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Although 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, produ

Although 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 ago
This 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Half 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 ago
  Not OP but (s)he never mentioned anything about shipping broken products ...
  - cosmotic 6y ago
    If OP is me, I think it was implied when I referenced quality. If it was the author of the article, I believe that was part of the title of the article.
- boogies 6y ago
  The companies seem to be claiming that their products work fine in other places and blaming their customers for the places where they fail. > The consulting company defended its performance at the time, saying it was continuing to improve the system and it would run more smoothly as employees from the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) learned to use it properly. > “As we have communicated to DEO, we believe that any remaining issues deemed ‘high impact’ by DEO’s own definition either require Departmental actions or are otherwise beyond Deloitte’s control,” they said. > Price also said the company had worked on systems in states including Minnesota and New Mexico, which he said have weathered problems relatively well.
- jariel 6y ago
  Because quality isn't what matters, and they can paper over it with ads, personal relationships, presentations, sponsorships. I had a pretty good experience with Sapient once. I suggest it probably depends a lot on the location though I would never touch Accenture or Deloitte and would only allow Bain or McKinsey to deliver on something for which they had very material experience, and never let them do actual work because they will f it up.
- Vervious 6y ago
  At least now their reputation has gone up in smoke amongst the hacker news readership.
- wisty 6y ago
  In a badly managed mess of a project, "reputation" means never implicating the wrong person in the inevitable miss-steps. And by "wrong person", I mean "your boss, your customer, or anyone who they are friends with".
- raz32dust 6y ago
  People who hire these companies are typically not competent enough to recognize a broken product.
  - diogenescynic 6y ago
    Spot on, that’s it exactly. Worked with Deloitte aka Doolittle for several years and they delivered consistent crap results, but the people who kept signing the contracts weren’t even SMEs in the area of their responsibility.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Reputation is managed by networking: going drinking with the right people is often more important than delivering quality products. Or, in the case of government contracting, providing a revolving door for people who leave government to be given lucrative private sector jobs. G4S were selected to run a new private prison at the same time as being fined £44m for previous fraud. But then, private prisons in the UK aren't a "market" - how could they be? There's only one buyer and in practice only one seller.
asjfj9 6y ago
Isn't the whole point of consulting to win more work? You get promoted and paid because you have money coming in, so it makes sense to do what you can to keep winning more work (i.e. sales, billable hours and reputation). You shouldn't be working for a consulting firm if you don't want to focus on those things.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  If the institution implicitly understands its own incompetence (that they will explain away as "we just can't find good developers"), they know they can't win repeat contracts, so they optimize for milking the few that they do get.
- harpratap 6y ago
  It's a pretty well-known fact in Indian universities than anyone even a teeny bit serious about computers should never step foot in consulting companies (unless you are leading a green field project).
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Well that’s got to be impossible because how else do you guys get all the off shore work, if not through these companies?
    - harpratap 6y ago
      Firstly, India has a huge engineering population. Even if 10% of it is interested in consulting jobs, it's easily more than most countries. Secondly, most folks do engineering just because it's easy path to get a decent paying job. They don't really care about engineering itself, so consulting jobs are a happy medium, also they provide easy transition to customer facing roles or management which many folks want to move to anyway. And lastly, there's dearth of product based companies in India, so positions in such companies are highly lucrative and competitive. Consulting job is the last resort for someone interested in software. This entire phenomenon is so common there's a popular comedy sketch on it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPp4htuqDOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPp4htuqDOs Not really far from reality
richardknop 6y ago
Complete agreement.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Given how obvious their inability to deliver a functioning system is, how does their reputation intact?
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Because the stakeholders don't use the system they buy. They foist then on others. And any complaints are treated like the ignorant bleatings of the rabble. They'll drive home to their mansion in Herndon in their second BMW and it will never come up.
- davinic 6y ago
  Reputation risk avoidance. "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"
- cosmotic 6y ago
  Just barely functioning usually meets the requirements. Few had passion for making something they would be proud of.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jliptzin 6y ago
Don’t gripe, celebrate it! Huge companies getting conned by large consulting firms creates opportunities for startups. If Deloitte and others were actually good at what they do, it’s be much harder to compete. Large companies blowing a hole in their budget so that Deloitte can deliver a garbage product 6 months after the deadline is the kind of thing you want to hear if you’re involved in startups.
- myth_drannon 6y ago
  Startups have no chance with these clients. It's all about deep industry/government connections and kickbacks. It will be Adobe AEM consultants billing 300$/hour and not GatsbyJS ninjas.
  - hnick 6y ago
    This is true. I worked with a communications provider and we were not cheap by any means when it came to sending email/sms, and turnaround time and capability lagged behind any smaller group. The major driver from the clients was in not being blamed for picking the small company when (not if) something goes wrong, along with the usual sales and relationship building games that entrenched vendors play.
    - rv-de 6y ago
      Interesting reasoning. Few days ago when there was yet another GH outage I read in a comment here that it seems that larger companies get more slack for mistakes b/c of the idea that a large company must surely provide an as solid as possible product while if a smaller company fails people come around asking "why didn't you go with [large company] instead of this [small company]?". Also I observe it with Linux vs Windows. If you promote Linux and then something itches people are quick to express "this wouldn't have happened with Windows". While if Windows causes problems people will easily accept it as caused by higher powers. I wonder if there is a name for this David vs Goliath syndrome.
  - colek42 6y ago
    There are plenty of opportunities in the government for small businesses, mandated by law. Learn how to team to go after contracts and look into the SBIR open topic. It isn't easy and takes patience, humbleness, and work but the payoff is long term reccuring revenue from a customer that always pays.
megablast 6y ago
> As a software engineer, every review season completely ignored all of my technical accomplishments and problem solving skills How do you even measure that?
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Measure the success of the project via improved metrics, performance, bugs getting fixed, features getting done, etc. Instead, they measure if they billed 50 hrs every week and have successfully increased their client's consulting budget for next month.
tossthere 6y ago
> They no doubt billed the customer ten times what they were paying the employee while claiming cost savings. You forgot the part about how the engineer is very aware of this hourly arrangement and feels their job security depends on their ability to get work done in less time, and so they they take tons of shortcuts and pile up technical debt like crazy. Then the other engineer has to make changes through that technical debt, and he’s also very aware that his time is the company’s money (because the managers remind him of it constantly), so he does 20 hours of work over the weekend and logs it as 4 hours so his boss won’t get mad at him. And the part about how half of them will lose their visa and have to leave the country if they complain about any of it. If you’re reading this, and you write software for one company that later becomes the property of another company: QUIT. YOUR. JOB. RIGHT. NOW. Interview at ANY other company, your life can be 10x better in a few weeks, just go.

OmarShehata 6y ago

This 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Half 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 ago
Not OP but (s)he never mentioned anything about shipping broken products ...
- cosmotic 6y ago
  If OP is me, I think it was implied when I referenced quality. If it was the author of the article, I believe that was part of the title of the article.
boogies 6y ago
The companies seem to be claiming that their products work fine in other places and blaming their customers for the places where they fail. > The consulting company defended its performance at the time, saying it was continuing to improve the system and it would run more smoothly as employees from the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) learned to use it properly. > “As we have communicated to DEO, we believe that any remaining issues deemed ‘high impact’ by DEO’s own definition either require Departmental actions or are otherwise beyond Deloitte’s control,” they said. > Price also said the company had worked on systems in states including Minnesota and New Mexico, which he said have weathered problems relatively well.
jariel 6y ago
Because quality isn't what matters, and they can paper over it with ads, personal relationships, presentations, sponsorships. I had a pretty good experience with Sapient once. I suggest it probably depends a lot on the location though I would never touch Accenture or Deloitte and would only allow Bain or McKinsey to deliver on something for which they had very material experience, and never let them do actual work because they will f it up.
Vervious 6y ago
At least now their reputation has gone up in smoke amongst the hacker news readership.
wisty 6y ago
In a badly managed mess of a project, "reputation" means never implicating the wrong person in the inevitable miss-steps. And by "wrong person", I mean "your boss, your customer, or anyone who they are friends with".
raz32dust 6y ago
People who hire these companies are typically not competent enough to recognize a broken product.
- diogenescynic 6y ago
  Spot on, that’s it exactly. Worked with Deloitte aka Doolittle for several years and they delivered consistent crap results, but the people who kept signing the contracts weren’t even SMEs in the area of their responsibility.
pjc50 6y ago
Reputation is managed by networking: going drinking with the right people is often more important than delivering quality products. Or, in the case of government contracting, providing a revolving door for people who leave government to be given lucrative private sector jobs. G4S were selected to run a new private prison at the same time as being fined £44m for previous fraud. But then, private prisons in the UK aren't a "market" - how could they be? There's only one buyer and in practice only one seller.

asjfj9 6y ago

Isn't the whole point of consulting to win more work? You get promoted and paid because you have money coming in, so it makes sense to do what you can to keep winning more work (i.e. sales, billable hours and reputation). You shouldn't be working for a consulting firm if you don't want to focus on those things.

moron4hire 6y ago
If the institution implicitly understands its own incompetence (that they will explain away as "we just can't find good developers"), they know they can't win repeat contracts, so they optimize for milking the few that they do get.
harpratap 6y ago
It's a pretty well-known fact in Indian universities than anyone even a teeny bit serious about computers should never step foot in consulting companies (unless you are leading a green field project).
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Well that’s got to be impossible because how else do you guys get all the off shore work, if not through these companies?
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Firstly, India has a huge engineering population. Even if 10% of it is interested in consulting jobs, it's easily more than most countries. Secondly, most folks do engineering just because it's easy path to get a decent paying job. They don't really care about engineering itself, so consulting jobs are a happy medium, also they provide easy transition to customer facing roles or management which many folks want to move to anyway. And lastly, there's dearth of product based companies in India, so positions in such companies are highly lucrative and competitive. Consulting job is the last resort for someone interested in software. This entire phenomenon is so common there's a popular comedy sketch on it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPp4htuqDOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPp4htuqDOs Not really far from reality

richardknop 6y ago

Complete agreement.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

Given how obvious their inability to deliver a functioning system is, how does their reputation intact?

moron4hire 6y ago
Because the stakeholders don't use the system they buy. They foist then on others. And any complaints are treated like the ignorant bleatings of the rabble. They'll drive home to their mansion in Herndon in their second BMW and it will never come up.
davinic 6y ago
Reputation risk avoidance. "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"
cosmotic 6y ago
Just barely functioning usually meets the requirements. Few had passion for making something they would be proud of.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jliptzin 6y ago

Don’t gripe, celebrate it! Huge companies getting conned by large consulting firms creates opportunities for startups. If Deloitte and others were actually good at what they do, it’s be much harder to compete. Large companies blowing a hole in their budget so that Deloitte can deliver a garbage product 6 months after the deadline is the kind of thing you want to hear if you’re involved in startups.

myth_drannon 6y ago
Startups have no chance with these clients. It's all about deep industry/government connections and kickbacks. It will be Adobe AEM consultants billing 300$/hour and not GatsbyJS ninjas.
- hnick 6y ago
  This is true. I worked with a communications provider and we were not cheap by any means when it came to sending email/sms, and turnaround time and capability lagged behind any smaller group. The major driver from the clients was in not being blamed for picking the small company when (not if) something goes wrong, along with the usual sales and relationship building games that entrenched vendors play.
  - rv-de 6y ago
    Interesting reasoning. Few days ago when there was yet another GH outage I read in a comment here that it seems that larger companies get more slack for mistakes b/c of the idea that a large company must surely provide an as solid as possible product while if a smaller company fails people come around asking "why didn't you go with [large company] instead of this [small company]?". Also I observe it with Linux vs Windows. If you promote Linux and then something itches people are quick to express "this wouldn't have happened with Windows". While if Windows causes problems people will easily accept it as caused by higher powers. I wonder if there is a name for this David vs Goliath syndrome.
- colek42 6y ago
  There are plenty of opportunities in the government for small businesses, mandated by law. Learn how to team to go after contracts and look into the SBIR open topic. It isn't easy and takes patience, humbleness, and work but the payoff is long term reccuring revenue from a customer that always pays.

megablast 6y ago

> As a software engineer, every review season completely ignored all of my technical accomplishments and problem solving skills How do you even measure that?

ativzzz 6y ago
Measure the success of the project via improved metrics, performance, bugs getting fixed, features getting done, etc. Instead, they measure if they billed 50 hrs every week and have successfully increased their client's consulting budget for next month.

tossthere 6y ago

> They no doubt billed the customer ten times what they were paying the employee while claiming cost savings. You forgot the part about how the engineer is very aware of this hourly arrangement and feels their job security depends on their ability to get work done in less time, and so they they take tons of shortcuts and pile up technical debt like crazy. Then the other engineer has to make changes through that technical debt, and he’s also very aware that his time is the company’s money (because the managers remind him of it constantly), so he does 20 hours of work over the weekend and logs it as 4 hours so his boss won’t get mad at him. And the part about how half of them will lose their visa and have to leave the country if they complain about any of it. If you’re reading this, and you write software for one company that later becomes the property of another company: QUIT. YOUR. JOB. RIGHT. NOW. Interview at ANY other company, your life can be 10x better in a few weeks, just go.