4 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
Perhaps, 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 ago
Purely 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 ago
  Visual Basic and MongoDB on Azure.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Doesn'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 ago
    What, no /s? What's sad is that you could be serious and correct.
    - TrackerFF 6y ago
      Well, to the defense of VB - it's .NET, so that shouldn't be much of a big deal these days.
- spyspy 6y ago
  In 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 ago
    It'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 ago
  They'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 ago
    6 to 7 figures for the API and DB? Literally the ELT?
    - treis 6y ago
      No, 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 ago
  There 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 ago
  Some 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 ago
  More 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.
  - jariel 6y ago
    I'm going to be that salary is not hugely correlated with skill, but more or less skill in marketing. It takes talent to recognize talent so I think most of software is mispriced.
  - qwepeyote 6y ago
    Name some. mailto:decode(“7872746f7370776f3131377a40636f636b2e6c69“)
- 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 ago
    Smaller 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 ago
I 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.

I 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 ago

Perhaps, 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 ago

Purely 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 ago
Visual Basic and MongoDB on Azure.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Doesn'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 ago
  What, no /s? What's sad is that you could be serious and correct.
  - TrackerFF 6y ago
    Well, to the defense of VB - it's .NET, so that shouldn't be much of a big deal these days.
spyspy 6y ago
In 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 ago
  It'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 ago
They'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 ago
  6 to 7 figures for the API and DB? Literally the ELT?
  - treis 6y ago
    No, 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 ago
There 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 ago
Some 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 ago
More 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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.
- jariel 6y ago
  I'm going to be that salary is not hugely correlated with skill, but more or less skill in marketing. It takes talent to recognize talent so I think most of software is mispriced.
- qwepeyote 6y ago
  Name some. mailto:decode(“7872746f7370776f3131377a40636f636b2e6c69“)
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 ago
  Smaller 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 ago

I 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.