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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$/hou

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.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  This isn't really true. Not only are SIBR rewards generally low, but it's very easy for contracts to be pulled out from under you via larger contracting firms and there is a ton of risk involved for the employees. I would never ever go back to that environment after working in it for a few years. Not knowing whether or not you're going to have a job for over a month every year is not fun. Larger contracting firms can shuffle people around in those cases but for smaller ones it kills an entire team.
  - colek42 6y ago
    We are onboarding a remote team this week for a government contract working with CNCF tooling in AWS. COVID changed what is allowed. Also SBIR phase II for open topic are 750k for the next period.
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      That's $750k for two years, which is paltry when you consider that your average senior engineer salary is likely to be in the range of 150k+ per year because of how much the major players offer and you also don't get funding for Phase III. A small team of engineers and QA will eat up that award quickly. This is without factoring in other things your company needs to navigate the government labyrinth, healthcare and more if you aim for commercialization. If you and your team are willing to be underpaid relative to other companies and deal with the risk that working on government contracts entails a smaller contracting company might survive for a few years.
      - colek42 6y ago
        750k for 9 months. You need to write the scope to be profitable, just like any other fixed firm contract. If you execute in a need area phase 3 should be high percentage if you build the right relationships during your phase 2.
PaulAJ 6y ago
Everyone assumes its about connections and kickbacks, but its actually more to do with procurement policies. The people who sign off on large contracts need to be able to demonstrate due dilligence, because if they don't then when something goes wrong they will be blamed for hiring cowboys instead of professionals. But this merely creates a series of hoops through which the candidate contractors must jump. Ultimately the process of getting these contracts becomes so cumbersome, expensive and risky that only a few large companies do it. They naturally become experts at hoop-jumping, often to the detriment of actually doing the work. I once saw the bid evaluation criteria for a large company I worked at. Over half the scoring points could be summed up as "one of the usual suspects" (e.g. big company, has track record in industry, has staff with industry experience, has done similar work in the past). If you weren't one of the usual suspects you had no chance of getting the job.
- buran77 6y ago
  > (e.g. big company, has track record in industry, has staff with industry experience, has done similar work in the past) That's the classic CYA, or the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage. I've dealt with procurements for eye watering amounts both in the private and public sector. But no matter how much you struggle to get the good product eventually some hard requirements (either legal or institutional) will be shoved down your throat and you end up with the Accentures of the world. They must have comparable revenue to the customer. They must have had similar projects going at least 10 years back. They must be able to deliver the service 24/7 in any corner of the world even if we only have one office. You can't say anything about past performance in projects even if it's objectively measurable because it would put one competitor at a disadvantage. So what if Accenture blew the budget by an order of magnitude and delivered a year+ late on every single project they had with you, that's the past, we're starting with a clean slate every time. Then the contractual conditions can't be harsh enough that even Accenture says "not for us" because that all but guarantees that you have no bidders. So now every startup is out the window and all you're left are the big ones. And when the project bombs - and bomb it will one way or another, Accenture will guarantee that because they make money by underbidding and then overcharging you through your nose for CRs and fixing what they failed to deliver under one contractual loophole or another - the people in charge from the customer side always have good cover. They picked the best offer. Nobody could have done it better. This goes hand in hand with Gartner recommendations, the company that came to me with 2 conflicting reports and let me choose which one I want to present to management depending on what version I wanted to push. I laughed them out the door and when going face to face with the higher ups the first thing that came up was "what does Gartner say?". Try answering "anything I want"... They need plausible deniability so you're there to plausibly shield them from the reality of this farce. So you call Gartner back and ask for that report "we first talked about". Nobody gets fired for buying Accenture (or the likes). They'll just leave in disgust.

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.

fzeroracer 6y ago
This isn't really true. Not only are SIBR rewards generally low, but it's very easy for contracts to be pulled out from under you via larger contracting firms and there is a ton of risk involved for the employees. I would never ever go back to that environment after working in it for a few years. Not knowing whether or not you're going to have a job for over a month every year is not fun. Larger contracting firms can shuffle people around in those cases but for smaller ones it kills an entire team.
- colek42 6y ago
  We are onboarding a remote team this week for a government contract working with CNCF tooling in AWS. COVID changed what is allowed. Also SBIR phase II for open topic are 750k for the next period.
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    That's $750k for two years, which is paltry when you consider that your average senior engineer salary is likely to be in the range of 150k+ per year because of how much the major players offer and you also don't get funding for Phase III. A small team of engineers and QA will eat up that award quickly. This is without factoring in other things your company needs to navigate the government labyrinth, healthcare and more if you aim for commercialization. If you and your team are willing to be underpaid relative to other companies and deal with the risk that working on government contracts entails a smaller contracting company might survive for a few years.
    - colek42 6y ago
      750k for 9 months. You need to write the scope to be profitable, just like any other fixed firm contract. If you execute in a need area phase 3 should be high percentage if you build the right relationships during your phase 2.

PaulAJ 6y ago

Everyone assumes its about connections and kickbacks, but its actually more to do with procurement policies. The people who sign off on large contracts need to be able to demonstrate due dilligence, because if they don't then when something goes wrong they will be blamed for hiring cowboys instead of professionals. But this merely creates a series of hoops through which the candidate contractors must jump. Ultimately the process of getting these contracts becomes so cumbersome, expensive and risky that only a few large companies do it. They naturally become experts at hoop-jumping, often to the detriment of actually doing the work. I once saw the bid evaluation criteria for a large company I worked at. Over half the scoring points could be summed up as "one of the usual suspects" (e.g. big company, has track record in industry, has staff with industry experience, has done similar work in the past). If you weren't one of the usual suspects you had no chance of getting the job.

buran77 6y ago
> (e.g. big company, has track record in industry, has staff with industry experience, has done similar work in the past) That's the classic CYA, or the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage. I've dealt with procurements for eye watering amounts both in the private and public sector. But no matter how much you struggle to get the good product eventually some hard requirements (either legal or institutional) will be shoved down your throat and you end up with the Accentures of the world. They must have comparable revenue to the customer. They must have had similar projects going at least 10 years back. They must be able to deliver the service 24/7 in any corner of the world even if we only have one office. You can't say anything about past performance in projects even if it's objectively measurable because it would put one competitor at a disadvantage. So what if Accenture blew the budget by an order of magnitude and delivered a year+ late on every single project they had with you, that's the past, we're starting with a clean slate every time. Then the contractual conditions can't be harsh enough that even Accenture says "not for us" because that all but guarantees that you have no bidders. So now every startup is out the window and all you're left are the big ones. And when the project bombs - and bomb it will one way or another, Accenture will guarantee that because they make money by underbidding and then overcharging you through your nose for CRs and fixing what they failed to deliver under one contractual loophole or another - the people in charge from the customer side always have good cover. They picked the best offer. Nobody could have done it better. This goes hand in hand with Gartner recommendations, the company that came to me with 2 conflicting reports and let me choose which one I want to present to management depending on what version I wanted to push. I laughed them out the door and when going face to face with the higher ups the first thing that came up was "what does Gartner say?". Try answering "anything I want"... They need plausible deniability so you're there to plausibly shield them from the reality of this farce. So you call Gartner back and ask for that report "we first talked about". Nobody gets fired for buying Accenture (or the likes). They'll just leave in disgust.