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It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional serv

It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around. Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop. It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence. This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.

rozenmd 4y ago
24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.
  - pmcollins 4y ago
    your sales game needs to be world class though. that’s all that really matters.
  - malux85 4y ago
    Did you read the title? When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client. If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others. (This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.
      - patja 4y ago
        Pretty sure i was billed at 10x when I started at Andersen Consulting in 1990. My starting salary was 21.5k.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.
    - hadleybelter 4y ago
      I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town). I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it. It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that. The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
    - ianhawes 4y ago
      This is my experience with big accounting/finance firms as well.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms playing that game.
    - dustingetz 4y ago
      it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make money by squeezing labor salaries. you can’t raise rates because moral hazard - you’d have immediate incentive to pocket the margin. behold the stable state.
      - illuminati1911 4y ago
        This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates. It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
        ethbr0 4y ago
        Picking a consultant is like picking a tradesperson -- the competent ones already have more business than they can service, so they'd be doing you a favor by taking you on, which usually means an introduction from an existing client is needed. Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
        dustingetz 4y ago
        raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500
  - illuminati1911 4y ago
    They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers
    - CommanderData 4y ago
      I've seen it repeatedly, how they think you'll get the same quality product outsourced to the cheapest consultancy in India is beyond me. The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
  - noahjk 4y ago
    I accepted an offer this year for $150k as a sr assoc at a big 4 consultancy doing "dev" work, so for me, it was worth it. 3 years as a dev before
- throckmortra 4y ago
  The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
  - cjdoc29 4y ago
    The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.
    - djmips 4y ago
      Accord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees." https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinsey-3m-a-year https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
      - EddySchauHai 4y ago
        > Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year. And not for a cheap fee either!
  - conradfr 4y ago
    Yeah well https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-france-consultants-mckinsey-campaign.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-franc...
- ctrager 4y ago
  LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the entire program basically in flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box, like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to make the change. It. Was. Insane.
  - ctrager 4y ago
    Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
    - b0afc375b5 4y ago
      I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        And it sounds like the users didn't understand that in some manner.
      - ctrager 4y ago
        Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.
- simonh 4y ago
  Scott Adam’s has this covered. https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/share-email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=brand-loyalty https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
  - maroonblazer 4y ago
    Ha! When I visit the link the page includes several banner ads for...Hertz!
    - hnuaer 4y ago
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from.
  - truemotive 4y ago
    I wonder what country this is..
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs. I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money. Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
    - programmer_dude 4y ago
      Probably India.
      - lawgimenez 4y ago
        It’s in the Philippines.
- dustingetz 4y ago
  did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing.
- _tik_ 4y ago
  Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training. On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing. On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    "Orientation program?" Did they not send you to CAPS in St. Charles?
    - kimi 4y ago
      St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.
      - NonNefarious 4y ago
        Ever go to Scotland Yard? The one bar in town. Some CLMs (career-limiting moves) took place there (not perpetrated by me).
    - happymellon 4y ago
      When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin. I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop. I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
      - NonNefarious 4y ago
        Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey. Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
- listless 4y ago
  “Consulting is a test. You pass when you leave.” - Unknown
- oars 4y ago
  LOL!
UltimateFloofy 4y ago
I was being billed at > $300/hr when I first got out of school at 21 as consultant. 24 would make someone a senior consultant!
- icedchai 4y ago
  I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  How much of that $$$ did you get to keep?
  - aditya 4y ago
    1/10th usually
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    I was billed out at around $300 an hour and paid salary of 75K plus porfit sharing (sometimes) and bonus based on billability
- lowercased 4y ago
  My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later) 1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks. I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
  - 4y ago
walrus01 4y ago
have seen it described in telecom industry as "dinosaurs mating"
- noSyncCloud 4y ago
  Literally perfect analogy, going to remember this.
- kefabean 4y ago
  …moments before the asteroid strikes.
pinot 4y ago
Yeah all that is true.. but what is even worse is the relationship between "account execs" and "Decision makers". Only reason they keep getting the work are those to players.
pcurve 4y ago
haha oh boy, I have a similar story to tell about $!0mm IT project we (not me) gave to M______y. Never again.
unixhero 4y ago
Hey! You would do great over at /r/consulting Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
alexose 4y ago
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers. Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together. At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly. Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    > Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together. That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
    - p_l 4y ago
      That one got the added "benefit" of Congress and POTUS directly meddling. So you get to restart parts with new contractors, changes in direction just as you got the last 20% of bugs fixed etc and that's assuming you work with honest suppliers
- SoftTalker 4y ago
TrackerFF 4y ago
Learning by doing, while billing your clients $xxx/hr The consultant way.
- LightG 4y ago
  Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing your clients". Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ... Joke. But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".
sytelus 4y ago
The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
  Sometimes, I've worked at consulting shops that actually delivered quality though they were large-ish but not Accenture/IBM sized
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org. I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure? I suspect that might be the case. If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
    - InefficientRed 4y ago
      This is why these large companies often form "innovation" units that are spun out as separate entities or at lest setup as separate orgs sheltered from internal politics by the C suite. It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
dakial1 4y ago
You said it perfectly. When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M... I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
- trhway 4y ago
  Agile/Scrum is perfect for such consulting engagements - there is a measurable easily reportable progress every sprint while nothing real gets achieved in any reasonable time, and the customer seeing/accepting that incremental progress is de-facto almost waiving its right to demand the final result.
  - dakial1 4y ago
    But usually the customer is the one prioritizing the backlog no? At least in all the project I've worked in the PO was always on the customer side.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
> It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
turns0ut 4y ago
And then you get posts from experts like you convinced there’s really some big picture goal to technology; that you’re not just optimizing for employment yourself.
- civilized 4y ago
  I actually genuinely value doing a good job. I genuinely hate being put under pressure to deliver stuff that looks good but is actually bad. It feels awful to me. I've built my career around avoiding this. I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it. Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
- robswc 4y ago
  You can certainly take pride in your work and build a good product all the same though. Big consulting companies usually deliver bad products because their structure makes it almost impossible to do anything else.
CommanderData 4y ago
London has some of the biggest consultancy firms and I can confirm LinkedIn networks with these firms are majority newly grads. Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts. New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved. I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  Their purpose isn't to understand the cloud. It's to fill buzzword bingo and look good when some bloated company hires some mercenaries for their internal power politics.
javier2 4y ago
Worked for someone almost as cynical as this. We always had mixed in more senior people to keep things under control, but lots of newly grads. Tbf though, the client will also ok these people on the project, but they often have no clue about IT qualifications and only see the cheaper price tag compared to the more experienced. My company also tried to avoid such projects, but sometimes the money was too good or a strategic partner comes along.
illuminati1911 4y ago
100% true and even if you offer a more higher caliber consultancy instead of these India outsourcing companies, the legacy corporations and their management will never want to admit that they know nothing about tech or their business. Because the executives themselves have used iPhone or web browser they often think they know best what features the app needs, they claim that they don' need analytics or metrics from users and they don't want any advice from professionals. They just need bunch of "coders to do that coding thing or whatever". On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
SMAAART 4y ago
> The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around. #TRUESTORY
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  Well, first they usually roll out a 40 year old "partner" (and that's the end-goal here- you want to be made "partner") who will show some diagrams in a PowerPoint or even diagram some stuff on a whiteboard, and never seen again. When shit hits the fan, they bust out a "SWAT Team" which is a few people with actual experience in an attempt to unfuck whatever those 24-year-olds screwed up.
scifibestfi 4y ago
Good god. Can we have a recession where it's only these bullshit companies that get weeded out?
rosenjcb 4y ago
You just describe Boeing's relationship with HCL and Infosys. I had to get out because I just felt like I was wasting my life bullshitting and delivering zero value to anyone.
golergka 4y ago
And that's why you shouldn't be that afraid of competing against them as a startup.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I've never had a job or worked in an office. When I was still actively freelancing, most of my clients were startups and small businesses. Later, I started getting some contracts with larger businesses. The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.

rozenmd 4y ago

24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.

Nextgrid 4y ago
Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.
- pmcollins 4y ago
  your sales game needs to be world class though. that’s all that really matters.
- malux85 4y ago
  Did you read the title? When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client. If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others. (This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.
    - patja 4y ago
      Pretty sure i was billed at 10x when I started at Andersen Consulting in 1990. My starting salary was 21.5k.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.
  - hadleybelter 4y ago
    I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town). I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it. It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that. The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
  - ianhawes 4y ago
    This is my experience with big accounting/finance firms as well.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms playing that game.
  - dustingetz 4y ago
    it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make money by squeezing labor salaries. you can’t raise rates because moral hazard - you’d have immediate incentive to pocket the margin. behold the stable state.
    - illuminati1911 4y ago
      This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates. It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Picking a consultant is like picking a tradesperson -- the competent ones already have more business than they can service, so they'd be doing you a favor by taking you on, which usually means an introduction from an existing client is needed. Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
      - dustingetz 4y ago
        raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500
- illuminati1911 4y ago
  They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers
  - CommanderData 4y ago
    I've seen it repeatedly, how they think you'll get the same quality product outsourced to the cheapest consultancy in India is beyond me. The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
- noahjk 4y ago
  I accepted an offer this year for $150k as a sr assoc at a big 4 consultancy doing "dev" work, so for me, it was worth it. 3 years as a dev before
throckmortra 4y ago
The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
- cjdoc29 4y ago
  The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.
  - djmips 4y ago
    Accord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees." https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinsey-3m-a-year https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      > Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year. And not for a cheap fee either!
- conradfr 4y ago
  Yeah well https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-france-consultants-mckinsey-campaign.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-franc...
ctrager 4y ago
LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the entire program basically in flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box, like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to make the change. It. Was. Insane.
- ctrager 4y ago
  Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
  - b0afc375b5 4y ago
    I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      And it sounds like the users didn't understand that in some manner.
    - ctrager 4y ago
      Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.
simonh 4y ago
Scott Adam’s has this covered. https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/share-email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=brand-loyalty https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
- maroonblazer 4y ago
  Ha! When I visit the link the page includes several banner ads for...Hertz!
  - hnuaer 4y ago
lawgimenez 4y ago
When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from.
- truemotive 4y ago
  I wonder what country this is..
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs. I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money. Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    Probably India.
    - lawgimenez 4y ago
      It’s in the Philippines.
dustingetz 4y ago
did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing.
_tik_ 4y ago
Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training. On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing. On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  "Orientation program?" Did they not send you to CAPS in St. Charles?
  - kimi 4y ago
    St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      Ever go to Scotland Yard? The one bar in town. Some CLMs (career-limiting moves) took place there (not perpetrated by me).
  - happymellon 4y ago
    When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin. I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop. I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey. Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
listless 4y ago
“Consulting is a test. You pass when you leave.” - Unknown
oars 4y ago
LOL!

UltimateFloofy 4y ago

I was being billed at > $300/hr when I first got out of school at 21 as consultant. 24 would make someone a senior consultant!

icedchai 4y ago
I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
Nextgrid 4y ago
How much of that $$$ did you get to keep?
- aditya 4y ago
  1/10th usually
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  I was billed out at around $300 an hour and paid salary of 75K plus porfit sharing (sometimes) and bonus based on billability
lowercased 4y ago
My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later) 1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks. I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
- 4y ago

walrus01 4y ago

have seen it described in telecom industry as "dinosaurs mating"

noSyncCloud 4y ago
Literally perfect analogy, going to remember this.
kefabean 4y ago
…moments before the asteroid strikes.

pinot 4y ago

Yeah all that is true.. but what is even worse is the relationship between "account execs" and "Decision makers". Only reason they keep getting the work are those to players.

pcurve 4y ago

haha oh boy, I have a similar story to tell about $!0mm IT project we (not me) gave to M______y. Never again.

unixhero 4y ago

Hey! You would do great over at /r/consulting Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.

alexose 4y ago

I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers. Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.

zdragnar 4y ago
Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together. At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly. Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together. That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
  - p_l 4y ago
    That one got the added "benefit" of Congress and POTUS directly meddling. So you get to restart parts with new contractors, changes in direction just as you got the last 20% of bugs fixed etc and that's assuming you work with honest suppliers
SoftTalker 4y ago

TrackerFF 4y ago

Learning by doing, while billing your clients $xxx/hr The consultant way.

LightG 4y ago
Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing your clients". Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ... Joke. But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".

sytelus 4y ago

The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
Sometimes, I've worked at consulting shops that actually delivered quality though they were large-ish but not Accenture/IBM sized
InefficientRed 4y ago
Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org. I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure? I suspect that might be the case. If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    This is why these large companies often form "innovation" units that are spun out as separate entities or at lest setup as separate orgs sheltered from internal politics by the C suite. It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.

dakial1 4y ago

You said it perfectly. When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M... I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.

trhway 4y ago
Agile/Scrum is perfect for such consulting engagements - there is a measurable easily reportable progress every sprint while nothing real gets achieved in any reasonable time, and the customer seeing/accepting that incremental progress is de-facto almost waiving its right to demand the final result.
- dakial1 4y ago
  But usually the customer is the one prioritizing the backlog no? At least in all the project I've worked in the PO was always on the customer side.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

> It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.

turns0ut 4y ago

And then you get posts from experts like you convinced there’s really some big picture goal to technology; that you’re not just optimizing for employment yourself.

civilized 4y ago
I actually genuinely value doing a good job. I genuinely hate being put under pressure to deliver stuff that looks good but is actually bad. It feels awful to me. I've built my career around avoiding this. I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it. Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
robswc 4y ago
You can certainly take pride in your work and build a good product all the same though. Big consulting companies usually deliver bad products because their structure makes it almost impossible to do anything else.

CommanderData 4y ago

London has some of the biggest consultancy firms and I can confirm LinkedIn networks with these firms are majority newly grads. Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts. New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved. I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
Their purpose isn't to understand the cloud. It's to fill buzzword bingo and look good when some bloated company hires some mercenaries for their internal power politics.

javier2 4y ago

Worked for someone almost as cynical as this. We always had mixed in more senior people to keep things under control, but lots of newly grads. Tbf though, the client will also ok these people on the project, but they often have no clue about IT qualifications and only see the cheaper price tag compared to the more experienced. My company also tried to avoid such projects, but sometimes the money was too good or a strategic partner comes along.

illuminati1911 4y ago

100% true and even if you offer a more higher caliber consultancy instead of these India outsourcing companies, the legacy corporations and their management will never want to admit that they know nothing about tech or their business. Because the executives themselves have used iPhone or web browser they often think they know best what features the app needs, they claim that they don' need analytics or metrics from users and they don't want any advice from professionals. They just need bunch of "coders to do that coding thing or whatever". On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.

SMAAART 4y ago

> The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around. #TRUESTORY

cbm-vic-20 4y ago
Well, first they usually roll out a 40 year old "partner" (and that's the end-goal here- you want to be made "partner") who will show some diagrams in a PowerPoint or even diagram some stuff on a whiteboard, and never seen again. When shit hits the fan, they bust out a "SWAT Team" which is a few people with actual experience in an attempt to unfuck whatever those 24-year-olds screwed up.

scifibestfi 4y ago

Good god. Can we have a recession where it's only these bullshit companies that get weeded out?

rosenjcb 4y ago

You just describe Boeing's relationship with HCL and Infosys. I had to get out because I just felt like I was wasting my life bullshitting and delivering zero value to anyone.

golergka 4y ago

And that's why you shouldn't be that afraid of competing against them as a startup.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I've never had a job or worked in an office. When I was still actively freelancing, most of my clients were startups and small businesses. Later, I started getting some contracts with larger businesses. The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.