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The story of how they took $32 million from Hertz for a website that never saw the light of day is a good read. > Despite having missed the deadline by five mo

The story of how they took $32 million from Hertz for a website that never saw the light of day is a good read. > Despite having missed the deadline by five months, with no completed elements and weighed down by buggy code, Accenture told Hertz it would cost an additional $10m – on top of the $32m it had already been paid – to finish the project. [1] Good work, if you can get it. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsu...

curiousllama 5y ago
Working for a company like that is soul crushing in the most basic sense...
discordance 5y ago
They screw up, and ask for more funding... how do they keep good enough relationships to keep getting new work?
- mywittyname 5y ago
  A bunch of reasons: key decision makers being pretty far removed from the day-to-day of projects; everyone lying about how poorly the project is going to CYA; project timelines being so long that these projects end up losing visibility in the C-suite long before completion; etc. In some cases, like Hertz, they do actually damage their partners. But most of their clients are massive multinational conglomerates who can readily suffer from a string of failed multi-million dollar projects. Like any parasite, they know not to kill their host.
Exmoor 5y ago
> Good work, if you can get it. I'm sure it is for whatever level of management you have to get to so that you maximize the ratio of BONUS_PAY:STRESS_OF_PROJECT_FAILURE, but to me it sounds like an absolutely nightmare. At the engineering level, I've found very few things a painful as having to put on a good face and pretend that my team is delivering something worth paying for when I know it's an absolute waste of resources for all involved. Thankfully my experience with this has been fairly minimal, but I really never want to experience it again. (I know it was likely a flippant comment rather than a serious one, but it just kind of triggered a well of emotions in me)
- csmattryder 5y ago
  Oh, of course, management. For the sorry saps caught in the cubicle-based nightmare, it's a likely hell. But to be one of the suited-and-booted dream sellers, I bet that's a bundle of fun.
  - ep103 5y ago
    I had the opportunity to be one of those. The money was clearly good. And you quickly built a network that you could turn into your own business (which was actually expected. They expected you to ultimately not get promoted fast enough, start your own business, and if you were successful enough they would hire you back several levels higher). But it was also a very, I dare say off, not quite sick, culture. You are travelling 90% of the time. This has a tendency to destroy family and friend relationships at home, and make it hard to befriend anyone not living similarly, because you are never in the same city for more than a few weeks. You are never in one place long enough to develop a deep connection. You are alone in a new city after work, ever week, and your colleagues are all the type of people who chose that lifestyle too. The ones who chose that lifestyle for money are usually just doing it to put kids through college or after college, and will take a new job in a few years, so the people you really want to network with are the lifers. The lifers are people who chose that lifestyle because that's the type of lifestyle they actually want. There are a lot of interesting reasons to do that, some very good, some very bad, but none of them very normal. Then you have to look at the moral aspect of what you're doing. As I remember upper management putting it to me: "We're pirates. We steal from large corporations, and put it in our own pockets." And you do that, by providing services that garner their profit by pocketing the difference in capital that comes from shipping jobs from America to offshore locations, made possible by abusing the h1b program. And sometimes literally abusing the h1bs, its not like they have any rights in practice, once they're within the country. I dunno. I walked away. I think about the money sometimes, but I'm much happier with my more mundane, salaried life.
    - op00to 5y ago
      I’d walk away too if management saw our role as stealing from the customer. Oh boy.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
I worked at a company who did a lot of outsourcing with companies like Accenture. They tend to stick to contracts and the wording at all costs, so every feature had to be specced to hell. You can't just say "the site has a responsive design", you have to have screenshots of every page at every resolution and have what elements appear at each resolution. This took so much time it was almost always faster to simply do the work ourselves.
- tragomaskhalos 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate here, this can go both ways; clients may well take the piss unless the contract is quite strict about agreed scope etc. For big contracts that can make the difference between coming in under or over budget, although something of this kind of rigour is prudent at all scales, as https://clientsfromhell.net https://clientsfromhell.net regularly attests.
  - ep103 5y ago
    I used to work at Accenture. I was quite literally the ivy league educated white face they used to interact with clients, so they didn't have to have clients interacting with their h1bs. Though it took a while to figure that out. We were pushed to ship to the letter of the contract, because they understood that that would create bugs that their offshore QA wouldn't catch. That meant that there would be an ability to sell support contracts after the initial contract completed to keep the code running, and would make it easier to sell the client on rewriting from scratch when the next iteration of whatever framework or product line we were integrating against came out in a few years.
rusk 5y ago
Another well known consultancy took the Irish government for well over €200m for a payroll system they never delivered. [0] and they never had to apologise even once. [0] is http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=8661 http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=8661
agumonkey 5y ago
I worked at a retail chain for a big project led by consultants. They only made stats of others work, and reskinned old slides. Millions were lost.
spelunker 5y ago
There are lots of these stories. Remember when the FBI contracted SAIC to build a new case file system and it was so badly implemented they decided it couldn't be used? https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/fbi-virtual-case-file-system https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/fbi-virtual...

curiousllama 5y ago

Working for a company like that is soul crushing in the most basic sense...

discordance 5y ago

They screw up, and ask for more funding... how do they keep good enough relationships to keep getting new work?

mywittyname 5y ago
A bunch of reasons: key decision makers being pretty far removed from the day-to-day of projects; everyone lying about how poorly the project is going to CYA; project timelines being so long that these projects end up losing visibility in the C-suite long before completion; etc. In some cases, like Hertz, they do actually damage their partners. But most of their clients are massive multinational conglomerates who can readily suffer from a string of failed multi-million dollar projects. Like any parasite, they know not to kill their host.

Exmoor 5y ago

> Good work, if you can get it. I'm sure it is for whatever level of management you have to get to so that you maximize the ratio of BONUS_PAY:STRESS_OF_PROJECT_FAILURE, but to me it sounds like an absolutely nightmare. At the engineering level, I've found very few things a painful as having to put on a good face and pretend that my team is delivering something worth paying for when I know it's an absolute waste of resources for all involved. Thankfully my experience with this has been fairly minimal, but I really never want to experience it again. (I know it was likely a flippant comment rather than a serious one, but it just kind of triggered a well of emotions in me)

csmattryder 5y ago
Oh, of course, management. For the sorry saps caught in the cubicle-based nightmare, it's a likely hell. But to be one of the suited-and-booted dream sellers, I bet that's a bundle of fun.
- ep103 5y ago
  I had the opportunity to be one of those. The money was clearly good. And you quickly built a network that you could turn into your own business (which was actually expected. They expected you to ultimately not get promoted fast enough, start your own business, and if you were successful enough they would hire you back several levels higher). But it was also a very, I dare say off, not quite sick, culture. You are travelling 90% of the time. This has a tendency to destroy family and friend relationships at home, and make it hard to befriend anyone not living similarly, because you are never in the same city for more than a few weeks. You are never in one place long enough to develop a deep connection. You are alone in a new city after work, ever week, and your colleagues are all the type of people who chose that lifestyle too. The ones who chose that lifestyle for money are usually just doing it to put kids through college or after college, and will take a new job in a few years, so the people you really want to network with are the lifers. The lifers are people who chose that lifestyle because that's the type of lifestyle they actually want. There are a lot of interesting reasons to do that, some very good, some very bad, but none of them very normal. Then you have to look at the moral aspect of what you're doing. As I remember upper management putting it to me: "We're pirates. We steal from large corporations, and put it in our own pockets." And you do that, by providing services that garner their profit by pocketing the difference in capital that comes from shipping jobs from America to offshore locations, made possible by abusing the h1b program. And sometimes literally abusing the h1bs, its not like they have any rights in practice, once they're within the country. I dunno. I walked away. I think about the money sometimes, but I'm much happier with my more mundane, salaried life.
  - op00to 5y ago
    I’d walk away too if management saw our role as stealing from the customer. Oh boy.

SamuelAdams 5y ago

I worked at a company who did a lot of outsourcing with companies like Accenture. They tend to stick to contracts and the wording at all costs, so every feature had to be specced to hell. You can't just say "the site has a responsive design", you have to have screenshots of every page at every resolution and have what elements appear at each resolution. This took so much time it was almost always faster to simply do the work ourselves.

tragomaskhalos 5y ago
To play devil's advocate here, this can go both ways; clients may well take the piss unless the contract is quite strict about agreed scope etc. For big contracts that can make the difference between coming in under or over budget, although something of this kind of rigour is prudent at all scales, as https://clientsfromhell.net https://clientsfromhell.net regularly attests.
- ep103 5y ago
  I used to work at Accenture. I was quite literally the ivy league educated white face they used to interact with clients, so they didn't have to have clients interacting with their h1bs. Though it took a while to figure that out. We were pushed to ship to the letter of the contract, because they understood that that would create bugs that their offshore QA wouldn't catch. That meant that there would be an ability to sell support contracts after the initial contract completed to keep the code running, and would make it easier to sell the client on rewriting from scratch when the next iteration of whatever framework or product line we were integrating against came out in a few years.

rusk 5y ago

Another well known consultancy took the Irish government for well over €200m for a payroll system they never delivered. [0] and they never had to apologise even once. [0] is http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=8661 http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=8661

agumonkey 5y ago

I worked at a retail chain for a big project led by consultants. They only made stats of others work, and reskinned old slides. Millions were lost.

spelunker 5y ago

There are lots of these stories. Remember when the FBI contracted SAIC to build a new case file system and it was so badly implemented they decided it couldn't be used? https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/fbi-virtual-case-file-system https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/fbi-virtual...