9 ms·

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, rea

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.
      - cratermoon 4y ago
        I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.
        melbournegrad 4y ago
        Can confirm, at a big 4, billed out at 8x
  - mleo 4y ago
    There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things. 1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better. 2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable. 3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label. Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP. Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP. Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP. Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
- 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!

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.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.
      - melbournegrad 4y ago
        Can confirm, at a big 4, billed out at 8x
- mleo 4y ago
  There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things. 1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better. 2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable. 3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label. Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP. Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP. Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP. Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
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!