he's really good (even though all the people on www.thelayoff.com absolutely revile him), but there is a reason he came from outside the company.
- pacificmint 9y ago
  > "the smart people leave, the dumb people stay and promote other dumb people" This is sometimes referred to as the 'Dead Sea Effect'.[1] The same way that water carries salts and other minerals to the Dead Sea, and then the water evaporates while the salts accumulate. Similar effect with hiring a mix of good and bad people, and over the time the good ones leave because they have options while the bad ones stay and accumulate. [1] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

ethbro 9y ago

As someone who's worked in that space, I'll repost the short version of a comment I made before: it's an economics problem. Services Profit = Bid - Employee Cost + Upsales Bids are only so flexible. Employee cost is much easier to minimize. So inevitably, all consultancies trend towards providing the cheapest employees that will satisfy the customer. And if the customer isn't constantly vigilant, the quality can get pretty dire indeed (BAs who just learned to "code" yesterday).

gaius 9y ago
Funny you should mention BA, since they have had a series of high profile IT meltdowns since outsourcing...
- ethbro 9y ago
  Sorry, in my use *Business Analyst (aka business majors who want to get into "that computer thing") BPO / offshoring is a whole other can of rotten worms.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I know, it just seemed apt :-)
tootie 9y ago
Holy shit man. This was literally my experience with Accenture. I worked side-by-side with them on a massive IT project. Their team was like 60 liberal arts grads willing to work 80 hours a week configuring some COTS software and 4 managers making sure they don't go home. I think they just use India now instead.
- seibelj 9y ago
  One thing I love about HN is the willingness of people to name names in stories. I don't always do it because of fears of repercussion, but I appreciate people like you who do. Thanks for saying the word "Accenture".
  - tootie 9y ago
    People have very public debates about consumer brands. Apple or Google or whatever. These B2B businesses can stay out of the spotlight and get far less press. There's an open market for their services and their value is based on reputation, so why not express some unvarnished opinions? Especially when I'm being anonymous online.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbro 9y ago
    + ISG
  - yborg 9y ago
    In this case, the names are completely interchangeable. I had precisely the same experience years ago on a large ERP project on which Deloitte was the lead consultant. After the beachhead team (which was good) rolled off the project, the backfill consisted of an army of fresh-outs straight from Deloitte's consultant boot camp, billed out at a rate a developer with 6-7 years of experience should have cost.
- barsonme 9y ago
  > I think they just use India now instead. Depending who you get this could be an upgrade. I've met some damn good Indian programmers who work for contracting shops (and, sadly make way less than they would in the states). But, I've also met some who literally don't know how to code.
  - rsj_hn 9y ago
    The ones you encounter in the U.S. are the cream of the crop. It gets very spotty when you look at western-based outsourcing shops like Accenture or Deloitte and then when you go to Persistent, Capgemini or Infosys it's a shitshow. Fundamentally, the problem is that these firms are used for work that is not valued by either the customer or the implementor. The primary concern is cost. If you are a developer for a tech company working on core products, you drive revenue and are important. If a feature you implement is marginally better than the competition, your firm can win the market and, due to economies of scale, the revenue gain will be huge. Because revenue is sensitive to small differences in quality, you want the best possible developers that you can afford. As a result, developers viewed as part of the firm's comparative advantage are paid well and treated well. But if you are a DBA working at walgreens, then you are not a part of the comparative advantage of the firm. If you are marginally better at your job, revenues will not go up. You are a cost that will be outsourced in a heartbeat if the firm could save a dollar. Or like doing landscaping at Google. Regardless of how awesome Google is, they are going to look at their landscaping expenditures purely as a cost. Revenues will not go up if you do a better job. Thus they don't care about getting the best possible landscaping, they want adequate landscaping, like water running out of a tap. That's the type of work that is passed on to these outsourcers. It may be technical in nature, but there is little to no perceived marginal gain in the work being of a higher quality than the minimum amount necessary to be fit for use: maintenance of products that companies no longer want to invest in, but they have service contracts in place that require maintenance. The goal is to minimize cost while not breaching the contract. Or bespoke work in the B2B space where you don't get the type of economies of scale that result in a meaningful revenue bump when one particular piece of code exceeds expectations. In all these things, the driver is the cheapest talent such that the output is adequate. That means that these jobs are not rewarding to the developers who do them, and so these firms have huge problems with turnover and keeping good developers motivated. Those developers who remain are the ones who don't mind working on code that no one cares about, being paid poorly to do it, and being treated as expendable. In other words, the least motivated, passionate developers are the ones who remain. It is no wonder that they will tend to be the least talented.

mercer 9y ago

Is it a bit like Deloitte? I keep hearing it's the shittiest of the bunch, but you do it for a while so you can move on and get a better job (or start your own company).

geodel 9y ago
In this business, there is no rock bottom. I have seen people who would not know how to work with Java classes without main method. They were working on $100M projects.
- mark_edward 9y ago
  I really have a hard time believing there are people so incompetent employed as software engineers? How are they not caught out? How do they get hired?
  - camhenlin 9y ago
    Catching them would require that other engineers are probably pretty rude or mean to them. Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. I think most software engineers are more likely to be a little on the friendly side and instead give the bad dev a pointer in the right direction or a few minutes of mentoring here and there. Then, eventually, the bad dev becomes an ok dev, and so on.
    - azinman2 9y ago
      I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit. Update: I’m not saying this is a good thing, just an industry observation.
      - camhenlin 9y ago
        Sounds like you work on some pretty toxic teams or are yourself toxic

notfromhere 9y ago

Don't feel bad. All the good IBM employees are former IBM employees

Bucephalus355 9y ago

I was shocked to see this comment as it rang so true for me. I worked at Oracle for many years, and I think it's a pretty well run company, but this theme of "the smart people leave, the dumb people stay and promote other dumb people" is very true. Mark Hurd is the current CEO, and I think he's really good (even though all the people on www.thelayoff.com absolutely revile him), but there is a reason he came from outside the company.

pacificmint 9y ago
> "the smart people leave, the dumb people stay and promote other dumb people" This is sometimes referred to as the 'Dead Sea Effect'.[1] The same way that water carries salts and other minerals to the Dead Sea, and then the water evaporates while the salts accumulate. Similar effect with hiring a mix of good and bad people, and over the time the good ones leave because they have options while the bad ones stay and accumulate. [1] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...