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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
by _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 agoSt 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 agoEver go to Scotland Yard? The one bar in town. Some CLMs (career-limiting moves) took place there (not perpetrated by me).
- happymellon 4y agoWhen 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 agoAh. 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.
- happymellon 4y agoThis was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow. I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame. I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.
- NonNefarious 4y ago"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow" I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it. Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.
- happymellon 4y agoIt was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be. I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.
- solarkraft 4y agokid/no kid is one thing, but were you able to deliver the insights they expected? I know I'd be pissed if I paid a high rate expecting an expert and then got a guy who doesn't know either.
- hyperbovine 4y agoA 22-yr old kid? I don't care how many future presidents you rubbed shoulders with at Yale, the answer is NO.
- etempleton 4y agoConsultants and agencies typically give all of the actual work to young 22-28 year olds. Leadership focuses on acquiring new business. Once they get your business they really do not care what happens beyond generally fulfilling the contracted requirements.