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Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work
- mrslave 6y agoInternally they're quite honest about what's most important on IT projects: billable hours.
- moron4hire 6y agoI worked for Deloitte for a year. I'm convinced their business strategy is to put their worst foot forward first, find the clients that will put up with it, and then milk them dry.
- Proven 6y agoPerhaps, but that's not the problem. The problem is that governments unnecessarily handles huge amounts of other people's money. What does anyone here expect - that they could make industry-leading returns or do something better than the private sector? Do you think the problem would be fixed by making sure Deloitte no longer got involved? What's to prevent the same people from moving to Schmeloitte to continue the practice?
- simonw 6y agoPurely out of interest, what does the tech stack tend to look like for these big projects? Do they use open source components and frameworks? Are they using Oracle? Do they tend to have good test coverage and continuous deployment? What kind of version control do they use - what kind of branching / release model etc? I've been immersed in the GitHub-centric open source world for so long I don't really have a feel for how these big Deloitte government IT projects work.
- xenihn 6y agoVisual Basic and MongoDB on Azure.
- dathinab 6y agoDoesn't MongoDB still has major issues with not keeping the consistency guarantees they have potentially just "forgetting" whole batches of data and stuff like that? I kinda remember having read something like that two or three month ago...
- pstuart 6y agoWhat, no /s? What's sad is that you could be serious and correct.
- TrackerFF 6y agoWell, to the defense of VB - it's .NET, so that shouldn't be much of a big deal these days.
- spyspy 6y agoIn all seriousness you’d probably have to ask the subcontracted dev team in China what they’re using because the actual Deloitte employees won’t know and likely won’t care. Source: fiancée is a tech consultant for a big 4
- im_down_w_otp 6y ago> "Purely out of interest, what does the tech stack tend to look like for these big projects?" My experience being on executive panels, etc. receiving pitches from firms like Deloitte, et Al., is that they're super buzzword-compliant nonsense because what they're actually selling is a vision of "innovation" and "modernization" to middle & upper management of all manner of enterprises going through the corporate/institutional version of a midlife crisis. These folks want to feel relevant and cutting edge, and firms like Deloitte sell straight into the strange mix of vanity and insecurity. That said, I'm sure I'm witnessing a fair amount of sample bias in that read, as it's the big corporate contract side. I have no idea what the governmental side looks like.
- moron4hire 6y agoIt's the same. Bureaucrats measure their self-worth by the relative size of their budget compared to their peers. It's not their money, they don't care about cost, except that the more they can spend, the easier it is to get a budget increase and gain rank in their peer group. Consulting firms like Deloitte help them burn their budget every year.
- treis 6y agoThey're almost always building an API to a legacy system and a modern front end. There's a bunch of BPM solutions like Salesforce, Pega, Appian, IBM has one, Oracle has one, and Microsoft has one as well. API layer is usually Mulesoft. They usually pay 6-7 figures annually for licenses and then $75-250 hourly rates for developers. It adds up very quickly.
- texasbigdata 6y ago6 to 7 figures for the API and DB? Literally the ELT?
- treis 6y agoNo, for the application layer. Think like Rails/Django but a lot more features specific to integrating in an enterprise environment and process management.
- moron4hire 6y agoThere wasn't anything particularly wrong with the technology they used. It's the fundamental incompetent management and the infrastructure that protects it that is the problem. At Deloitte, you don't get to be a project manager because you're any good at managing projects. Hell, I don't think they even really hire real project managers. You get there by glad handing with partners and managing directors. You as the developer also never get any access to the client. You never get any real set of requirements. At best, you'll have some stuffed shirt make up the entire concept out of thin air (or "user personas", as they called them), present it to the client at a kick off meeting, and then never take any feedback on it. If, in the course of development, you discover your PM knows more about hair products than software products, there's no way to change the plan. And when it all invariably fails, you as the software developer who doesn't have any drinking buddies in the partner suite are blamed for it. These folks are also responsible for your yearly review through a system called the "scatter plot". It's basically random noise with a linear progression forced into it (which mirrors the institution's complete lack of competence amongst management). At the end of every project, you hunt down your PM and coworkers and make them submit a "snapshot" about you. They then evaluate you on completely subjective scales like "if it were yours, would you give this person money". The theory is, over the course of a year, you'll work ok multiple projects with multiple PMs and any interpersonal bias will average it. They think of this as an objective evaluation system. But if you're working on software, they think you want to build report and work with the same people all the time (not an unreasonable assumption). So in the software side, they put you on 3-6 month long projects, all of which are with the same PM. So you don't get very many snapshots (because there aren't that many projects in a year) and they're all from the same person. Half my team and I got laid off because our management was incapable of selling projects. I was on the bench 40% of my time at Deloitte. Tried to make use of that time to make useful tools, which just got me into more trouble. Got told "libraries are a waste of time". Tried to bring in some of my contacts for potential contracts (I had been freelance before Deloitte and had a few leads come back after I joined), got yelled at for that. Tried finding projects within the company, got yelled at for that, too. Never did get told how I was supposed to be using my time. And I mean literally yelled at. I got sat down and scolded like I was some child in school. The only saving grace: my former boss got fired for harassment about a month before I got laid off, and I'm pretty sure I helped it happen. Though it had been there 8th complaint against him in so many years, so actually, probably not. He probably got the can because he missed his sales targets 8 years in a row. Yes, eight. Stay away from anywhere that is organised as a partnership.
- bluedino 6y agoSome sort of IBM in the background. Contract gets build out to have a web interface built for it. You might see PHP or something (Zend makes a PHP Server product for IBM). However, like at any non-tech business, you will see crazy shit. Maybe the guy who worked on it wasn't that great at PHP or wasn't real good at web programming, or didn't follow best practices with databases. A 'good' programmer could come in and clean up the code, clean up the data structures, introduce things like memcache, and speed stuff up significantly.
- moron4hire 6y agoMore directly to your question, for a giganto consulting shop like Deloitte, the tech stack is whatever the client wants. They have people for everything. They'll also lie and say they have people for anything they don't have, then outsource it again. Even in the hyper-niche field I was working in, we weren't the only team in the company working in that field. Do not underestimate how little the left hand knows what the right is doing in a partnership-organized company. The people I worked with in my niche were some of the best people in the world at that work. The failure to deliver projects was 100% a problem of management. Deloitte has so many fingers in so many pies that you literally spend two, separate weeks every year letting them paw through your financials to see what stocks you and your spouse own, what business interests you have, to make sure there is no supposed "conflict of interest". It never came up for me, but theoretically I could have been barred from working on any particular project if, say, my wife's 401(k) had an index fund that had stock in the client company.
- txcwpalpha 6y agoI worked at one of Deloitte's sister companies (another one of the Big 4). I used to think the same way you did, until I later had experience working with other software consulting companies. As bad as Deloitte et al are (and holy shit are they bad, especially at producing software), they are sadly still much better than most of the other clown shops out there.
- paxys 6y agoI have worked with some amazing consulting firms, but those came with a $250/hr per developer price tag at the cheap end. It says something though that large companies wouldn't blink at paying that much for a lawyer or skilled mechanic, but when it comes to software they'll go for the cheap option and then complain about bugs.
- stepstop 6y ago> most of the other clown shops out there Who, in your experience? Because the smaller shops tend to have brighter people, often with the founder involved (or one-step removed), in my experience
- txcwpalpha 6y agoSmaller shops are a huge hit-or-miss minefield in my experience. Some of them can be rockstars, but those rockstars are typically already 100% engaged with a long-term client or are on the road to be acquired by Deloitte et al. On the other hand, most of the non-rockstars might as well just be staffing agencies that aren't any better than hiring a random part time dev from craiglist. The sweet spot in my experience is the mid-size consulting companies, like around ~500 employees or so, because you know that they are at least good enough to stay in business long enough to grow, but they also aren't yet big enough to be bureacratic, incentive-warped, soul-sucking machines like Deloitte/Accenture.
- move-on-by 6y agoI worked for them as well and lost count how many times myself and my product owner were in calls where upper management were promising features that had a fundamental conflict with major design decisions. Leadership absolutely did not want to hear about it and became hostile. We both left the company and are much happier. Terrible company, when I hear ‘run like a startup’ I have flashbacks.
- 65536 6y agoIt’s ironic. In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to, but they will happily waste millions of dollars paying someone to do a shitty job.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoTangent: during my last stint on unemployment, there was this class we were required to attend. In that class, they repeatedly told us that we are not entitled to unemployment benefits. They didn't exactly offer an alternative vocabulary.
- cosmie 6y agoIt certainly fits the government's definition of an entitlement[1]. It's also structured as a non-optional, government-ran insurance scheme predominantly funded through explicit payroll tax obligations[2], which employers aren't entitled to opt out of. As long as you meet your states particular flavor of requirements, you're entitled to your unemployment insurance benefits. Despite any statements to the contrary states may push in their mandatory unemployment class. [1] https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/entitlement.htm https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/entitlement.h... [2] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-unemployment-insurance-trust-fund-and-how-it-financed https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-unemploym...
- c3534l 6y agoThat's absurd. They take it out of your paycheck every month, it's paid entirely from employee wages, it can't be spent on anything but unemployment, and you get benefits proportional to what you contributed. It's literally your own money that they're giving back to you that they took for the sole purpose of forcing you to save money for if you lose your job at some point. It's like if I asked to borrow a pen, then when you asked for it back pretending like it was some benevolent gift.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoIt's definitely not a line item on paychecks in my state. It's structured as an insurance premium paid by companies to the state. The company's premiums increase when there's a claim against the "policy." Smaller companies like to try denying claims in an attempt to prevent this increase. One could certainly argue that if this 'premium' didn't exist, it could be paid out in salaries.
- deviation 6y agoSoftware consultant chiming in here. Deloitte is a dirty word that most people in the office react sourly to... This doesn't surprise me one bit.
- spyspy 6y agoMy fiancée is a senior tech consultant at a big 4 firm and I can say with the utmost confidence that they have zero ability to actually build things. I specifically watched her project manage a multi-million dollar product for a client. Clueless. Consultants are good, organized, hard-working people but they are not technical in the ways most on HN are. And the outsourced dev teams they hire at bottom dollar will just never deliver anything of quality.
- txcwpalpha 6y agoI'm a former tech consulting manager at one of the B4 and my experience is that the types of multi-million dollar software projects that they get involved in are lose-lose situations from the start. They are always high-profile, huge projects that a ton of executives, salespeople, etc all have their hands in, and everyone is fully aware that the delivered product is going to be a steaming bureacratic pile of shit with a never-ending list of feature requests and bugs, no matter who they hire. Then they hire Deloitte/IBM/Accenture because Deloitte/IBM/Accenture are so big that they are the only companies that will knowingly take on a losing project as long as they get paid handsomely for it. And if the project is gonna be a loser anyway, why would you waste your best people on it instead of the C-stringers from your offshored development center? At my B4, the major multi-million dollar government projects like that were basically the company graveyard where you were staffed when literally no other project would take you. For the actually successful and typically much smaller software projects, we actually had a subsidiary company with a much better reputation that would handle the design and development instead of our offshore dev centers.
- cpeterso 6y agoWhat is the solution? How can these huge systems be developed economically and correctly? These government agencies don't have the technical experience to hire and manage their own software developers and, from what people say, the big consulting firms don't either and/or they don't care. But a smaller firm that might be able to deliver a working solution would be seen as "too risky" to be awarded a big government contract when compared to a large, well-known consulting firm.
- my_usernam3 6y agoI saw a Vox video recently that hinted that the Government WANTED broken unemployment systems after showing some of the bugs that existed in their interface. It infuriated me, because they mentioned Deloitte built it and I (like others have mentioned in this thread) know they are infamous for bad software. It appeared to me Vox wanted to make people mad at some bogus government conspiracy that a specific state had against it's people. Also that they don't respect the complexities that go into software development. Edit so you can get mad at Vox too with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ualUPur6iks&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ualUPur6iks&t=1s
- dsparkman 6y agoFlorida purposely built a broken system under Governor Rick Scott. It was engineered to make sure that as few eligible people could access it as possible. It is socially and technically engineered to make it so that people give up trying to claim the unemployment benefits they are entitled to. Florida used the system to keep their unemployment numbers artificially low coming out 2008 recession.
- ryankupyn 6y agoI'd note that while a broken unemployment system would affect statistics on the number of claims made, the official unemployment rate is calculated differently, using the Current Population Survey, and doesn't incorporate data on claims: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
- thephyber 6y agoThe state of Florida cares less about the unemployment rate and more about whether they have to pay out of their unemployment fund. The federal government is different because they just increase the deficit whenever the situation is dire.
- newacct583 6y agoSo you contend that the ~7x delta in unemployment benefit uptake between states that they start the video with is... solely due to bad Deloitte software? That seems no less suspicious to me.
- cosmotic 6y agoAlthough they aren't mentioned in the article, it seems like a pretty similar story: I worked for Accenture and they cared very little about the end user, product, or the client. The things they cared the most about were sales, billable hours, and reputation. As a software engineer, every review season completely ignored all of my technical accomplishments and problem solving skills and focused entirely on growing sales and billable hours. The cherry on top was the way they treated their employees that were working in the states on Indian salaries. They no doubt billed the customer ten times what they were paying the employee while claiming cost savings. The dishonesty, disrespect, and lack of integrity were palpable. It's no wonder why projects managed by large consulting companies are total disasters.
- OmarShehata 6y agoThis doesn't make sense to me. You mention "reputation" as one of the things they care about. How does delivering a broken product not destroy that?
- elliekelly 6y agoThe people consulting firms “deliver” to have no idea it’s broken and don’t really care because they’ve never seen the software or process and they never will. Plus, Deloitte said it’s fixed now and Deloitte knows best or else they wouldn’t have charged so much, right?
- three_seagrass 6y agoHalf the reason these consulting firms get hired is to be a scapegoat by the director/exec when things go south. Liability is one reason they can charge a premium.
- moralestapia 6y agoNot OP but (s)he never mentioned anything about shipping broken products ...
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- linuxftw 6y agoAlternative title: Incompetent bureaucrats wasted tax payer money, as usual. There's a saying in the home building industry: "If the boss says put the toilet on the roof, you put the toilet on the roof." So often in government contracts, the people writing them are the complete and utter definition of incompetent.
- dangus 6y agoI don’t think the article convinced me that Deloitte is specifically at fault for these systems failing. They were paid one time to design a system, seven years ago, to handle probably less than 1/10 of the kind of volume that we are seeing due to the pandemic. It really isn’t Deloitte’s fault that our government isn’t willing to just pay civil servant employees to build and maintain technology in house. I don’t claim to know why the government is so sub-contractor happy but I guess that’s the way it is right now. Also, the government needs to stop thinking about software like it can be boiled down to a one-time cost. Building software one time and leaving it alone to rot for a decade doesn’t work.
- bluedino 6y ago1/10th isn't even close. In my state you were looking at 40x the volume. And you have a good point, that much more traffic is probably going to break a lot of systems. Not to mention, even if the systems were only down for a few hours or a few days, the government agencies just don't have the manpower to process all those claims. Especially when people are working from home or not working at all. Then you have the massive fraud. A perfect time for scammers to apply for unemployment benefits. Remember the people who don't have computers and call their claims in via touch-tone. Those systems all crashed as well, or had busy signals for weeks.
- jariel 6y agoThe kinds of volume we are talking about should be irrelevant for such a system if was designed to handle scale in any capacity. I mean, there could be bottlenecks, fair enough, but I'm doubtful that's the problem.
- blunte 6y agoWho's managing the projects, and where are the workers doing the development? This story sounds awfully familiar.
- TrackerFF 6y agoNot just unemployment systems. There's a graveyard of broken systems made for governments, all over the world. I genuinely believe that their business model is to ship out unfinished and broken software, and then spend xx years billing them (steeply) for upgrades and maintenance. That's of the few explanations that makes a lot of sense. edit: This isn't only aimed at Deloitte, lots of habitual offenders out there.
- imglorp 6y agoIt's not clear how so many government procurement systems are broken everywhere. As a counterexample of some procurement did work, just a tiny one, my state DOT rebuilt a major road over a decade. The whole project was many millions broken out into milestones and each milestone had penalties for being late and rewards for early, presumably with some quality gates too. The contractors got it done. So it is possible, just not common. Another example is NASA batting 1 for 2 on Commercial Crew, although politics messed up the ULA half of that.
- thephyber 6y ago> It's not clear how so many government procurement systems are broken everywhere. One of the two major political parties in the USA actively sabotages government projects. The other one frequently fails to wield the tools of government well. Some of the procurement details might not be clear, but it's not terribly hard to figure out where the upstream problems are.
- mi100hael 6y agoI don't think it's typically that partisan. I have an insider's perspective on one of the systems mentioned in the article, and from what I could see, politics played no part until everything went off the rails and they started flinging shit in the media. Things start out with a few in-house sysadmins hacking together some scripts to start batch loading records into a database or whatever. At some point they get far enough along to decide to bring in an external consulting firm to build out a more fully-featured solution. At that point, it becomes a very ironic situation. The meat of the requirements are laid out by career bureaucrats who work in state government agencies (unemployment, in this case). They are extremely risk-averse because their jobs are typically very secure and, barring any criminal activity, the only thing that can sink a career is some sort of publicized failure involving taxpayer dollars. So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large, established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty. Furthermore, they want to go from 0-100 right away and convert an old manual paper process to a fully-featured SaaS-style product in one go with a bunch of different feature requests coming from different people. Thus they ironically end up with a massive risk of failure precisely because of the steps they took to mitigate risk in their minds. They have no prior experience developing software and are usually lacking in overall technical expertise. Really they have no business designing any sort of software solution or negotiating a contract to build one. It's doomed to fail simply based on the premise. The best outcome would be for a dedicated SaaS company to build something that could be purchased by multiple states. I actually briefly explored starting something like this but couldn't make the numbers work. These departments have very little discretionary budget. Selling to each state would require a literal act of congress, and your TAM is only 53 distinct customers. And because of the inability to quickly make a purchase, they all seem to start out with that in-house hacked approach which naturally leads to paying for consultants to "improve" it, not starting over with a product purchase.
- Luechkt 6y agoMy wife works for a state in a department using software being made by a company mentioned. The weekly meetings and calls are so astonishingly slow and deal with such meaningless minutiae that I am sadly not surprised at this article. Heartbroken a bit, nit not surprised.
- aplummer 6y agoEx Deloitte here: In several years I never once saw the firm not deliver what they agreed to in writing. There’s one way to deal with a consulting firm: a rock solid statement of work and people on the client side to verify you got exactly what you paid for. If the system didn’t work as agreed in the statement of work and that was clear, Deloitte would be footing the bill. If you gave out a time and materials contract without clear acceptance criteria, testing requirements, and verification / support / warranty detailed, you probably shouldn’t be handling 100 million dollar budgets.
- h0l0cube 6y ago> acceptance criteria, testing requirements, and verification / support / warranty detailed Some orgs just don't have the in-house capability to do this, so they seek a consulting firm... oh wait. Edit: I guess the strategy is to hire technical staff, keep them around a few years until you can be sure they can deliver on projects and understand your existing systems and processes, and then embark on the larger project to transform those systems and processes. Alternatively, shop around to find a consulting firm that is motivated to have good long-term outcomes. Probably a smaller operation, that has good word-of-mouth reputation, but doesn't have an established brand to fall back on.
- aplummer 6y agoYep on a 100 million dollar budget you need to hire people to manage software delivery on your side and can never absolve end responsibility is definitely my point. I’m not describing how the world should work, just how it does when outsourcing IT to consultancies (which can work anywhere from successfully to very unsuccessfully)
- aplummer 6y agoTo your edit: A good strategy is to hire a team, get a few consultants who have literally built the same system down the road, and use that blended team until 2.X release. That way you a team that has made a thing already (and often consultants are just as passionate about their work too!) ready to build a better 2.0, plus you keep responsibility and control.
- dseGH3FETWJJy 6y agoRemember the healthcare.gov rollout? It was built by EY and I may have worked there. It was being hosted from one of the main developers homes. Let that sink in for a few...
- jariel 6y agoCGI was the lead. Proudly Canadian exporters of dysfunction.
- rjkennedy98 6y agoIt was CGI Federal (the US version of CGI) and QSSI (eventually bought by Optum part of UnitedHealth Group). CGI was the lead contractor and got it by low balling on the website. When CGI immediately got behind on project deliverables (2 years before launch) they started forcing all the people to work 7 days a week which immediately caused every good developer to leave. All that was left were the most inept H1B developers I've ever seen (some literally couldn't touch type). I joined 2 weeks before launch as a product consultant. There were basically no senior people working there at all. It was a bunch of middle managers and either inept H1Bs or fresh college students brought on as subcontractors. There is no way it could've succeeded in any alternative universe. Basically no one cared about the product at all, everyone only cared about their slice of the pie, and by everyone I mean the tens of different subcontracting companies and middlemen that were involved. The only reason CGI even lost the contract is because it was such bad publicity HHS had no choice. CGI ended up suing and I'm pretty sure they were given alternative contracts anyways. There was never any accountability for anyone involved. When I quit I made sure the next job I had wouldn't get close to government contracting.
- beckler 6y agoI saw Mikey Dickerson give a great talk about his experience leading the completion of healthcare.gov, and it sounds like you only saw a slice of it. This is the talk I attended: https://youtu.be/7Vc8sxhy2I4 https://youtu.be/7Vc8sxhy2I4
- SavageBeast 6y agoNobody wants to bring up Accenture here? Why should Deloitte get all the credit? There is plenty to go around. The large publicly traded consulting companies are like the mafia - once you let them in the door, they're not leaving until all your money is gone. Thats all there is to it. Funny thing is those companies are never brought in by technical departments. My most recent experience saw the Marketing dept bring in CONSULTING COMPANY to do a particular job because the internal Engineering department's quote for the same work was "5 times what CONSULTING COMPANY said it should cost if they did it". (queue violent laughter for those who have seen this joke play out) It was a mess - consultants were as inept as they were numerous but damn, they dressed nice every day. They all had great glasses too, like they were assigned by the wardrobe department. Picture a Banana Republic Catalog's worth of new, very young people running around the office and you get it. I'm not saying these consultants were inept because they couldn't invert a binary tree or because they couldn't tell me the time complexity of a HashTable. I'm saying it because they literally knew nothing aside from the intensive training CONSULTING COMPANY gave them for this job. If it was not covered in training they not only couldn't do it but didn't know what it was in the first place. The whole project became a train wreck in slow motion. You could see it was going to be bad but it had so much momentum there was no chance of stopping it. Must be how the people felt on the Titanic come to think of it. Things got so insane I realized that the consultants and those responsible were looking for someone to blame - and I promptly accepted a new job offer and vanished in a puff of smoke. I would later find out I was on the short list of people to be "promoted" to manage deliverables for that project!
- phone8675309 6y agoAfter being laid off in 2016 I joined a big consulting company (you've heard of them but they're not Accenture) because I needed to pay the rent. I didn't come up through their training program as a new graduate but as an experienced developer. Every year I got glowing praise from the client - I solved the problems they had faster than their in house guys did, I delivered on time with the lowest defects of any contractor across all firms that worked at the client, and was a domain expert in one of the client's systems after about six months there. Do you know what the consulting company offered me as a raise? $150 on top of my base salary. Not $150 a week or month - $150 total. When my consulting company reviews came back, despite high praise from the client, I wasn't enough of a member of the consulting company's team because 1) I didn't hang out with only consultants from the company, 2) I didn't attend drinking events every week with consultants from that company, and 3) I was too specialized on what the client did, so how were they going to move me to another client for more money? I stuck around for another year and then the client negotiated hiring me on directly. I will starve before I work as a consultant at someone else's consultancy. I'll start my own one-man firm first.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoQuestion for the HN crowd: My apologies if I offend anyone (sure I will), but I can't imagine a good programmer wanting to work for any of the big tech consulting companies. They don't pay very well, their work is generally boring but tedious, and their corporate cultures are not known for attracting top talent. If you're a good programmer, seems like the top options are: 1. Join a FAANG or other well-regarded software company (e.g. a Salesforce-like company) 2. Join a startup 3. Research (academia) or a company that does big "research-like" work (e.g. the NSA, SpaceX, etc.) So I just don't see any way this kind of work is going to get done and not kinda suck.
- treis 6y agoIt's not true that consulting companies pay the least. They're not paying like the FAANGs or unicorns but they're higher than working for industry. As an example, at my level I can make ~200k as a consultant but only 150ish as a direct employee. It's crazy because they're willing to pay ~400k for me as a contractor.
- alistairSH 6y agoDefine "good salary". In the DC area, they pay well. We don't have the unicorn FAANG salaries you see in SV or Seattle, but $150k+ isn't uncommon for somebody with a few years under their belt. The biggest problem I see with them is they tend to throw bodies at the problems. Many junior employees trying to build complex solutions isn't efficient. Even if those junior employees are smart. Also, not everybody can get hired at a FAANG, sometimes because they're good but not great, sometimes because the FAANG hiring process is terrible, and sometimes because they don't want to live in SV.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago> $150k+ isn't uncommon for somebody with a few years under their belt. I don't think that's much higher than government employees make these days. In DC an engineer "with a few years under their belt" can easily make that at a startup and be working on much more interesting problems for a much less slimy company. There are plenty of jobs outside of FAANG that pay that or better. The parent isn't wrong, at least in my experience, nobody who is technically competent would take a job at one of those places (and in my experience none of the technical people coming out of them have been competent).
- touchpadder 6y agoIR35 reform in the UK(every contractor must pay as much taxes as full time employee and no expenses allowed) is a conspiracy of Deloitte and the government
- Nextgrid 6y agoSource? (neither supporting nor disproving your claim, just genuinely curious as IR35 is something that could affect me)
- rexreed 6y agoIt is the apex of mediocrity to hire the apex of mediocre consulting body shops that are the so called global systems integrators.
- sjg007 6y agoSure... probably by design? And 90% of the work was outsourced.
- diogenescynic 6y agoDeloitte is a horrible consulting company. I worked at a company where someone senior in my org had a husband who was a partner at Deloitte. We ended up going from barely using consultants to using them for everything. They even billed us for our own work and most of the time just ran down the clock on the contract and left without finishing the project. Pretty sure what our senior leader was doing was shady and wrong. I ended up leaving and noted this situation in my exit interview but nothing was ever changed. Conflicts of interest aren’t taken as seriously as they should be.
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoI've worked with a bunch of Ex-Deloitte people and without fail they all could talk forever about the subject at hand, sound very technical, but in practice were completely incapable of executing anything correctly, and had absolutely no knowledge of their subjects of "expertise" beneath the surface. They really are expert bullshitters. I think the real trick to being an expert bullshitter though is that you have to forget that you even are bullshitting. Ex-Deloitte people have deluded the most important person which is themselves. In technical conversations it's almost as if the idea that there even was something beneath technical talk behind these ideas. It's to the point now where Deloitte on a resume is a huge red flag.
- fzeroracer 6y agoAre people surprised by this? This happened also over two years ago during Hurricane Maria where the contractor failed to supply food to Puerto Rico. The reality is that all consulting firms are trash. From big to small. They pay their employees far less than working direct and abuse foreign workers looking for a good career. They don't care about the product or the people they work with. I used to work as a contractor and the people I worked with was fantastic, but what I saw from the larger companies and the way they treated their work was awful. The incentives are just not aligned properly because the higher-ups only care about prolonging contracts and siphoning more money, not about actual quality. For the government we'd be in a better place if they just hired people directly rather than going through contracting firms to play telephone and get a non-working product out of it.
- moron4hire 6y agoWhile we're shitting on Deloitte: Between the target billable rate they give you and the amount of time you spend on regulatory compliance, plus the fact that your own vacation time counts against your billable rate, you're guaranteed to have to work at least 10 hours of unpaid overtime every week just to hit your target. I accidentally started a small riot during my introductory training period when I did the math in my head and blurted it out in the room of 50 other new people. The guy running the training left shortly after I got canned, started his own business, and even sent me some work. He hated that place, too.
- fractal618 6y agoDog eat dog
- unnouinceput 6y agoQuote: "Deloitte also faced blowback in 2013 for an unemployment benefits system it built in Massachusetts. There, the benefits system arrived in 2013, two years late and $6 million over budget—only to be filled with glitches that erroneously cut workers’ benefits, according to the Boston Globe." Ha! I don't think those were glitches, but a clever plan to siphon here and there a bit of extra money. Kind of "you cut them a small amount of money, you get some, I get some" deal between state officials and Deloitte. Easy to blame computers when you do this and have experience. This is a classic case of evil genius at work.
- amINeolib 6y ago1 billion dollars later healthcare.gov almost works good. Sure I need to click the same 14 screens just to get to the Health insurance options screen, and sure any time I open a URL on page 4 and hit back, it takes me to the top of page 1.... But government healthcare would surely not run into issues that seem to trouble every other government service. (Can I post /s or does that delete your post?)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danielodievich 6y agoSo I work for an APM vendor. COVID-based unemployment has been excellent for our public sector sales (as well for other APM vendors who are the competition). One of the sales people went to (I think) every unemployment insurance department in every state and pitched them our software. Quite a few were standing in a smoldering wreckage and they gladly accepted to see what they could do. That is how I personally got to look at the guts of unemployment insurance system of Kansas and Florida back in May. The KS system was ... well judge for yourself. It was run on 3 (yes that's three) servers - a 8 CPU 32GB web server hosting UI and IVR web service, a 4CPU 48GB service layer hosting a WCF service talking to mainframe, and some auxilary 2CPU 4GB server doing some little batch stuff. Yes, that's right, no redundancy. That's for the state with almost 4 million people. The bottlenecks were all in the mainframe which was reached by via screenscraping host key-sending software, which was doing GC.Collect on every end of the given session. It worked well when nobody was using the unemployment system but once half the state of KS lost their jobs, everything melted down. The vendor for the host-key fixed the library by commenting our GC.Collect. Don't know what happened afterwards. Then next week I got a look at FL which is the uFacts system built by Deloitte https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solutions/unemployment-insurance-services.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solution... mentioned in the article. There was no Deloitte there anymore and from what I can tell there hasn't been for 3 years. That one was is a standard 3 tier (web layer, services layer, database layer) hosted by more than enough hardware on web and services layer - although very much an inconsistent hodgepodge of IaaS machines from Azure, but it all ended in the big Oracle database that had some atrocious performance under heavy load. All timeouts were cranked up to the limit - I am talking WCF/WS timeouts north of 600 seconds, and Oracle DB query timeouts set to what I think is infinity - so things just backpressured out of the slow Oracle queries like there is no tomorrow. But optimizations were pretty obvious. They had an "Messages" table that was adding all the things that could happen to a case that was north of 100M records and suffered tremendously on the inserts. Pretty easy sharding or just archiving opportunity. Here I and couple of my colleagues were able to get to the team leads and developers in charge to present our findings. Even though the governor was yelling at them and the lawsuits were filed and people were struggling, the response back from the dev leads was remarkably devoid of urgency. "well that we already know about this, we'll hoping to be getting to this 3 sprints from now". We all shrugged and moved on.
- chasd00 6y agothis article reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not part of the solution there's money to be made prolonging the problem".
- chansiky 6y agoFor all the people talking about how much BS there is in big consulting, dont any of you think there could be a business model that could usurp the way the BS'ing boys club siphons money through narcissism, lies, and incompetence by replacing them with better quality development for a smaller price tag (but still with very well paid developers - from the looks of it)? I'm personally thinking of a team building model where developers can join together and form teams to bid on projects and win financial rewards for delivering, reviewing, and passing quality benchmarks, with some sort of rating system in place to keep bad actors and bs-er's out.
- shaabanban 6y agoAn immediate problem I see with this is the realistic estimates problem. If you go to your average deloit/accenture customer and offer them the services of this anti-BS'ing boys club collective, and then deloit swoops in and says they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the massive excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the requirements that flat out make no sense, then guess who is likely to the win the bid? In the end it will be your deloits and your Accentures that win and then predictably the project will run long, not tick every requirement, and end up costing double.
- chansiky 6y ago> says they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the massive excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the requirements that flat out make no sense I see your point, thanks for the counter arg, I can't refute this. It seems the key strategy is to make the payer aware of how much BS they're paying for... but knowing all the people I know, I know that's just flat out not going to happen save for a very small percentage of people.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> form teams to bid on projects and win financial rewards for delivering, reviewing, and passing quality benchmarks I work in a government agency and a friend is at another one. That would not work simply because the government is terrible at defining the project and actually hammering things down. I have been working on a project for nearly a year as an internal developer. I couldn't with any reasonable level of clarity tell you what it is my project needs to do.
- canada_dry 6y agoI've been on both sides of the argument and there's plenty of blame to go around. On the client side there's the utter lack of clarity, plus in-fighting and adversarial dynamics between departments and execs. On the consulting side, it's just too easy to milk all the issues on the client side. Including playing one side off another - like lawyers in a never ending divorce settlement.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoClients are never clear. They don't know what they want, need or how to express it. I consider it my job to work with them until it becomes clear. I bill them for that. If the project fails because of lack lf clairity, it's my fault.
- neilwilson 6y agoIt's always worth remembering that large firms like this are not hired for their ability to deliver products but the free underpants the brand supplies to the hirer. It's never about the delivery. It's about the backside covering.
- maerF0x0 6y agoAnecdotally, when I had a stint in consulting I eventually learned that whenever a client wanted estimates the only way I could get the contract was to bid about 1/2 of what I knew it would actually take, else one of my competitors would do the same and they would get it. These same clients would usually be giving me much praise when we'd eventually deliver 100% over budget, because that was "much better than their last contractor"... A lot of times the buyer isnt even qualified to do that and so the seller has all the power.
- robinduckett 6y agoI had a recruiter from Deloitte approach me, telling me how great I'd be for the role they had in mind for me, etc. They wanted a phone interview immediately. I said fine, I'll go for an interview. Then I got an email thanking me for my application but my skillset was unsuitable. Except I never applied for any role, never gave out my CV (although it is out there in the wild). Absolutely wild. They can't tell their asshole from their elbow.
- saint_abroad 6y agoEnterprise software consultancy is a variation of the design price-list https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/graphic-design-price-list-charge-clients/ https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/graphic-design-price-list...: $100k Consultancy spec everything $200k Consultancy spec, provides client with drafts $300k Consultancy spec, listens to client feedback $500k Consultancy spec, accepts client changes to requirements $800k Client spec, accepts consultancy changes to requirements $1.3M Client spec, listens to consultancy feedback $2.1M Client spec, provides consultancy with drafts $3.4M Client spec everything
- tomohawk 6y agoYes, there are sharks out there who do poor work. That's why we should expect the government procurement process to be competent. If the government hires a shark, the shark is not suddenly going to change. We should be holding the government responsible for hiring the shark in the first place. When a government hires a consulting firm to perform a service, the responsibility does not shift to the firm - it remains with the government. When procuring the system, did the government provide adequate requirements? Did they perform proper diligence in selecting the consultant? Did they provide proper oversight of the work? The answer is rarely 'yes' to all of these questions.
- darepublic 6y agoA bit tangential but I recall working with a company that wanted to use a particular very expensive brand name closed source software framework to build their ecommerce site. The going price on using this was in the half million ballpark. Working with this framework I was incredulous that anyone would actually want to buy this framework -- also none of the sites I have seen built on this actually work very well. But the force of the brand name and the audacity of the asking price just seem to mix well I suppose. If you are in a corporate setting with little technical ability, and more money to spend than brains, 'you won't get fired' if you choose to go with vendor X (not IBM but point stands) -- even if vendor X is going to fleece you of millions while providing little value. Its just the safe thing to do.
- majkinetor 6y agoYou must be talking about Oracle ADF :)
- mi100hael 6y agoBiggest question in my mind is why state bureaucrats are given the latitude to think it's a good idea to build their own one-off solutions. There are 50+ markets for these sorts of systems. It makes absolutely zero sense for them each to build & maintain their own software products. Of course big consulting firms are going to _leap_ at the opportunity to bill $50M per state and then throw together products as cheaply as possible. States need to start working together on these platforms with in-house technical teams that can actually own the systems long-term. Or we need to make it far easier for them to purchase SaaS products like any sane private market.
- phonon 6y agoThat's something they've been working on since 2010. See http://www.itsc.org/itsc%20public%20library/NationalViewUI_IT%20Systems.pdf http://www.itsc.org/itsc%20public%20library/NationalViewUI_I... And what http://www.itsc.org/ http://www.itsc.org/ and https://www.naswa.org/ https://www.naswa.org/ are supposed to help with.
- mi100hael 6y agoNASWA is good at facilitating knowledge-sharing, but they are no better equipped to build a software product than any state IT department. Each state is still ultimately handling "modernization" in their own way. There's very little appetite for COTS for whatever reason, and little sharing of technical components between states.
- phonon 6y agoIf a motivated small company wanted to work with NASWA in a "not business as usual" approach, perhaps with 18F involved, I believe it could be done. Part of their role is to reduce duplicative efforts across states and try to establish best practices. The problem of course is how many small companies are knowledgeable about the UI IT systems, and can put together a strong proposal? It's a bit chicken and egg. Yes, NASWA could push this harder if they really wanted to, but it's hard to manage a consensus oriented organization. (I was not implying NASWA was going to build things themselves...though if I were king, I would have them develop an open source UI platform, and then give it to the states to customize for their individual scenarios. Companies could compete on how well they make those customizations, and support contracts. Of course the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction, unfortunately... c.f. VistA -> Cerner).
- DeonPenny 6y agoIts a government program. Why are people surprised at this point. It literally always happens. Literally every single time.